Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

by Deepa Anappara

  Muslims aren’t supposed to drink, and Tariq-Bhai and Wajid-Bhai are good Muslims who pray five times a day, but they also sneak out sometimes to share a bottle of daru. If Faiz catches them, they’ll pay him big money to keep it a secret from their ammi. Otherwise Faiz will ask their ammi to sniff his brothers’ faces closely that night. “Something black in the dal, don’t you think, Ammi?” Faiz will say pointedly.

  He has done it before.

  Faiz and Pari march into the lane that leads to the theka, not even waiting for me. My detectiving hasn’t begun and it’s already gone off track.

  The lane is filled with suspicious people and smells. A nani-type lady with a marigold stuck behind her ear runs a beedi-paan stall, but when boys and men hand her money, she gives them plastic pouches packed with something dried and brown-green instead of cigarettes.

  “Focus,” Pari hisses into my ear and drags me away.

  Drunkards squat or lie on the ground outside the theka, singing and speaking gibberish. The loud beats bouncing out of the theka make the air tremble.

  “We can’t talk to these idiots,” Pari says.

  Faiz points to a man selling eggs and bread from his cart. “Ask the anda-wallah. He’s always here.”

  We stand to the side of the cart because the anda-wallah has stacked egg cartons to the front; we aren’t tall enough for him to see us behind them.

  “Quarter, you know him?” I ask. The anda-wallah is sharpening knives, and the clink-clank of it is louder than the music blaring out of the theka. He doesn’t look up.

  “Quarter only wears black. He’s our pradhan’s son,” Pari says. Then she turns to Faiz and whispers, “What’s his real name?”

  Faiz shrugs. I don’t know Quarter’s name either.

  “Make it fast-fast,” a customer to the front of the cart says.

  The anda-wallah puts his knives down and flings a slab of butter into the pan, then a fistful of chopped onions, tomatoes and green chillies. He coats them with salt and chili powder and garam masala. My mouth waters too much for me to ask questions. Just this afternoon we were talking about eating eggs, and now I’m at an egg stall. I wonder if Byomkesh Bakshi ever felt too hungry to investigate.

  “Sir-ji,” Faiz says, “we’re looking for Quarter.” Actually, Faiz’s eyes are scanning the lane for his brothers, but his luck is bad today because they aren’t here.

  “He’ll grace us with his presence in a while, no doubt,” the anda-wallah says.

  “Was he here”—Pari asks and pauses to count something on her fingers—“seven nights ago? Last Thursday?”

  I hate that it’s a good question; if Quarter was at the theka the night Bahadur disappeared, then he couldn’t have snatched Bahadur.

  “Probably,” the anda-wallah says, breaking two eggs at a time into the pan. “What do you care where he was?”

  “We’re looking for a friend of ours who has gone missing,” Pari says. “He could have been with the pradhan’s son. We’re worried about him.”

  She looks worried too. Her eyes narrow, her lips wobble like she’s about to cry.

  The anda-wallah props his ladle against his shoulder. His shirt is yolk-stained yellow. “Quarter and his gang are usually here even when I leave at two or three in the morning. But I haven’t seen a single child with them. They’re too old to be friends with children.”

  “But Quarter was here last week, every night?” I ask.

  “Of course he was here. He doesn’t have to pay for daru. You get something for free, you’ll take it too, won’t you?”

  I look at the eggs hopefully. The anda-wallah transfers the bhurji onto a paper plate, sticks a spoon on top of the egg mountain, and hands it to his impatient customer.

  “Look who’s here,” Faiz whispers.

  Quarter staggers past the cart as if he’s already drunk, eyeing us curiously. We can’t ask people about him when he’s around, so we leave.

  * * *

  Faiz knows everything about Bhoot Bazaar because he spends more time here than Pari or me. “The pradhan keeps the theka in business,” he says when we are at a safe distance from Quarter. “It’s illegal, but he has told the police not to touch it.”

  The pradhan’s hand smudges every lane in our basti. He has a network of informers who give him the basti-news 24/7. Ma is contemptuous of these men who watch us so that they can run to the pradhan with stories of a shiny-new TV or fridge in a basti-home or gossip about whose hi-fi madam was generous with baksheesh during Diwali. Ma says the pradhan sends policemen to separate people from the little happiness they have.

  Faiz leaves for the kirana shop. He has had a bad day. No eggs, no bhai-sightings at the theka, no more detective work with us.

  “If Quarter spends every night at the theka, does that mean he didn’t snatch Bahadur?” I ask, pulling Pari away from the path of an e-rick that swerves and falters through the lane.

  “The anda-wallah wasn’t hundred-percent sure,” Pari says. “He said usually Quarter’s there at night. Also, we don’t know what time Bahadur disappeared. It could have been at four in the morning even.”

  This is just how detectiving is; everything is guesswork at first, even for Byomkesh Bakshi and probably for Sherlock too.

  We walk toward Omvir’s house. A boy with a stray dog on a leash walks alongside us. His dog is a pretend-horse; he holds the leash like it’s a rein, click-clicks his tongue and makes the clip-clop sounds of horses’ hooves.

  “We should get a dog too,” I tell Pari. “It will lead us to criminals.”

  “Focus,” Pari says. “Why would Quarter snatch Bahadur?”

  “Maybe he wants a ransom.”

  “If someone had asked Bahadur’s ma for a ransom, we would have heard of it by now.”

  “She mustn’t have told anybody,” I say.

  * * *

  We can’t talk to Omvir because he isn’t at home.

  “Since that friend of his went missing, he’s been dawdling around Bhoot Bazaar, hoping he’ll run into Bahadur somewhere,” Omvir’s ma says. She’s holding a small baby boy who keeps punching her face with his tiny fists.

  Omvir’s brother is susu-ing into the drain outside their house. Doing No. 1 and No. 2 right where you live can put long worms into your stomach, which is why Ma insists I use the toilet complex. Omvir’s ma tires of her boxer-baby’s punches and goes inside her house to put him to sleep, drawing their curtain-door shut behind her.

  The boy, who’s smaller than us, finishes peeing and zips up his jeans-pant.

  “Does Omvir have a mobile?” Pari asks him. “We need to talk to him.”

  “Bhaiyya is with Papa. Papa has a mobile. You want his number?”

  “No,” I say. It will be tough to explain our detectiving to a grown-up.

  “Omvir doesn’t come to school or what?” Pari asks.

  “Bhaiyya is busy. He has to help Papa all day. He picks up clothes to be ironed from customers and, once it’s done, he drops them back. If he has any free time, he spends it dancing, not studying.”

  “Dancing?” Pari asks.

  “That’s all he talks about. He thinks he’s the new Hrithik.”

  The boy hums the notes of a Hrithik song, swings his hands, bobs his head, jiggles his legs. It takes me a while to figure out he’s dancing.

  “Why Am I Like This?” he wails, prancing around happily. “Why Am I Like This?”

  Pari grins. She’s enjoying the show.

  “Our work’s not over,” I remind her.

  * * *

  The front door to Bahadur’s house is open. When we peer inside, it’s exactly like my home except there’s more of everything: more clothes hanging from the clotheslines above us, more upturned pots and pans on a raised platform that’s the kitchen corner, more framed photos of gods on the walls, the glass turning sooty becaus
e of the joss sticks thrust into the corners of the frames, a bigger TV, and even a fridge, which we don’t have at all, so in the summer everything Ma makes we have to eat the same day. Bahadur’s ma must get paid a lot more than my ma and papa.

  Drunkard Laloo is sleeping on a bed that looks like a hi-fi bed. A blanket is pulled up to his shoulders. Bahadur’s younger brother and sister are sitting on the floor, picking out stones from the grains of rice spread on a steel plate.

  “Namaste,” Pari says, standing at the doorstep. She never greets anyone that way. “Can you please come outside? We want to find out about Bahadur.”

  “Bhaiyya isn’t here,” Bahadur’s sister says as she gets up obediently, gaping at us though Pari and I are wearing the same school uniform that she must have seen Bahadur wearing. Her brother comes out too.

  “Do you know where Bahadur is?” Pari asks, which is a bad question. They would have told their ma if they had known.

  “What’s your name?” I ask the girl because good detectives become friends with everyone first so that they’ll speak the truth. The girl wiggles. She’s wearing boy’s trousers several sizes too big for her, tightened at the waist with a long, fat safety pin.

  “We’re Bahadur’s classmates,” Pari says. “I’m Pari and this here is Jai. We’re trying to find your brother. Was there some place he liked to go to after school?”

  “Bhoot Bazaar,” the boy says. He’s wearing a girl’s blouse with white ruffles and pink embroidery. Maybe he swapped clothes with his sister and his ma didn’t notice.

  “Where in the bazaar?” Pari asks.

  “Bahadur-Bhaiyya worked at Hakim-Chacha’s Electronics Shop. He fixed our TV and also our fridge and also that air cooler.”

  “Bahadur fixes things?” I ask. A cobwebbed pink cooler is plonked on top of bricks so that it faces a window-like gap in the wall, from where it can blast cold air into their house.

  Pari shoots me a warning glance with her eyes as round as she can make them. If we had a secret signal, she would have used that right now to shut me up.

  “We think Bhaiyya has run away,” the boy says.

  “To where?” I ask.

  The girl presses the bridge of her nose with her hand, squashing it. “My name is Barkha,” she says. Then she puts a finger inside her nose.

  “Bhaiyya used to talk about running away to Manali,” the boy says. “With the press-wallah’s son. Omvir.”

  “No Manali. Mumbai yes,” the girl says.

  “Is it Manali or is it Mumbai?” Pari asks.

  The boy scratches his ear. The girl pulls her finger out of her nose and looks at her nails.

  “Omvir wants to go to Mumbai to see Hrithik Roshan,” the boy says. “But Bhaiyya wants to see the snow in Manali. Now it’s winter, na, so there’s lots of snow.”

  “Omvir is still here,” I say.

  “Haan, maybe Bhaiyya went to Manali by himself,” the boy says. “He’ll come back once he has played in the snow.”

  “At home everything has been okay?” Pari asks. “The last time I saw Bahadur at school he seemed a bit”—her face scrunches up as she tries to find the right word—“bruised?”

  “Papa slaps us a lot,” Bahadur’s brother says, like it’s nothing. “Bhaiyya would have run away a long time ago if that bothered him.”

  “Was anyone else troubling Bahadur?” Pari asks.

  “Any enemies?” I finally manage to ask a question.

  “Bhaiyya never gets into trouble,” the boy says.

  “Do you have a photo of him?” Pari asks.

  I kick myself for not thinking of it first. Photos are the most important part of any investigation. Policemen are supposed to put up a missing-child’s photo on their computer from where the Internet will carry it to other police stations the same way our veins carry blood to our arms and legs and brain.

  The safety pin holding up the girl’s trousers pops open. She starts crying. The boy grins. Three or four of his front teeth are missing.

  Pari says “uff” like she has had enough, but she tells the girl, “Don’t cry. I’ll make it right in a minute. One minute only.” She pins it back in two seconds.

  “Papa will have a photo,” the boy says, running his hand over his shirt-blouse ruffles.

  We tiptoe into Bahadur’s house. It smells sour like sickness and sweet like rotting fruit. Bahadur’s brother and sister sit down on the floor, away from the bed. I want them to wake up Drunkard Laloo but their eyes are already on the rice, divided into two sections: one that has been cleared of stones, and the other yet to be inspected.

  “You do it,” Pari whispers to me.

  Only Drunkard Laloo’s face can be seen outside his blanket. His mouth is half-open and so are his eyes. It’s like he’s watching us in his sleep.

  “Don’t be a wet cat,” Pari whispers.

  Easy for her to say. She isn’t standing as close to him as I am.

  There’s nothing else to do. I’m Byomkesh and Feluda and Sherlock and Karamchand all at once. I shake Drunkard Laloo’s blanket-covered right arm. It’s rough and spiky. The blanket slips down and, when I touch his hand, it’s too-warm, like he has a fever. He turns around and sleeps on his side.

  I joggle Drunkard Laloo again, strongly this time.

  Drunkard Laloo jumps up. “What’s it?” he shouts, his scared eyes popping out of his sunken face. “Bahadur? You came back?”

  “His classmate,” I say. “You have a photo of him?”

  “Who’s this?” a woman’s voice asks. It’s Bahadur’s ma, holding plastic bags in her hands that must be filled with the scrumptious food I have heard her nice hi-fi madam gives her every day. She switches on the light and Drunkard Laloo first blinks his eyes and then shades them with his hands as if the bulb’s rays are spears poking him.

  “We’re Bahadur’s friends,” Pari says. “We were wondering if you have a photo of him. We’re going to ask at the bazaar if anyone has seen him. If we have a photo, it will be easier.”

  Maybe Pari is so quick at coming up with lies because she has read many books and has all their stories in her head.

  “I have already asked around at the bazaar,” Bahadur’s ma says. “He isn’t there.”

  “What about the railway station?” Pari asks.

  “Station?”

  Bahadur’s sister and brother look up at us with terror sizzling in their eyes. I guess they haven’t told their ma about Bahadur’s plans, maybe because they are scared she’ll scold them for not ratting out Bahadur when he first stuttered about Mumbai-Manali.

  “We’ll check again,” Pari says. “It’s good if we check again, right?”

  I think Bahadur’s ma will chase us away, but she puts the plastic bags down, opens a cupboard, pulls a notebook out of its insides, and flips through the book until she finds a photo that she hands over to Pari. I move to the side to look at the photo. It’s Bahadur in a red shirt, his oiled hair neatly parted in the middle. The shirt’s red looks bright and happy against a dull cream background. He isn’t smiling.

  “You’ll return it to me?” Bahadur’s ma asks. “I don’t have many photos of him.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  Pari touches a corner of Bahadur’s photo and moves her finger back and forth as if she wants to get a paper cut.

  “People think he has run away,” Bahadur’s ma says, “but my boy, he’ll never give me a reason to worry. You know, he works at Hakim’s and buys sweets for us with the money he makes. If I’m too tired to cook, he’ll say, Ma, wait, and he’ll run to the bazaar and come back with packets of chow mein for everyone. Heart of gold my son has.”

  “He’s the best,” Pari says, which is another lie.

  “If he had run away, like those policemen said, wouldn’t he have taken something with him, money, food? Nothing’s gone from the h
ouse. His clothes are here, his school bag too. Why would he run off in his uniform?”

  Bahadur’s ma looks above us, at something on the wall maybe, a fixed point where her eyes focus before misting over. She rocks back and forth. I check the floor to see if it’s moving. But under my feet the ground is solid and stock-still. Behind us, Drunkard Laloo burps.

  “No one has asked you for anything, no, chachi?” Pari asks. “Like money to give Bahadur back?”

  “You think someone has snatched him?” Bahadur’s ma asks. “That baba, Baba Bengali, he said…”

  “Chachi,” Pari says, “even babas can be wrong sometimes. My ma says so.”

  “No one has called me for money,” Bahadur’s ma says.

  “I’m sure Bahadur will come back,” Pari says.

  “Who knows if he has eaten anything?” Bahadur’s ma says. “He must be hungry.” Then she lurches toward the bed on which Drunkard Laloo is sitting. He shifts his legs to make space for her.

  Pari opens her mouth to talk more but I shout, “Okay-tata-bye, we’re going.” Then I run out as fast as I can because inside that house sadness sticks to me like a shirt damp with sweat on a hot summer’s day.

  WE HAVE ENOUGH TIME BEFORE—

  —it gets too dark to go to Bhoot Bazaar and look for Hakim from Hakim’s TV-repair shop. My legs don’t want to walk with me anymore. I have to keep dragging them forward.

  The bazaar seems to be growing bigger and bigger. I pass alleys I have never been to. Pari is tired too and our pace is tortoise-slow.

  “When will we study?” she asks. Just like her to worry about silly things.

  I prepare a list of questions in my head so that Pari can’t pretend she’s in charge again. But when we meet Hakim, the TV-repair chacha, he talks about Bahadur without any prompting from us.

  “I saw him on Friday, maybe even on Saturday, but definitely I didn’t see him on Sunday,” he says, stroking his pointy beard that’s henna-orange at the bottom and white at the top, just like his hair. “That was two whole days after his own brother and sister saw him, I found out later. He was wearing his uniform the whole time. I assumed he was avoiding school because of the bullies—you must have seen them teasing Bahadur? Poor child. Shall I get you a cup of tea? You’re doing a good job, looking for him. You deserve a reward.”