At home, Ma takes out Runu-Didi’s framed certificate from our precious-things bundle by the door, and unwraps the dupattas bound around it. “Remember the day Runu won this?” she asks.
I don’t remember. Ma hardly ever comes to our school, so I don’t think she has seen Didi run.
“One of her teammates dropped the baton that day,” Ma says, “but Runu was so fast, her team still won.”
Someone knocks on the door. It’s Fatima-ben. She forces Ma to accept a tiffin box filled with something. “Roti and subzi, it’s no feast,” she says. She talks about Buffalo-Baba. “My heart has been burning since I found him…in that state,” she says. “Who would do something so cruel, and why, I can’t even imagine. It’s not the same as what you’re going through, of course…”
When she leaves, Ma puts the tiffin box on the kitchen shelf.
Shanti-Chachi also brings us food, wrapped in foil. “Puris, your favorite, Jai,” she says.
I put her food on top of Fatima-ben’s tiffin box.
Ma and Shanti-Chachi go outside to discuss something grown up.
I look at Runu-Didi’s books stacked by the wall. Her clothes hang from nails. Her track-pants for yoga class lie on a footstool, waiting for Friday when the class will take place.
I can smell Runu-Didi on her clothes and her pillow that has acquired a dip in the middle from the weight of her head. If I stare at it long enough, the snatcher or the bad djinn who has caught Didi will let her go. I stare and stare. My eyes hurt, but I don’t look away.
RUNU
When the school bell rang, everyone hurried out of the classroom, but she stood behind her desk, taking her time with her textbooks, uncreasing dog-ears, and arranging the folds of her dupatta so they formed a crisp V on her chest. She could feel the tautness of the starch in her uniform, carefully soaked for hours in rice water, then rinsed and pinned to a clothesline where it dried, slowly, collecting every smell in the alley: spices, smog, goat shit, kerosene, smoke from woodfires and beedis. What even was the point of washing, her ma liked to say. By the time Runu finished her training in the evening, the uniform was damp and sticky with sweat anyway.
Ma couldn’t understand why Runu put in so much effort for a mere few hours in which her clothes looked as if they had been ironed by a press-wallah. Ma couldn’t understand anything about her. No one did.
Runu stood now in the empty classroom, its walls darkened by cobwebs and inky fingers, the blackboard cracked at the edges and whitened by years of chalk. Curls of smog crept in like unruly tendrils through windows that wouldn’t shut fully. She saw for herself a life that would be a series of misunderstandings, and hated herself—and the world—for it.
She touched her cheek where the previous night her father had slapped her. She could still hear the sound of it, his hand swinging backward and then slicing through the air toward her as she stood unable to move. That moment of humiliation had thankfully left no mark on her skin, but part of her also wanted her face to be disfigured so that even strangers could tell a man needn’t be soused up to the eyeballs like Drunkard Laloo to be a bad father.
Her resolve grew firmer. She wasn’t going home (not today, not ever). She would never wear earrings again (not today, not ever).
Textbooks in her bag, she walked outside, into the corridor where her brother was gleefully narrating the events of last night—and then he slapped Runu-Didi—to his friend Pari, who was a hundred times smarter than him and made sure he knew it too. Runu told him not to wait for her, and the donkey spat out a swear more colorful than usual.
Since he had been born, she had considered Jai with a blend of loathing and admiration; it seemed to her that he had a way of softening the imperfections of life with his daydreams and the self-confidence that the world granted boys (which, in girls, was considered a character flaw or evidence of a dismal upbringing). At least tonight she wouldn’t have to sleep next to the smells he carried on him, sometimes the butcher shop in Bhoot Bazaar, sometimes tea and cardamom, and always in winter the filth of days that accumulated on him from his refusal to wash himself with cold water.
Runu leaned against a pillar in the corridor and watched her brother leave. On the other side of the pillar stood a boy from her class. Pravin turned up wherever she went, the school ground where she trained, the ration shop from where she procured sugar and kerosene, and the basti water tap, where she and her mother left their pots to hold their positions in the queue as they talked to friends. At least he didn’t try to talk to her.
She felt separate from the world. It wasn’t a new feeling; it had been there for a while. While other girls her age smiled at their distorted reflections in glass windows, her own body had become so strange to her that she could barely glance at it as she poured a mug of cold water over herself in one of the dark washrooms at the toilet complex. Her friends considered the sprouting of breasts and the wearing of bras exotic, but to her, the arrival of periods and the accompanying cramps only signalled the end of even more freedoms. The months her mother couldn’t afford to buy pads, she had to use folded cloth from which it was impossible to scrub out the stench of blood.
These days she had to worry about bloodstains on her clothes, and the boys (even the boys who trained with Coach in the mornings) leering at her as she ran. Coach was always chasing them off, but the boys managed to scale a wall or a tree to take videos of her and the other girls with their phones, zooming in on their breasts, which were (truth be told) barely there. The videos were then shared across school, and the boys ranked the girls according to their physical attributes and scrawled their ratings (Five-star! Three-star! One-star! ) on bathroom walls for everyone to see.
Runu lifted her bag strap where it was cutting into her shoulder. She never showed that she cared about the boys’ rankings, but they preyed on her mind sometimes. Why was she three stars and not four like Jhanvi or even five like Mitali? Why was Tara a two when she looked like she could be Miss Universe? On the days they scribbled the latest rankings, the boys approached her and Tara, as if they thought the odds of the girls agreeing to an outing were the highest on the days their confidence was the lowest. Pravin’s devotion to her, strangely enough, remained unwavering in the face of such graffiti.
Runu had no dreams of falling in love, not with Pravin, not with the seniors who styled themselves after film heroes; and certainly not with Quarter the gangster, whose eyes stalked any girl in his vicinity. She didn’t want romance. All she cared about was getting onto a podium and lowering her head to receive a gold medal. (National? State? District? Something.) But right now, she was a not-good-enough daughter to her parents and, someday, she would be a not-good-enough wife to a strange man. Without a place on the school’s athletics team, this was who she was now and who she could be in the future, though future itself seemed like a mere possibility, a slit in the smog that suggested sunshine but not really.
“Isn’t it training time for girls now?” Pravin asked, having walked around the pillar to speak to her at last. He pointed his nose toward a corner of the playground where Coach was smoothing the ground with the tips of his scuffed canvas shoes. She practiced in this playground dotted with penguin bins and see-saws and slides, and she was still faster than most students who went to private schools. Her speed made her special. Without it, she would be nothing, an unperson. The thought felt to her like a hand parting her ribs. Her chest ached wildly, her head throbbed.
“You aren’t feeling well?” Pravin asked, his voice frail, as if he couldn’t believe he was talking to her.
She pressed her back against the pillar, watched the other girls in the team—Harini would never be as fast as her—nodding to Coach’s instructions. Runu drew a sharp breath. The image in front of her curved and collapsed in on itself. Pravin put his hand on her shoulder, above her bag’s strap.
“Runu, Runu.”
His voice shook off the s
leepiness that warped her vision. She shrugged off his hand, twisting her mouth. “Don’t touch me,” she said.
“You almost fainted,” he said, the pustules on his face turning redder.
“Leave me alone,” she said and sprinted to the playground.
Coach nodded at her and said, “Knew you couldn’t keep away.”
“I’m not here,” she said, and just saying that made her want to cry.
“I don’t like anybody watching my team train,” Coach said, his voice as stern as always. “If you aren’t joining them”—he swept his hand toward the other girls—“then please leave.”
Her teammates, panting, puffing, looked at her with consternation when she half-lifted her hand in a gesture that she hoped combined hello and goodbye. They were her tribe (even Harini), these meticulous girls who were also her rivals, who ran because they wanted sports scholarships to study, or hoped to secure a government job through the sports quota when they finished college. She considered them with envy. She thought of the times they had traveled for inter-school competitions and shared good secrets and bad secrets and shameful secrets and she didn’t know what she would do without them without hope without dreams.
The sky hung low, cropping the school roof. She walked out of the playground and into the alley. Empty wrappers and foil bowls rustled and winked brightly on the ground. The alley was deserted. The vendors had moved their carts to wherever their customers were. She felt alone in a way that frightened her, and not because of the bad djinns her brother worried about, or the men who took one too many sips of desi daru and attempted to pinch every passing woman’s bottom. Who was she if not an athlete?
She wondered if her parents would allow her to resume training when the snatchings ended. “Jai needs someone to teach him Maths,” she imagined her father saying. “Water has to be fetched every evening,” her mother would say. It was as if she existed solely to care for her brother, and the house. Afterward, she would similarly look after her husband, her hands smelling of cow-dung cakes. Her own dreams were inconsequential. It seemed to her that no one could see the ambition that thrummed in her; no one imagined her becoming someone.
When she reached Bhoot Bazaar, she stood for a moment to tug at her ponytail and tighten it. On the paan-spattered walls around her were advertisements for computer classes, banking and insurance exams, tuitions, and appeals for votes from politicians. She withered under the lecherous stares of the men who sold carrots and radishes and capsicums. She wished she were a boy because boys could sit on culverts and smoke beedis without anybody stopping them.
She went into a fabric shop and the shop-girl considered her suspiciously as she browsed. Runu asked the girl to pull out a blouse-piece as blue as the sea (she had seen the sea often enough on TV) from a shelf behind the counter. The shop-girl hesitated, her eyes asking what someone wearing a shoddy uniform was going to do with the shiny material. Runu made up a story about a wedding she had to attend, thinking all the while of her teammates running, and she missed the taste of dust in her mouth and the grit in her eyes and the pounding of her heart, and this picture of her running interrupted her story of a fake wedding such that the shop-girl said, “The bride ran away? But what of the wedding?”
She must have said something aloud, unaware, as if talking in her sleep. Embarrassed, Runu felt the blouse-material between her fingers and said, “This isn’t right.”
She turned on her heels and ran out of the shop and the bazaar until she reached the highway. Her shoulders and her school bag smacked against strange men and women. Then she collided with a toddler who toppled sideways to the ground and bawled, though he appeared unhurt. His mother swung her shopping bag toward Runu, missing her by a millimeter. The gust of violence propelled Runu forward. But where was she going? Who knew who cared not her.
She walked along the highway, smelling the corncobs that vendors were roasting on charcoal, watching bhelpuri-sellers balance their almost-empty baskets on their heads and fold their wicker stands, a hard day’s work done at last. The stone slabs on the pavement see-sawed with every footstep. People hissed at her for being in their way. She was directionless, and they read it in her stride. They had dinners to prepare, Purple Line trains to catch, children whose homework needed supervising. When the crowd dwindled for a moment, she saw a young man who stood proprietarily next to a steel box on wheels that said:
FILTERED WATER
FRESHEST! PUREST! CLEANEST!
2 RUPEES PER GLASS ONLY
He gaped at her as if she were mad, which all things considered, she might be. Traffic rushed by on the highway like streaks of light. Her mother must be home and already beside herself with worry. Runu could hear Jai’s voice suggesting daft ideas stolen from Police Patrol to find her. Her parents would probably listen to him. Jai wasn’t Runu. Jai wasn’t a girl. She turned her hands and looked at the calluses ringing her fingers, these timestamps of every bucket of water she had carried, every brinjal she had sliced, every shirt she had washed. There were black ribbons on her hands where flames had singed her when she cooked. These were the lifelines pitted into her palms, the ones that sealed her destiny.
The water-vendor approached her hesitantly. On the highway, a bus rolled past, the driver keeping his hand pressed on the horn, the honk like an endless scream.
“Are you lost?” the vendor asked. “What are you doing here?”
“What’s it to you?” she said, but only in her head. She turned and walked away from him, remembering this was why she had started running, and running fast; she didn’t want people asking her why she was blowing her nose or eating gol-gappas or watching the rain tumbling from the sky. No part of her life was hers, no corner of the world either. On the running track was the only place where she felt alone even if a hundred eyes were watching; there, it was just her and the sound of her shoes thudding against the earth.
“Runu?” said a voice that cracked with hesitation. Then Pravin stepped forward with his hands in his pockets. “I heard children have been going missing from this very spot,” he said. “You should go home.”
She looked around and realized, from the electric transformer safeguarded by an iron fence, that she was in the Shaitani Adda of Jai’s stories. Something had brought her here, anger or sorrow or an emotion she couldn’t name.
“Runu, chalo,” Pravin said.
“Try Clearasil,” she said, gently. “Maybe it will help.”
“You’re only a three,” he said, and it took her a minute to figure out what he was talking about.
“Three is much higher than minus hundred, which is where you are,” she said. She was surprised, and grateful, that her brain had come up with a retort.
He looked as if he might cry, but then he left.
The Shaitani Adda was now empty. The pulse in her temples quickened. Even if djinns weren’t real, the disappearances had indeed taken place. She didn’t want to be a number, a totem for the Hindu Samaj. She had dreams (still). In a year or two, she would figure out a way to escape from home, but for now she would have to make do with the stale air of their one-room house.
A man’s voice spiralled out of the blackness toward her: “What are you doing here?”
“Do you know what they say about girls who stay out at this hour?” a woman asked.
No place could be quiet for long in this basti (she should have known).
PAPA SAYS WE ARE GOING ON A PATROL—
—as soon as the smog lets a bit of morning light into our basti.
“We should have kept watch at your Shaitani Adda,” he tells me, “when the children started disappearing. It was careless of us, not to do even that much.”
I stay quiet. It’s not yet forty-eight hours since the spotty boy saw Runu-Didi; that will be tonight. We have a whole day to find Didi.
When our patrol starts, our group is just Papa, Ma, Kabir-Khadifa’
s abbu, Shanti-Chachi and me; soon others join, men who don’t have to work in the day, grandpas and grandmas, and a few women holding small children wrapped snugly in shawls and dupattas. No one calls Kabir-Khadifa’s abbu a terrorist; maybe we Hindus don’t hate Muslims anymore.
Papa knocks on every door, pulls back every curtain, asks, where is my daughter? Have you seen her? Look at this photo, look carefully, look closely. If Ma knows the woman of the house, she says, you have seen Runu at the water tap, remember?
The parents of all the other missing children join us, except for Omvir’s ma and Kabir-Khadifa’s ammi and Chandni’s ma and papa. Even Drunkard Laloo is here. Maybe there are fifty people in our patrol group now, or seventy.
We knock on more doors. A woman Ma knows from the water tap tells her, “You’re so unlucky. What a horrible thing to happen.” She looks gratefully at her baby who is safe in her hands.
Another woman says Ma should have been stricter with Didi. “All that running business, I told you it wasn’t going to end well. Daughters should never be allowed out on their own.”
Ma’s face contorts in pain, as if someone has stabbed her.
News of our patrol spreads across our basti and Bhoot Bazaar. Quarter turns up with his gang. His eyes dart around, and his legs and hands shudder as if he’s nervous. Maybe he’s worried about Runu-Didi. Maybe he knows something he can’t tell us.
If Quarter is the child-snatcher, he shouldn’t have been here. Or he’s here so that we won’t suspect him. Which one is it? Pari would know the correct answer. But Pari is writing the EVS exam right now.
“My father is going to speak to a minister in the city,” Quarter tells Papa now. “He will insist that special police be sent here.”
“Are we fools to believe such lies?” someone in the crowd says.
“Who said that?” Quarter shouts, but no one admits to asking the question.
“Does your father even live here anymore?” Papa asks Quarter.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line Page 25
