Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

by Deepa Anappara

—she’s a terrible boss-lady. She keeps darting back to her home because she’s cooking for once, and she’s worried she’ll burn the food. She can’t ask us to study at her house; it’s filled with ointment-tubes from factories. Her husband works as a sweeper for the municipality, which is an excellent government job, but he also has a second job screwing caps onto tubes from home. One day I ran in and my feet squashed a tube or maybe ten tubes, so children are banned from her house.

  “Study, study,” Shanti-Chachi says, appearing at our door before hurrying back to her house to confirm her lunch is still tasty.

  Runu-Didi puts on her shoes.

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “Coach restarted training on Friday. Tara told him about Buffalo-Baba’s murder, so Coach agreed to give me a couple of days off. But I miss today too, that’s it, I’ll be out of the team.”

  “If both of us aren’t here the whole day, Shanti-Chachi will know.”

  “You’re still doing that tea-stall thing?”

  “You’re still doing that training thing?”

  “Wait here,” Didi says. She picks up her sweater and runs off, leaving the door half-shut, and me inside. She must have gone to the toilet complex. I wait one-two-three-four-hundred minutes but there’s no sign of her. I can see from Ma’s tardy alarm clock tick-tocking on the shelf that I’m extra-late for work. I can’t believe Runu-Didi tricked me like this.

  Shanti-Chachi’s anklets are returning to our house. I leap out of the bed and stand in front of our half-shut door so she can’t see inside.

  “Runu-Didi has women-troubles,” I say. “Her stomach hurts.” Ma told me that once when she asked me not to disturb Didi.

  “Oh-o,” chachi says. “Let me see.”

  “She’s sleeping now. She took a Crocin.”

  “If she needs anything—”

  “She’ll ask you.”

  “You must be bored, just sitting here like this.”

  “I’m studying.”

  Shanti-Chachi’s face clouds with doubt but she leaves. When I hear her ladle stirring a pot, I pull our door almost-shut and sprint toward Bhoot Bazaar.

  “Lo, he has arrived, ladies and gentlemen, the maharaja of Bhoot Bazaar has finally decided to grace us with his presence,” Duttaram says the second he lays his eyes on me.

  “They cut a buffalo in half in my alley,” I say. “There’s a big crowd there. I couldn’t get out for hours.”

  “Sad business that,” Duttaram says, but he doesn’t look sad. He gestures with the kettle spout that I should serve his waiting customers. I don’t spill a drop. I’m an expert tea boy now.

  * * *

  It’s not even afternoon and I see two of my neighbor-chachis at Duttaram’s tea stall. “Chokra, you’re in big trouble,” says the chachi who lives next door to Shanti-Chachi. “We have been looking for you and your sister everywhere.”

  Duttaram twists my ears when the chachis tell him they were worried I had got snatched.

  “Where’s your sister?” a neighbor-chachi asks.

  “What do I know?” I say.

  This is the worst kind of bad luck. If I had been caught after five in the evening, I would have made the last twenty rupees I needed.

  “Let’s go,” the chachi says. “Poor Shanti must have had a thousand heart attacks by now.”

  Duttaram takes twenty rupees out of his shirt pocket and places it on my palm which is wet and dirty. “Give it to your parents,” he says.

  I push the note down into my pocket. I got caught but my bad luck is less bad than I thought.

  Shanti-Chachi shouts when she sees me, then hugs me so tight, I worry my bones will snap. “Why did you lie to me, Jai? Where’s your sister?” she asks.

  “Runu-Didi went to school to talk to her coach. She’ll be back before Ma gets home.”

  “Your ma is coming home right now. I called her, I had to. Wait, let me call her again and tell her not to worry.” Chachi almost drops her mobile, then steadies her hands. Though the rotis her husband makes are glossy with ghee and though he always adds a scoop of butter to his dal, chachi is thin like Ma, and now she looks even thinner. She tells Ma I’m safe and that Runu-Didi is with me. Clumps of pink nail polish are stuck to the bottoms of chachi’s nails, which are turmeric-yellow at the top like her fingertips. I can see the white strands in her hair where the dye is fading quickly.

  “Your ma says she’s going back to work because her hi-fi madam is having a party later today,” Shanti-Chachi says. “I told her Runu is with you because I didn’t want to worry her anymore. She’s safe, isn’t she, your didi? You weren’t lying again, were you?”

  “She’s at school.”

  “We have to go and get her.”

  “She’s with her coach, chachi. They’re training.”

  “I don’t care if she’s with the prime minister himself. I’m bringing her back.”

  “Can I change? Someone spilled tea on me at the stall.”

  “Be quick.”

  I run inside, open the Parachute tub, and fold into it the twenty rupees Duttaram gave me. Ma can kill me today and I won’t die a criminal.

  * * *

  Shanti-Chachi asks me loads of questions on the way to school. Why did I tell her Runu-Didi had women-troubles? Did I even know what women-troubles were? What was I doing in Bhoot Bazaar? Wasn’t I afraid of kidnappers? When did a little boy like me become such a shameless liar?

  In a small voice, I tell her I work on Sundays, but Ma and Papa don’t know that. I tell her about Runu-Didi and her inter-district contest.

  “Didi’s going to get a big pot of money if she wins and she’ll give everything to Ma and Papa. That’s why I’m working too. We’re just trying to help.”

  “That’s all well and good,” chachi says impatiently, “but if you two get snatched, then what happens, haan? You have the best mother and father in our whole basti. You just don’t know how good you have it.”

  “I know it too.”

  “What if Runu is not there?” chachi asks when we are close to the school. “Your mother will kill me. I’ll have to kill myself.”

  The school gate is half-open today. Didi’s No. 1 fan, the spotty boy, is peeping through the gate.

  “Move,” chachi barks at the boy, and he leaps aside, looking ashamed, like we caught him stealing.

  Runu-Didi is standing on a fading track drawn with chalk powder on the ground, her left hand outstretched to grab the baton from her teammate. She has told me that the baton-exchange shouldn’t take more than two seconds. Fumbling or letting the baton fall can get you kicked out of the team.

  Didi starts to jog as her teammate comes closer, she grabs the baton even before the teammate has finished shouting “stick” and then she races, her ponytail flying behind her, her arms swinging, her legs kicking up into the air as if they weigh nothing. She’s the last runner in her relay team because she’s the fastest.

  “Runu, come here right now,” Shanti-Chachi yells.

  Didi keeps running, like she’ll never stop. Chachi calls her name again, what do you think you’re doing, Runu? she shouts. Didi reaches the finish line, hands the baton to her coach, says something that makes him look angrier than ever. Then she jogs toward us.

  * * *

  When Ma gets home late in the evening, she doesn’t say a word to me or Runu-Didi. I watch her face closely, but she isn’t noisy like she usually is when she gets mad. She tastes the dal Didi made and adds some salt and garam masala to it. She rubs her lower back, just above her underskirt, where she’s always saying it hurts. I try to give her an old tub of Tiger Balm and she pretends she can’t see me though I move my hand to wherever her eyes go. I put the balm back on the shelf. Runu-Didi stares at Papa’s belt hanging from a nail that’s been hammered into the wall so hard, there’s a starburst of cracks around it. Pa
pa has never used the belt on us.

  Finally, Papa gets home. Ma and Shanti-Chachi and Shanti-Chachi’s husband push us out of the door and give Papa a high-level briefing inside. Runu-Didi and I sit on the doorstep, shivering.

  Tomorrow is exam day. Exams seem unreal, like they belong to another world. In our world we are doing daily battle with djinns and kidnappers and buffalo-killers and we don’t know when we will vanish.

  The grown-ups are whispering, but I can hear Papa’s shock that comes out in gasps.

  Shanti-Chachi opens the door and calls us inside. Then she and her husband leave.

  “Jai, you thought we wouldn’t have enough money to pay for food unless you worked?” Papa asks.

  “I won’t do it again,” I say.

  “Are we starving you here?”

  “I just…I thought I could give Faiz some money because his brother is in jail and the lawyer charges a lot.” It’s a good lie and it makes sense to me but not to Papa.

  “And this Faiz, he takes your money?”

  “I haven’t…Duttaram hasn’t paid me anything. Maybe if I had worked until the end of the month.”

  “And you, Runu,” Ma is speaking now, “I asked you to watch your brother. Instead you ran off to school? Running around all the time in the smog because you like your coach, haan? Think I don’t know what’s going on in that mind of yours?”

  “The coach?” Runu-Didi asks.

  She looks at me, eyebrows raised, as if asking me to explain Ma’s thinking to her. I tuck my chin into my chest. I can’t explain anything.

  “Your coach is your hero, isn’t he?” Ma asks. “You’ll risk being snatched if it means you’ll get to see him.”

  Didi’s coach doesn’t look like a hero at all.

  “No one will snatch me when I’m going to buy vegetables for dinner,” Didi says, flapping her arms around, hitting my face by mistake, and still not stopping. “Nothing will happen to me when I stand in the queue for water by the tap or for rice at the ration shop. But the second I do something that I want to do, that’s when I’ll get kidnapped. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Watch your mouth,” Ma tells Didi.

  “You have a little brother to care for,” Papa says.

  “If you two couldn’t look after Jai, why did you have him?” Didi asks.

  Papa moves in a flash and slaps Runu-Didi on her left cheek. Her small hoop earring falls down. Papa is shaking. His eyes are round, and he looks at his hand as if he can’t believe what it has just done. Ma starts to cry. Papa has never hit Didi before; he has never hit me either. Ma clouts us all the time, but never Papa.

  Ma bends down and picks up the earring. She tries to put it back but Didi pushes her away and climbs onto the bed and sits in the corner where I do my headstands. Papa seizes a blanket and marches out.

  “Won’t you have dinner?” Ma asks after him. Papa raises his right hand to say no without looking back.

  I sit on the bed, away from Runu-Didi, squishing the battered mattress with my knuckles. I guess Didi won’t be able to go to the inter-district championships. I bet she’s feeling a lot sadder about that than Papa hitting her.

  KABIR AND KHADIFA

  It felt like she had been waiting in the alley for hours. Behind her, the curtains that marked the entrance to the video-gaming parlor twitched, letting out ribbons of light that unfurled toward her feet. Night had swooped down without her noticing and erased the rooftops of Bhoot Bazaar.

  Khadifa imagined stomping into the parlor and hauling her brother out, but her sense of propriety stopped her. Basti-girls didn’t go inside such places, not even those girls brave enough to wear short skirts and talk back to their parents. She was doing the responsible thing by trying to stop the boys staggering into the parlor, but they were too distracted to listen to her.

  “Please, my brother is there, inside,” she said to yet another boy whose bristly mustache and grown-up smell of cigarette smoke she registered now, in alarm. “His name is Kabir, he’s small, just nine. Ask him to come out, please. Tell him his sister is waiting.”

  The boy’s expression didn’t change. She moved to the side to let him pass, and touched her hijab, feeling self-conscious. Shame burnt her cheeks even in this chill.

  She jammed her knuckles into the crooks of her elbows, a familiar anger surging through her. Ammi had sent Kabir out to buy a packet of milk in the evening, and then Khadifa to bring him back when he didn’t return a couple of hours later. No matter that Khadifa had friends to talk to, and sewing work to complete. Each time Kabir misbehaved, it fell on Khadifa to set things right. How was that fair?

  Ammi didn’t care about fairness. All she seemed to think about these days was the new baby growing in her belly. The sweetness with which Ammi spoke to it late at night and early in the morning, cooing in a voice heavy with sleep that she couldn’t wait to meet him—and why wouldn’t this baby too be another boy like her parents wanted?—set Khadifa’s teeth on edge. The new baby brother would probably be a rogue too, just like Kabir. All of Khadifa’s time would go in chasing after these brats; she wouldn’t have a minute to try on a new nail polish or a hairband at a friend’s house.

  Ammi and Abbu didn’t know it yet, but Kabir had been missing classes at their school that wasn’t really a school but a center run by an NGO where students aged two and sixteen were packed into the same classroom. He skipped the Friday afternoon sermons and prayers at the mosque, and nicked rupees from Abbu’s wallet, careful to steal only a note or two each time so as not to attract Abbu’s attention. The money Kabir made by running errands for the shopkeepers of Bhoot Bazaar wasn’t enough to buy him the number of hours he needed at the gaming parlor. He would have pinched coins from Khadifa too—she saved more than half of the money she earned by sewing—but she knew to watch out for him; tripped him before he got anywhere near her savings.

  Their parents were lenient with Kabir, maybe because he was a boy, but once they found out about his stealing, and his absences at the mosque and the school, they would pack him off to the village where their grandparents lived, and no doubt assign Khadifa the position of his minder. They thought her reliable enough to care for him on her own. Khadifa supposed she could view that as a compliment, but Ya Allah, this wasn’t the kind of praise she needed to hear.

  Ammi missed her childhood home, three hours away from the basti by bus. She spoke often of the sweetness of the fruit and the freshness of the air she had given up for this city where she couldn’t even breathe. But for Khadifa, that village was a different world, another country altogether. Evenings there were spent in the quiet-black punctuated only by the sound of buffaloes flicking their tails and mosquitoes humming, because the mullah had banned TV and radio and perhaps even talking. Her grandparents nodded their heads when the mullah said girls should be married off before they turned too old, and his too-old was thirteen or fourteen.

  Kabir would lose nothing if they moved to the village, and Khadifa would lose everything.

  It made her mad, how he took things for granted. She had friends whose older brothers played in these parlors, and from whom she had first learned about Kabir’s secret thrills; she could plead with these boys, through her friends, to give Kabir a fright. Rough him up even. He deserved it, Allah was her witness.

  She kicked up some dust, drawing the wrathful eyes of passersby, then pressed herself against the parlor wall, hoping the smog swirling around her would hide her. The curtain that covered the entrance to the parlor lifted. Kabir stumbled out, blinking, his eyes slow to adjust to the sickly light of the alley. Then he saw her and smiled sheepishly.

  “Where’s the milk?” she snapped. “Where’s the money?”

  His fingers checked his pockets as if there was still a chance that his addled brain hadn’t spent it on games. She marched him to a stall that sold milk and curd. All the way there she chide
d him for his selfishness.

  “The Hindus are after our lives, they’re calling us terrorist-pigs and child-snatchers and child-killers,” she said, “but you, you can’t think of anything other than those stupid games, can you?”

  Kabir’s heart ached when his sister said that, mostly because it was true. At first, his gaming had been for timepass, but now he craved the highs of a gunfight the same way the glue addicts he saw in choky alleys seemed to pine for Eraz-ex. He had forgotten to offer namaz that day and on several other days, the muezzin’s call unable to jolt his conscience inside the parlor, where the only thing louder than gunfire was the stream of ridiculous abuse that poured out of the mouths of gamers. A thousand dicks in your ass, brother, or you’re in this world only because of a torn condom.

  He knew he was too young to be in that room with its scratchy screens and unpliable joysticks, lit only by a tube light and aired by a ceiling fan whose blades were encased in black dust. But outside the gaming parlor he was a nobody; inside, he was good at fighting and part of something bigger than the basti and the bazaar.

  “I won’t do it again,” he said now, unsure if he meant it.

  “You won’t,” Khadifa said. “I’ll see to it, I promise you that.”

  He braced for more of her anger, but she was quiet. She looked tired. He watched her purchase a packet of milk with money she must have earned herself and felt ashamed. He didn’t know how to tell her he was sorry.

  A crowd had gathered in the alley outside. At its heart were two beggars, one in a wheelchair that had a loudspeaker attached to it, and the other his friend who ferried him around. They were telling a group of children returning from a cricket or a football game a story, bickering with each other about how it should be told. His sister, enthralled, stopped to watch them, shoving the little boy next to her so that she could get a better view.

  It was already dark, and they were late, but Kabir didn’t say that to her. The beggars talked about Junction-ki-Rani, a woman ghost that saved girls in trouble.