“All very well that we’re sharing our food with her,” the nani continues, “but how long can we do it?”
“You’ll not stop talking until I go mad,” Omvir’s ma screams at the nani from her doorstep. Boxer-baby pummels her face. “You think I can’t hear you? Don’t go around behaving like you’re starving to death because you gave us two rotis last night.”
“This is how people repay you for your kindness these days,” the nani says, the folds of her chin quivering.
“What did your two rotis cost? Two rupees?” Omvir’s ma asks.
I get up, tiptoe toward Pari and Faiz, and we slowly walk away from the two women. Their shouting is bringing people out of their houses. I worry Samosa will run away, but he stays by my side.
“You made them fight,” Faiz says.
“Samosa is going to track Bahadur and Omvir,” I say.
“Samosa?” Pari asks.
“My dog.”
“Dogs should have proper dog-names like Moti or Heera,” Pari says.
“A dog doesn’t care what you call it,” Faiz says.
We reach Bahadur’s house. Only his little sister Barkha is there. She’s washing clothes in a plastic basin full of soapy water.
“Will you give me one of Bahadur’s shirts?” I ask. “If there’s one that you haven’t washed yet, that will be better.” It sounds disgusting when I say it out loud.
Barkha splashes the water around. I stand back a little.
“Samosa has to get Bahadur’s scent first,” I explain to Pari.
Pari opens her book, brings out the photo of Bahadur that his ma had given us, and shows it to the girl. “I’m going to put it back, in the cupboard where your ma kept it before, okay?” she says.
Barkha nods and gets up, wiping her hands against the boys’ jeans-pant that she’s wearing.
Pari pads into the house, places her book on the bed, squeak-opens the cupboard and puts Bahadur’s photo inside. Then she points at Bahadur’s school bag, propped up against their fancy fridge. “I lent your brother a book,” she tells Barkha. “I need to see if it’s in there.” She takes out one of Bahadur’s notebooks and hands it to me. Bahadur’s round words float above black lines. I let Samosa have a good snuffle.
“What are you doing?” the girl asks.
“You want your brother to come back, right? Don’t you feel like seeing him?” Pari says.
Tears dribble down the girl’s cheeks.
“Arrey, don’t cry, don’t, no,” Pari says.
I hand the notebook to Faiz, who leaves it on the doorstep.
“Where’s Bahadur?” I ask Samosa. “Come on, find him, you can do it.”
Samosa barks, turns around and runs. I dash after him, my feet lifting up into the air as I jump over bricks and pots and pans, and piles of ash from the rubbish that people burnt last night for warmth, I don’t know how fast I’m going, I may be faster than Runu-Didi even, there’s the cold wind pulling my cheeks back, zipping up my skin too tight, and there isn’t enough air in my lungs and my eyes are watering and then Samosa ducks into a narrow lane between houses and I have to slow down.
Faiz is huffing behind me. I wave at him and shout, “Keep up.” Pari must have stayed behind to comfort Barkha.
I turn to the side and inch through the lane. The walls are swirly with moss and dirt. I stumble out of the path and so does Faiz. We sit down on the ground with our mouths open so that our breaths can catch up with us.
Samosa appears in front of us. He’s panting too.
“Was Bahadur here?” I ask. He barks. I think he’s saying yes. Faiz dabs his forehead with the rag around his neck.
We are at the very edge of our basti, facing the rubbish ground that’s much bigger than our school playground. Right in front of me, a man washes his backside with water from a mug. Pigs dive into the grey-black rubbish, their pink-white bellies splotched with dirt. Cows with dried dung on their backsides chew rotting vegetables, blinking their eyes to bat away flies. Dogs nose through the filth for bones, and boys and girls collect cans and glass. Smoke rises from the smelliest piles that people have set on fire to make them stink less.
The scavenger children remind me of Mental’s boys, who also picked up plastic bottles, but from railway tracks. Pari says Mental is just a story made up by Guru. I can’t argue with her. The green card from the reading center makes her the story-expert.
I stand up to get a good look at the rubbish ground and feel sad for the kikar trees and the thorny shrubs that were living here long before people started dumping their trash around them. Some of the trees are still alive but their leaves are black with soot, and the wind has bandaged their branches with Maggi wrappers and plastic bags.
Beyond the rubbish ground is the wall, and beyond the wall, hi-fi buildings disappear into the smog. The hi-fi people are trying to get rid of the rubbish ground, Ma says. The prices of their flats are going down because of the stench. Ma says the municipality was supposed to clear the rubbish ground years and years ago when the hi-fi buildings went up, before I was even born, but they didn’t. The government ignores us always but sometimes they ignore the hi-fi types too. The world is strange.
“Boys,” a man smoking a beedi and sorting heaps of trash into glass bottles and plastic bottles calls us over. He must be a scrap-dealer. Many kabadi-wallahs live near the rubbish ground, and towers of plastic and cardboard grow tall outside their houses. A black parrot with open wings is tattooed to the man’s forearm; it looks like it will fly away into the sky any moment.
“They’ll have to stick three needles as long as palm trees into your stomach if that dog bites you,” he says, pointing the red tip of his beedi at Samosa.
Samosa will never bite me because he likes me. Also, Samosa doesn’t have rabies. He’s not a mad dog.
“Want a puff?” the man asks, holding his beedi toward us.
“Ammi will beat me if I smoke,” Faiz says.
“The missing boys, Bahadur and Omvir, ever seen them here?” I ask.
The man scratches his feathery beard. “Kids around here disappear all the time,” he says. “One day they’ll have too much glue and decide to try their luck somewhere else. Another day they’ll get hit by a rubbish truck and end up in a hospital. Some other morning, they’ll be picked up by the police and sent to a juvenile home. We don’t make a fuss about anybody vanishing.”
“We aren’t making a fuss,” I say. “We’re looking for our friends.”
Children with heavy sacks slung over their shoulders slop-slop through the rubbish toward him. On his head one boy carries a sack so huge it covers his face.
“Good catch today, haan?” the man asks him.
“Haan badshah,” the boy says.
A few stray dogs have followed the children. Samosa darts off toward his four-legged friends.
“Samosa, come back,” I call after him, but he doesn’t.
The scrap-dealer stubs out his beedi. A scavenger girl opens her sack that’s splitting at the sides and takes out a broken toy helicopter. “I got this today, Bottle-Badshah,” she tells the man.
Bottle-Badshah is an excellent name. I should have thought of a fancy name like that for Samosa.
Right now Samosa is sniffing another dog’s backside, I can’t even look.
The other children open their sacks, to show the badshah what they found. They don’t answer my questions about Bahadur and Omvir.
Bottle-Badshah returns the helicopter to the scavenger girl. “You need a toy too,” he says.
She grins. I guess Bottle-Badshah is a good boss-man like Mental.
Faiz asks the girl if she has seen anyone wandering in the dark, trying to catch children. I think he means djinns.
“We sleep in the open,” the girl tells Faiz, “because we don’t have parents or homes. There’s always some idi
ot trying to snatch us, but we fight them off.”
She must be lying; she’s so small, she wouldn’t scare an ant.
The light has swerved quickly from yellow to brown to black. Evening noises drift out of houses, TVs shouting and women coughing as wood fires scratch their throats. Ma will be home soon.
“Why do you think Samosa brought us here?” I ask Faiz.
“Because he’s stupid?”
I call Samosa. His nose is now poking through the rubbish.
“Leave it, yaar,” Faiz says. “That dog must be hungry.”
I don’t tell Faiz that Samosa just ate an entire nankhatai that would have made my belly happy and quiet.
The scavenger girl runs ahead of us, making chop-chop noises as she pilots her helicopter with her left hand, her now-empty sack swinging in her right hand. Faiz and I run behind her. At first we are her passengers, but then we spread out our hands so that it looks like we are flying too. We go high up into the sky, above the hi-fi buildings and the smog, and we honk-honk so that we won’t crash into each other.
Flying is the best feeling ever.
RUNU-DIDI AND I ARE DOING OUR HOMEWORK—
—when Shanti-Chachi taps on our door and gestures with her eyes and eyebrows that Ma and Papa should step outside. Chachi warns us with the strict expression on her face that we shouldn’t get up, but she also gives us a smile that seems painted-on like a clown’s. She makes her face work too hard. Then the grown-ups huddle outside, whispering with their hands over their mouths.
Maybe Bahadur and Omvir are back. It’s been two days since Faiz and I followed Samosa to the rubbish ground and found nothing. So far, my whole detective mission has been a big failure. I have no clues, and my only suspect, Quarter, hasn’t done anything that can be considered suspicious. If my story were to come on TV, newsreaders would say Missing-Children Probe at Dead End, Child-Detective Admits.
Outside, Papa tries to speak softly like Ma and chachi but doesn’t have much luck with it. Runu-Didi and I hear him say a bad word: randi. Didi shakes her head disapprovingly. At my school, randi is the worst type of swear word for a girl; it means she’s like the women in the kothas of Bhoot Bazaar.
I have never been to the kotha-alley but I have seen brothel-ladies around the bazaar, buying chow mein and chaat, their faces so thick with makeup that even their sweat lines look like scars. They make kissy noises at young men. “Oye chikna,” they chirp, “come here and show us what you’re hiding in those trousers of yours.”
Once I asked Ma about kothas and she said the women there have no shame. She made me God-promise I wouldn’t go to the bad parts of the bazaar, and I don’t, but only because there are loads of other places to explore.
Runu-Didi gets up to stir the dal on the stove. I wish we had some meat to put in the dal. Meat gives you muscles. When I’m grown up and rich, Samosa and I will eat mutton for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and we’ll solve cases that baffle the police because our brains will be twice as smart. I wonder what Samosa is having for dinner tonight.
Ma comes back inside. She sits down next to Runu-Didi, picks up a small ball of atta, and flattens it into a roti. Didi tucks the edge of Ma’s sari into her underskirt because it’s too close to the stove’s flame.
“What happened, Ma?” Didi asks.
I notice only then that Ma’s eyes are full of tears. Maybe she knows about the money I stole from her Parachute tub. I want to throw up and also do No. 2.
I crawl toward Ma. “What’s it?” I ask.
“You,” Ma says, grabbing my wrist too-tight. “When will you stop wandering here and there? People will think there’s no one to take care of you.”
A chachi from Ma’s basti-ladies’ network must have seen me at Duttaram’s tea shop and told Ma. I try to free my hand. She lets me go and slaps her forehead. “Hey Bhagwan, why are you testing us like this?” she says.
I keep quiet because she’s talking to God and not me and God has better things to do than answer her questions.
“Ma, tell us what’s wrong,” Runu-Didi says.
“Aanchal,” Ma says, “Aanchal is missing.”
“Who’s that?” I ask but I have already guessed that Aanchal is a brothel-lady. That must be what Shanti-Chachi just told Ma and Papa.
“Aanchal left her home on Saturday and hasn’t come back yet,” Ma says. “Three nights—tonight it will be four—she hasn’t been home.”
Runu-Didi removes the dal from the fire.
“You don’t talk to boys, do you?” Ma asks Didi, who looks too confused to say anything.
“This Aanchal, she has a boyfriend,” Ma says, and then she snaps at me. “Jai, go outside.”
“I have homework,” I say, but I get up. Papa and Ma keep sending me and Didi away for secret reasons. It’s all right in summer but it’s just mean to do that to your children in the rains or on freezy nights like tonight.
The talk outside is very grown up. Ma wouldn’t have wanted me to hear it; serves her right for kicking me out.
“Her boyfriend is as old as her grandfather,” a chachi says. “But worse, he’s Muslim.”
“She told her mother she was going to a movie with a friend. How was that poor woman to know her daughter was running around with a Muslim instead?” a second chachi says.
“Who knows how many boyfriends a girl like that has?” a third chachi says.
Brothel-ladies must be brothel-ladies because they have many boyfriends.
“Muslims kidnap our girls and force them to convert to Islam. Love-jihad they’re doing,” a chacha says. “After bombs, this is how they terrorize us.”
These chachas and chachis wouldn’t have said such things had our Muslim neighbors like Fatima-ben been around.
Shanti-Chachi’s husband warns Papa that girls can’t be trusted. “They tell you one thing, they do something else. You should be stricter with Runu,” he says. “She goes here and there for running races, doesn’t she?”
“Didi only cares about winning inter-district,” I say. “She’ll marry her medal. Papa won’t have to pay a dowry for her.”
“Who told you to come out?” Papa asks.
“Your wife doesn’t want to see my face,” I say.
Papa sighs, then prods me back inside where Runu-Didi has put our books away so that we can have dinner. I wonder who Aanchal’s Muslim grandpa-boyfriend is. There are loads of old Muslim men in our basti, but the only one I know is the TV-repair chacha. He can’t be Aanchal’s boyfriend, can he?
Ma angrily slops dal onto everyone’s plates. She scowls at Runu-Didi like Didi has secret Muslim boyfriends.
“Papa,” I say, “Ma is doing drama-baazi again.”
Ma’s ladle smacks my plate, telling me to shut up.
* * *
By the next afternoon, Pari, Faiz and I know loads about Aanchal, from the words grown-ups let out of their mouths when they forgot we were around, and the stories Faiz’s brothers told him after he gave them his share of subzi at dinner. News about Aanchal came to us; we didn’t have to take the Purple Line to learn about her. Hardly anyone knows Bahadur and Omvir but Aanchal is a world-famous lady in Bhoot Bazaar.
During the midday meal break, we stand in the school playground, keeping an eye on Quarter whose eyes are on the girls around him. Our classmates play games that look like fun, but we can’t join in because Pari and I have a case to solve.
Pari writes a missing-person report for Aanchal based on the instructions I give her. Our final report is as good as any I have seen on Police Patrol. It says:
NAME: AANCHAL
FATHER NAME: KUMAR
AGE: 19–22
IDENTITY MARKS: FEMALE PERSON WITH WHEAT COLOR, FACE TYPE ROUND, BUILD THIN, HEIGHT 5' 5" (5' 3" OR 5' 4") WEARING YELLOW KURTA
LAST SEEN: BHOOT BAZAAR
I pass P
ari’s notebook to Faiz, who squints at the report and says, “When did Aanchal become nineteen? People say she’s twenty-three or twenty-four.”
“It looks professional,” I say.
“How is this going to help you find Aanchal?” he asks.
Faiz can’t admit we’re good at anything. But it’s also true that I don’t know how this missing-person report will be useful.
“Let’s make a list of suspects,” Pari says, and snatches her notebook back from Faiz.
“He is No. 1,” I say, pointing my eyes at Quarter.
“Some women at the toilet complex were blaming Aanchal’s papa,” Pari says. “He was driving an auto before and now he can’t because he has TB or cancer or something. Aanchal has to do all kinds of things for money, like work at a kotha.”
Pari tap-taps her pen against her notebook, like she’s sounding out the thoughts in her head through a secret code.
“Faiz, will you find out more about the TV-repair chacha?” I ask.
“More what?”
“Like, did he know Aanchal?”
“You think the chacha is Aanchal’s Muslim boyfriend, haan? I knew it. You Hindus will accuse a Muslim of anything.”
“The chacha is a suspect because Bahadur worked for him, and he was probably the last person to see Bahadur,” Pari says. “There’s no other reason Jai is saying that, right, Jai?”
“Right.” I hadn’t even thought of that.
“Faiz, you’ll see the chacha at the mosque. Your kirana-malik might know him,” Pari says. “Shopkeepers in Bhoot Bazaar know each other.”
“You can ask questions even when you’re working,” I say. I almost add that’s what I do on Sundays at Duttaram’s tea shop, but I remember just in the nick of time that Pari doesn’t know my secret.
“Jai and me,” Pari says, “we’ll ask the kotha-ladies about Aanchal.”
“We can take Samosa with us,” I say.
“There’s no time,” she says. “And that dog, it will just bark and annoy people.”
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line Page 13
