“This Faiz, na,” Pari says as soon as I join them, “is an idiot.” Her minaret fringe looks like it will collapse any second.
“You’re the idiot,” Faiz says.
“You saw?” I ask. “Drunkard Laloo is praying to Buffalo-Baba, like baba is an actual god.”
“Bahadur’s ma was saying she’ll go to the police,” Pari says.
“She’s ekdum-mad,” Faiz says.
“The police will kick us out if we complain,” I say. “They’re always threatening to send bulldozers to demolish our basti.”
“They can’t do anything. We have got ration cards,” Pari says. “Also, we pay them a hafta. If they throw us out, who will they extort money from?”
“Loads of people,” I say. “India has more people than any other country in the world. Except China.” There’s rusk stuck between my teeth and I pry it out with my tongue.
“Faiz thinks Bahadur is dead,” Pari says.
“Bahadur is our age. We aren’t old enough to die.”
“I didn’t say he died,” Faiz protests, and then he coughs. He hawks up spit and wipes his mouth with his hands.
“Maybe what’s happened is that Bahadur’s asthma went bad because of the smog, and he fell into a ditch and couldn’t get out,” Pari says. “Remember how he couldn’t breathe this one time we were in Standard Two?”
“You cried,” I say.
“I never cry,” Pari says. “Ma does, but not me.”
“If Bahadur fell into a ditch, someone would have pulled him out. Look at the number of people here,” Faiz says.
I eye the people walking past us, to establish if they seem like the helpful-type. But their faces are half-hidden by handkerchiefs to keep the smog from getting inside their ears and noses and mouths. Some of the men and women bark into their mobiles through their make-do masks. There’s a chole-bhature vendor on the roadside, and though his face isn’t covered by a scarf, it’s enveloped in a cloud of smoke rising from a vat of sizzling hot oil in which he’s frying bhaturas. His customers are laborers on their way to factories and construction sites, sweepers and carpenters, mechanics and security guards at malls returning home after a night shift. The men scoop up the chole with steel spoons and munch, their kerchiefs pulled down to their chins. Their eyes are fixed on their plates of hot food. If a demon were to stomp toward them right now, they wouldn’t notice.
“Listen,” I say, “why don’t we look for Bahadur? Either he’s lying sick in a hospital—”
“His ma went to all the hospitals near our basti,” Pari says. “The women at the toilet complex were talking about it.”
“If he was snatched, we can solve a case of kidnapping also,” I say. “Police Patrol tells you exactly how to find someone missing. First you—”
“Maybe a djinn took him,” Faiz says, touching the gold-colored taweez that hangs from a frayed black string tied around his neck. The amulet keeps him safe from the evil eye and bad djinns.
“Even babies know better than to believe in djinns,” Pari says.
Faiz furrows his forehead, and the groove of the white scar that runs across his left temple, just missing his eye, deepens as if something is pulling at his skin from the inside.
“Let’s go,” I say. Watching the two of them argue is the most boring thing in the world. “We’ll be late for assembly.”
Faiz fast-walks, even when we get to the lanes of Bhoot Bazaar, which are crammed with too many people and dogs and cycle-rickshaws and autorickshaws and e-rickshaws. To keep pace with him, I can’t do the things I usually do at the bazaar, like count the bloodied goat hooves on sale at Afsal-Chacha’s shop or cadge a slice of melon off a fruit chaat vendor.
No one will believe me but I’m one hundred percent pakka that my nose grows longer when I’m in the bazaar because of its smells, of tea and raw meat and buns and kebabs and rotis. My ears get bigger too, because of the sounds, ladles scraping against pans, butchers’ knives thwacking against chopping boards, rickshaws and scooters honking, and gunfire and bad words boom-booming out of video-game parlors hidden behind grimy curtains. But today my nose and ears stay the same size because Bahadur has vanished, my friends are sulking, and the smog is making everything blurry.
In front of us, sparks fall on the ground from a bird’s nest of electric wires hanging over the bazaar.
“That’s a warning,” Faiz says. “Allah is telling us to be careful.”
Pari looks at me, her eyebrows climbing up her forehead.
I peer into ditches for the rest of our walk to school, just in case Bahadur has fallen into one of them. All I see are empty wrappers and holey plastic bags and eggshells and dead rats and dead cats and chicken and mutton bones sucked clean by hungry mouths. No sign of djinns, no sign of Bahadur.
OUR SCHOOL IS LOCKED UP—
—behind a six-foot wall with barbed wire on top, and an iron gate that has a door painted purple. From the outside, it looks like the jails I have seen in movies. We even have a watchman, though he’s never at the gate because he has to run errands for the headmaster: pick up Mrs. Headmaster’s blouse from her tailor in Bhoot Bazaar or fill a tiffin box with gulab-jamuns for her and the headmaster’s No. 1 and No. 2 sons.
Today too the watchman isn’t around. Instead there’s a queue starting at the gate-door, which is too narrow for all of us to go through at the same time. The headmaster won’t open the main gate fully because he thinks strangers will run into the school along with us. He likes to tell us that 180 children go missing across India every single day. He says Stranger is Danger, which is a line he has stolen from a Hindi film song. But if he were really worried about strangers, he wouldn’t keep sending the watchman away.
The headmaster must hate us. There’s no other reason why he makes us wait outside the gate on smoggy winter mornings like today when the cold traces our breath in white. Even the pigeons with plumped-up feathers, sitting in a row on a droopy electric wire above us, haven’t yet opened their eyes.
“Why can’t these children make a proper queue?” Pari says, scowling at the many shorter lines that have branched out of the main one. “We’re going to be standing here forever.”
She says this every day.
The shortest queue totters forward as if to prove her wrong. I scuttle across to stand behind a boy who is in Runu-Didi’s class. A comb the color of milky tea sticks out of the back pocket of his trousers. He removes the comb, sweeps it through his hair, plucks the strands caught between its close-packed teeth and pushes it back into his pocket. His face is spotty like a banana gone bad.
Pari and Faiz cut in line in front of me. “How dare you?” I say to them, but they grin because they know I’m joking and I grin back. I look around to see if Bahadur has turned up. Maybe he doesn’t know that back in the basti his ma is about to call the police. But he isn’t here and I don’t want to talk about him because that will break up Pari’s and Faiz’s smiles. They have already forgotten they were squabbling a few minutes ago.
I spot Quarter reaching the school gate. He’s in Standard Nine but he has failed the ninth standard two or three times. His father is the pradhan of our basti and a member of the Hindu Samaj, a shouty party that hates Muslims. We hardly ever see the pradhan anymore because he has bought a hi-fi flat and only meets hi-fi people. I don’t know if that’s true or just something Ma says when the basti-tap stays dry for days and everyone has to chip in for a water tanker.
Quarter is standing by the gate now, directing the movement of the queues like a traffic policeman on a busy road. He thrusts his long right hand in the air, with his palm facing forward, for our line to STOP. I obey at once and so does everyone else.
In our school Quarter runs a gang that beats up teachers and rents out fake parents to students when they get into trouble and the headmaster insists on meeting their ma-papas. Quarter doesn’t work for free
, and I don’t know how students have the money to buy a papa or a ma. Faiz does loads of odd jobs, and he gives most of his money to his ammi and some money he sets aside to buy his favorite Purple Lotus and Cream Lux soaps and a bottle of Sunsilk Stunning Black Shine shampoo. Faiz says ma-papas cost more than a dozen soaps and shampoos.
Some boys are holding up the queue by making small talk with Quarter. They are always telling him about the one time they shouted at a teacher or a policeman to prove they can be rough-and-tough too. But there’s no one like Quarter because:
first of all, every day, he stops at a theka in Bhoot Bazaar to drink a quarter-peg of daru, which is how he got the name Quarter. His eyes are always red and puffy and he smells like daru too;
second of all, he never wears the school uniform;
third of all, he dresses only in black: black shirt, black trousers, and a black shawl wrapped around his shoulders if he’s feeling cold;
fourth of all, every morning, right after assembly, the headmaster throws Quarter out for not wearing the school uniform. The teachers keep threatening to strike him off the roll because he has zero attendance but they haven’t done that so far.
Instead of attending classes, Quarter loiters around Bhoot Bazaar until it’s time for the midday meal break. Then he swaggers back into school and stands under a neem tree in the playground, surrounded by students who want to join his gang or hire his gang-members, and idiot-senior girls who point finger guns at each other and call themselves Revolver Ranis. Most girls stay away from Quarter though because he’s always making eyes at them.
Quarter is the only criminal-type I have seen up close. He has never been arrested by the police, maybe because his pradhan-papa bribes them. I wonder if somebody paid Quarter to make Bahadur disappear. But who would do such a thing?
Our queue shuffles forward.
I decide Quarter is my prime suspect. He and djinns, but I can’t question djinns. They may not be real.
When we get to the gate, I make myself brave and tell Quarter, “A boy in our basti has gone missing.” I have never talked to him before but now I stand straight as if I’m about to sing the national anthem at assembly. I watch Quarter’s face to see if he looks caught out because good cops and detectives can tell from the way someone blinks their eyes or tightens their lips if they are lying.
Quarter smiles an oily smile at a senior girl standing behind me. He strokes the hair sprouting above his lips and on his cheeks, too sparse to be a real mustache and beard even though he must be very old, like seventeen or something. Then he says “Chalo-chalo-chalo,” swatting me toward the gate.
“The missing boy, his name is Bahadur,” I say.
Quarter snaps his fingers too close to my ears, making their tips burn. “Chal-hut,” he growls.
I run into the school grounds.
“You mad or what?” Faiz asks. “Why were you talking to that fellow?”
“Quarter could have cut off your arm and thrown it into one of these bins,” Pari says, pointing at a penguin bin next to us.
The penguin’s yellow beak is open so wide that our heads can fit inside. Its white pot belly screams USE ME USE ME. Toffee wrappers sprinkle the ground around it because students toss stuff into the penguin’s mouth from a long way away and keep missing.
“I was doing detective work,” I tell Pari.
* * *
The next India-Pakistan war the news says will happen any time now has started in our classroom. It’s about who should win Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Li’l Champs. The Indian side says the best singer in the competition is Ankit, a plump boy everyone calls Jalebi because his voice is sticky-sweet. The Pakistani side wants Saira, a hijab-wearing Muslim girl who must be a head shorter than me at least, to win, because she goes to school in the mornings and, in the afternoons, sings in the streets of Mumbai for coins to feed her family. Pari and I try to tell everyone that Bahadur is missing. Half of my classmates know that already because they live in our basti. But they don’t care about Bahadur, not right now in the middle of a war.
“Saira’s people kill cows and they also kill Hindus,” says Gaurav, whose mother fingerprints a red tilak on his forehead every morning as if he’s going into battle.
Faiz will never kill me. He even forgets he is Muslim sometimes.
“Gaurav is a donkey,” I whisper to Faiz.
Our class has nine or ten Muslim children, besides Faiz. They are sitting quietly, holding textbooks open in front of their faces.
Faiz and I take our places at a desk in the third row. Pari sits next to us. She shares her desk with Tanvi, who has a backpack shaped like a slice of watermelon, pink with black pips.
“What if Quarter really snatched Bahadur?” I ask Pari. “Maybe stealing children is his new business. Maybe he supplies fake kids to parents the same way he rents out fake parents to us.”
“Quarter doesn’t even know who Bahadur is, why would he?” Pari says.
“I have seen Quarter make fun of Bahadur,” Tanvi announces, stroking her backpack as if it’s a cat. “He calls him Ba-Ba-Ba-Bahadur.”
Kirpal-Sir comes into our classroom. “Silence, silence,” he shouts as he turns to the blackboard, gripping a stub of chalk between the tips of his fingers. His hand is shaky because it was broken a year ago and hasn’t mended right. He writes MAPS at the very top of the board and INDIA below it, then starts drawing a squiggly map of India.
“Bachao, bachao,” I whisper to Pari. “I’m only a poor little chalk and this teacher is choking me to death.”
Everyone else is whispering to each other too but Pari’s face goes all frowny and she hisses, “Sshhhh, sshhhh.”
I curve my right hand as if it’s the head of a cobra and sink my fangs into her left shoulder.
“Sir, teacher-sir,” Pari cries.
I slink down in my seat until most of me is under the desk. Kirpal-Sir can’t see me now. The classroom is darker than usual because of the smog.
Pari stands up with her hand raised and shouts teacher-sir again.
“What is it?” he asks, sounding miffed, maybe because he hates drawing.
“Don’t you think you should take our attendance first?” Pari asks.
Some students titter. Faiz sneezes without looking up from the swear word he’s carving onto our desk with his compass.
“Sir,” Pari says, “if you take roll call, then we’ll know if everybody’s here or not.”
I sit up. Of course, Pari was never going to tell on me.
Kirpal-Sir puts the chalk down on the table, and it rolls toward the attendance register that he never opens. His nose twitches like it does just before he takes out his wooden ruler to beat the air.
“Sir, you remember Bahadur, he used to sit there,” Pari says, spinning around to look at a seat in the last row behind her. “We found out yesterday that he hasn’t been home in five days.”
“What should I do? Go look for him in the market? His parents should file a complaint with the police.”
“If a student doesn’t turn up for two-three days, isn’t the school supposed to tell the family?”
Pari has made her eyes as big as she can and is talking in a sing-song voice, but her acting isn’t fooling Kirpal-Sir.
“O-ho,” Faiz mutters, his compass still carving letters. “Pari is in trouble. Major trouble.”
We know why Pari is asking Kirpal-Sir these questions. It shouldn’t take us five days to realize someone is missing. But Kirpal-Sir’s roll call can’t help Bahadur now. It’s too late.
I’m the only one who can do something about it. I can find Bahadur because I have seen many-hundred programs on TV and I know exactly how detectives like Byomkesh Bakshi catch the bad people who steal children and gold and wives and diamonds.
With his head bowed, Kirpal-Sir circles his table as if it’s a temple and he’s praying sile
ntly.
“If I take attendance every morning, who’s going to do the teaching? You? You’ll teach? You?” Kirpal-Sir aims his fingers at each one of the students in the front row, then rubs his right wrist.
Pari sticks her bottom lip out as if she’s about to cry. Faiz returns his compass to his geometry box though he hasn’t finished carving ha-ra-mi on the desk, with an arrow pointing to the boy to his left.
“How many of you are here? Forty, fifty?” Kirpal-Sir asks. “Do you know how much time I’ll need to call out each one of your names?”
Pari sits down and prods her hair dome with a pencil. A few strands come loose. She’s trying to hide her tears. This is new for her. She isn’t used to getting shouted at like the rest of us.
“And your parents, they keep taking you out of school so that you can visit your native place, without saying a word to us,” Kirpal-Sir says though Pari has never missed a day of school. “None of you will have a place here if I follow the government rules.”
“Sir, we won’t do anything to you if you mark us absent,” I say. “We’re only small.”
“Arrey, paagal,” Faiz says under his breath, “don’t you know when to keep your mouth shut?”
The whole class goes quiet except for sniffles and coughs. I can hear teachers in other classrooms asking questions, and the shrieky voices of students answering together. Kirpal-Sir’s eyebrows slant down to make a V. Then he picks up his powdery chalk and turns to the blackboard.
“Anyone else would have given you a good caning,” Faiz whispers.
I don’t think so. I didn’t say anything wrong.
Last year, Quarter put a curse on sir and turned him into a mouse. It happened after sir crossed out the names of three senior students from the register because they didn’t attend school for four months. A week later, when Kirpal-Sir was going home on his old Bajaj Chetak, Quarter’s boys followed him and, as soon as he stopped at a red light, hit him on the head with iron rods. He was wearing a helmet, so I don’t think they meant to kill him; it was a warning, like how Ma glares at me for a few seconds to see if I’ll stop doing whatever I’m doing that’s infuriating her before she has to start screaming at me.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line Page 3
