Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

by Deepa Anappara

  “This is too stupid, even for you,” Pari tells Faiz, and turns to me. “Jai, you’re getting a chance to do real detective work, and you’re running scared.”

  “There’s nothing in this world I’m afraid of,” I say, which is another lie. I’m scared of JCBs, exams, djinns that are probably real and Ma’s slaps.

  OMVIR

  Sometimes he forgot Maple Towers was a hi-fi building because of the way its insides were rotting. The lifts creaked, the walls cast off flakes of paint, and dirty nappies spilled out of the rubbish chutes into the edges of corridors. The staircase, which he used when his hands were unencumbered by bundles of wrinkled or ironed clothes, smelled of dead rat. Running down the stairs now, Omvir caught sight of the smog that made faces at him through the glass windows. Behind its dark coat, he couldn’t tell if the world was alive or dead.

  At the gates, a security guard halfheartedly patted him down to ascertain he hadn’t stolen anything, a ritual left over from the time Maple Towers began its life as the first of the high-rises in this neighborhood, heady with fresh paint and the promise of wealth. Now its inhabitants were resentful young people with office jobs they probably thought didn’t pay enough, and retired men and women whose children worked abroad and hired agency nurses to check on them each week.

  Omvir had peered into the homes of both the young and the old and, while they weren’t wealthy, they weren’t poor either. They could be fleshy or thin, their fingers snapping with impatience or gripping a walking stick, their eyes cloudy-white with cataracts or blue from contact lenses, but most of them dismissed him briskly once he had picked up their creased clothes to be pressed or returned them still warm from the soleplate of his father’s charcoal-iron. The few times they asked him to wait at the door, it was only so that they could inspect their trousers, shirts and blouses, and their underwear and vests, which some of them also wanted ironed for reasons Omvir hoped he would never have to discover. Once satisfied there were no cinder marks or ash stains on their clothes, they let him leave.

  His father worried press-wallahs were going out of fashion in the manner of landlines and Doordarshan and tape-recorders, and told Omvir not to mind their eccentricities. From his rickety stall exposed to the elements, he was competing against the neatness of laundromats conveniently positioned inside all-in-one malls with cinemas and restaurants and shops, and Dhobi Ghats and Dhobi Haats mysteriously located on the Internet, offering round-the-clock washing and ironing services and neat packaging.

  For safekeeping, his father wrapped ironed clothes in clean but worn bedsheets like the one Omvir had now tied around his shoulders to make a cape. Sometimes his father promised his customers hangers and biodegradable plastic sheet covers, promises Omvir knew he couldn’t deliver. Always a melancholic man, his father, knee-deep in debt, waited for certain ruin with the patience of a heron standing still in murky water.

  If he didn’t get away, Omvir imagined he too would spend his life in the shadow of hi-fi buildings like Maple Towers. He felt the weight of his father’s crushed hopes on his spindly, ten-year-old shoulders. He could understand why Bahadur had run off, if that was indeed what he had done.

  Tucking his cape behind him, Omvir thought of how others considered Bahadur’s stutter a weakness, something to be mercilessly mocked, a sign of sins committed in past lives. But Omvir himself had seen it as a source of strength, much like the two thumbs Hrithik Roshan had on his right hand. He believed the actor’s rhythm, the deftness with which he could manipulate his legs and torso and hands to the beats of a song—as if he had no spine, no bones—came from the extra appendage that others thought freakish. What was God-given couldn’t be a mere imperfection; it was a gift. Omvir wanted to believe there was a reason for everything. Otherwise, what was the point?

  A pack of stray dogs raced past him and stood snarling under one of the neem trees lining the road. He turned the glowing side of the ring he wore on his left index finger to the inside, toward his palm, afraid its flashiness would provoke them. Squawking birds rose into the smog, leaving a trail of dead leaves that drifted to the ground. A monkey gawped at him through the foliage, startling him and then vanishing quickly.

  He kept an eye on the dogs, attempting to judge the sharpness of their teeth against the thickness of the fabric of his jeans. A car passed. The dogs chased its wheels and, luckily for him, didn’t return to tear him apart.

  The birds flew back to their nests. He couldn’t tell the time, but the day seemed to have vanished, quickly and silently like Bahadur. Omvir wondered where Bahadur was now. For months they had joked about escaping to a city where their fathers couldn’t find them. A new beginning, in Mumbai, a city where two more boys on the street wouldn’t make a ripple in the crowd, and the air tasted of salt from the sea, and where even children selling electric mosquito swatters at traffic junctions could press their noses against car windows and spot actors inside, Hrithik himself one day perhaps. Why hadn’t Bahadur asked him to go along?

  Something terrible must have happened at Bahadur’s home. Omvir had to admit that his own father, though prone to dejection and whimpering at night and waking up his baby brother and in turn exhausting his mother, didn’t have any of Drunkard Laloo’s vices. His father didn’t raise his hand against them or waste his earnings on drink. He was on his feet from dawn till late in the night, and he never complained about the cinders that left burns on his arms, or the ash that singed his brows, or the smog and the cold and the dust storms that lanced his nose and throat and ears a thousand times each day.

  But his father also encouraged him to miss school so that his press-wallah trade wouldn’t suffer, adopting a high-pitched pleading tone whenever Omvir said he was worried about exams or being struck off the school roll. “I’m doing this for you,” his father would say, pointing to his stall which, like its owner, appeared to be on the verge of collapse. He didn’t have the heart to tell his father that he had no interest in being a press-wallah. He was going to be a dancer so famous that people would recognize him on the street.

  Omvir spread his hands out into the air. He wanted to imitate the steps he had seen in songs played on TV—Hrithik jumping into the air with his legs and arms extended or spinning on the floor upside down, balanced only on his head—but these were still beyond him. For now, he moved to the beats of a song only he could hear, letting its rhythm fizz through his entire body. His arms stiffened and relaxed as if pulled by invisible puppet strings. He pushed his chest backward and forward, pressed down on his heels and popped his knees so that his legs fluttered like washing in the breeze. A sense that he was someone else who was lighter and freer and happier swept through him.

  “Are you having fits?” a watchman shouted from behind a gate, interrupting his dance. Omvir waved off the man’s question. He was now in a posh neighborhood. Elevated side roads led to high-rises that were taller and shinier than Maple Towers, with worthier names too, Sunset Boulevard and Palm Springs and Golden Gate. Farther down this road, his father must be waiting for him, warming his hands against the orange glow of the charcoal in his iron, wondering what on earth was taking Omvir so long.

  There were no street lights on the main road. The hi-fi people had no use for those; they drove up and down in cars with headlights and smog lights. They didn’t walk except for exercise, and only in the well-lit gardens inside their gated complexes.

  Looking up at the hi-fi flats, imagining the ease of lives conducted in such brightness, he was late to notice the dogs watching him with their mouths wide open, tongues sticking out, breaths loud and swift. One of them barked, then the others joined in. Omvir found himself running.

  His slippers whacked the ground. Stones cut into his feet. His bedsheet-cape, heavy around his neck, slowed him down. The dogs gnashed their teeth. He was running in the wrong direction, away from his father’s stall. The cape grew heavier. He wanted to loosen it, let the sheet fall to the ground
, let it trip a dog or two. But his father would be mad, mad that he was late, mad that he had thoughtlessly lost a bedsheet, mad that he would need expensive rabies shots.

  The dogs were gaining on him now. He felt one of them pounce, ripping through the air toward him, drool spattering on the back of his neck. If he were a superhero, like Hrithik in the Krrish films, he would have leaped into the sky and grabbed the wing of an airplane, and his sleek black cape would have soared into the air behind him. But his feet were still on earth, and his lungs were running out of air, and his eyes were blurring.

  Yellow headlights cut through the smog, and a silver SUV stopped in front of him. The driver honked. The dogs barked angrily at the unexpected disruption. The vehicle’s back door flung open, and it stayed open, like an outstretched arm waiting to pluck him off the ground and out of harm’s way. His heart pounded as if it would burst from the exertion, and his mouth was so dry thorns seemed to be sprouting out of his tongue but, because he wasn’t his father, in that moment he also felt hope.

  PARI AND I DON’T SAY IT ALOUD BUT—

  —we have never gone farther than our school by ourselves. At least Pari has been to the city. Her dada who lives across the river took her once. She says she doesn’t remember anything because it happened when she was two years old, and the Purple Line wasn’t even running then.

  We stop at a cycle-rickshaw stand by the highway. The drivers are waiting for customers, sitting in their passenger seats, chatting with each other, smoking beedis, and drinking chai from roadside tea shops. Pari takes out Bahadur’s photo from her backpack. She asks the drivers if any of them ferried the boy in the photo to the metro station.

  “Let’s do this tomorrow,” I tell Pari.

  But she doesn’t listen and asks idling autorickshaw drivers too about Bahadur. No one has seen him. Her questioning makes us so late, we have to hire a cycle-rickshaw to the metro station because walking will take us twice as long. Ma says rickshaws are for people with money, and it’s a good thing our legs can do the job of wheels. I worry she’ll see me from her hi-fi madam’s flat but then I remember what she told me once: from up there, even a giant will look as small as an ant.

  Our cycle-rickshaw rattles past men peeling potatoes and dicing onions and tomatoes outside roadside stalls. Cars with bumper stickers that say strange things like DON’T GET TOO CLOSE, I’M BRUCE LEE and PROUD HINDU ON BOARD honk and screech and brake at a junction where the lights flash red, orange and green at the same time. A dwarf who can travel for free on the metro because he’s not over three feet tall begs in the middle of the road, standing on his toes to knock on car windows.

  The road is full of craters like the moon, and I have to clutch the sides of the rickshaw so that I won’t fall.

  “How are there accidents when the traffic is so slow?” Pari says, looking at an overturned Honda City in the middle of the divider. The rickshaw’s wheels trundle over a dead crow flattened against the tar.

  At the end of the ride, Pari asks me to pay because she has just enough money to buy tickets for herself. She must have guessed I have more money than I let on. Ma’s rupees look at me accusingly as I extend them toward the rickshaw-wallah. They disappear into his pocket. Forty rupees gone, just like that.

  We have to climb a flight of stairs to reach the metro station. I keep my eyes and ears open so that I can catch all the sights and sounds I have never seen or heard before. At the top of the stairs, I point out hi-fi buildings to Pari.

  “All this land, na,” I say, “it was once empty.” That’s something Papa told me. He said the land was at first full of boulders, which farmers pounded with tractors to grow mustard. But after working hard for years, they sold their land to suit-boot builders from the city, and now the farmers sit at home, boredom curling out of their mouths and noses in clouds of hookah smoke.

  “How do we buy tickets?” Pari asks. She doesn’t care about farmers.

  The counters are shut and boards pressed up against the glass say CLOSED. The ticket-vending machines, taller and wider than us, look like complex puzzles that even Pari can’t figure out. She asks a man in a striped red-and-black shirt for help and he takes our money but asks us many questions: Don’t you have school? Why are you alone? Where are you going? Do you know how dangerous the city is? What if someone snatches your money? What if someone snatches you?

  It’s good that Pari is with me because she comes up with lies at the same speed with which the man asks us questions.

  “We’re visiting our grandmother,” Pari says, “and she’ll send her boy to pick us up at the station.”

  Only rich people hire boys to run their houses but Pari makes the grandmother sound so real that I can smell her old-woman smells, see her papery skin and the talcum powder dusted into the folds on her face and neck. The man is finally convinced. He presses a few keys. A map of stations appears on the screen and he asks us where we want to get down. Then he presses even more keys. The machine slurps our money and spits out plastic coins that the man says are like tickets. He tells us to listen to the announcements so that we will know where to get off.

  “Be alert,” he says before he leaves.

  I’m very alert. I look around the station, wishing I could tell which parts Papa worked on. Maybe his fingerprints are hidden under the paint, stamped in cement. The noise of the road outside streams into the station but the walls hush them. It’s like we are in a foreign country. Even the smog looks tame from here.

  Pari grabs my sleeve and says, “Why do you keep staring at things like a dhakkan? That too when we have no time to waste. Focus.”

  We copy what the people in front of us are doing and place our tokens against short, pillar-like machines that let us through. Our bags are X-rayed, then we pass a metal-detector gate that won’t stop beeping. A policewoman checks ladies behind a curtain and a policeman frisks gents at the gate. “What’s in there?” a cop asks a man, tapping a wallet sticking out of the pocket of his jeans-pant. But they let us go without troubling us because they know children can’t be terrorists carrying bombs.

  To get to the platform, we can take either a moving staircase or a regular one. An old woman wearing a red sari and many gold bangles stops in front of the moving staircase and says, no, this is beyond me, I can’t, but her husband, whose back is even more stooped than hers, takes her hand and pulls her onto the stairs. Then they slide on up, happy like baby birds who have just learned to fly.

  Pari and I get on the moving staircase too.

  “You can hold my hand if you want,” she says.

  “No way,” I say, and pretend to throw up.

  A train glides into the platform and we run into it through the nearest door. Inside, the floor is as neat as Ma likes it. Everyone in the train is doing something on their mobile phones: talking, taking photos, listening to music, and watching videos of films or prayers like the Gayatri Mantra, their lips moving in sync with the words flashing on the screen. A man makes announcements in Hindi from speakers tacked somewhere up in the ceiling, and a woman translates what he says into English.

  Pari and I stare out of the glass panels on the train’s doors, smeared with people’s handprints. The train goes underground for a little while and we can’t see anything but then it comes up for air. We pass hi-fi buildings, gone before we can look into their windows, a clock tower, an amusement park with giant roller coasters that I have heard about, and the tops of trees going grey in the smog. Three streaks of green zoom close to the train and disappear. “Parakeets,” Pari tells me. I feel like I’m in a dream.

  This ride is the best. It’s worth a hundred slaps from Ma and Papa. Maybe not a hundred. More like ten or five.

  From the chatter in the compartment, I know the trains are late because of the smog, but I can’t tell how late. The announcer-man and the translator-woman don’t talk about the delays, but instead keep listing dos and don’t
s like:

  see if there are suspicious objects nearby before sitting down. A toy, a thermos or a briefcase could be a bomb;

  don’t eat, drink or smoke in the train;

  don’t play music loudly in the train;

  cooperate with the staff during security checks;

  give the disabled, pregnant women or senior citizens your seat;

  don’t obstruct the doors;

  don’t travel ticketless.

  Then they say that the doors will open on the left at the next station. A group of women in glittering salwar-kameezes, their faces decorated as if they are going to a wedding, get up from their seats and gather near the door. Their perfumes sweeten the air.

  “Her stomach is too much sticking out,” one says. “But she’s doing hot yoga and all,” another woman says. “She skips also,” a third woman says. “No one can do that much skipping,” a fourth woman says. “It’s not enough to lose weight.”

  The train stops at the station, the doors magic themselves open and the women get down, taking their perfume scents with them. Pari and I claim their seats. Around us several phone conversations are happening at the same time. I catch a few words of each.

  In fifteen minutes. It will take five minutes? Please change your attitude. Hello. Hello. Hello. Seriously, I’m telling you. Cut ho gaya. No, no, arrey, what are you saying? Hello?

  The train slips underground again.

  * * *

  We get off at a metro station that looks like a well-lit tunnel. Announcements and voices echo around us. We watch people walking past, their trousers flapping and their shoes clicking on the floor. I tug at the hem of a man’s kurta and ask, “Which way to the railway station?” and he laughs. “Where do you think you are right now?” he says.