“You’re dumping rubbish on my daughter’s grave?” Aanchal’s papa asks the woman.
“What do you want us to do?” the woman says. “You think we should keep this”—she swings her empty bucket toward the trash—“inside our house?”
“The CBI will arrest you when they come,” Aanchal’s papa says. “You’re ruining evidence.”
“You have lost your daughter, I understand, but all this screaming at us, that’s not going to bring her back.”
Pari and I see Bottle-Badshah talking to the scavenger children. We walk over to them, ask them how they are. The helicopter-girl who told us about Varun hiding the blue box in the trash, on the day he was caught, is with Bottle-Badshah, and today she’s holding a stick-thin, pink doll that has golden hair and zero clothes.
Bottle-Badshah squeezes my shoulder. The parrot on his forearm gives me the side-eye. “Sometimes,” he says, “when I see the news on TV, I can’t even watch it, the kind of shocking, filthy things they say those monsters did to our children.”
“We should be getting home,” Pari cuts him short.
“Yes, of course,” Bottle-Badshah says. Helicopter-Girl holds out her doll toward me, because she feels sorry for me maybe.
“He doesn’t play with dolls,” Pari says.
“It must be hard for you to understand what is happening,” Bottle-Badshah tells me. “But whenever you think of your sister, my wish for you is that you won’t think of the horrors she may have experienced in that flat. I’ll pray that you’ll remember her at her very best, doing what she enjoyed doing, even if it was just watching funny programs on TV.”
“Runu-Didi didn’t watch a lot of TV,” I say.
“Believe me,” the badshah says, “today or tomorrow, every one of us will lose someone close to us, someone we love. The lucky ones are those who can grow old pretending they have some control over their lives, but even they will realize at some point that everything is uncertain, bound to disappear forever. We are just specks of dust in this world, glimmering for a moment in the sunlight, and then disappearing into nothing. You have to learn to make your peace with that.”
“I’ll try,” I say even though I have no idea what he means.
* * *
I follow Pari to her house. Her neighbor-chachis ask her about her new school. It’s a private school across the river, near her dada-dadi’s house, where she has got admission with a full scholarship, which means she doesn’t have to pay fees. The private-school people felt bad for her after seeing our basti in the news. Pari tells the chachis that her ma and papa have to find jobs near the school before they can move.
Pasted on the water barrel of Pari’s neighbor’s house is a leaflet with the words Release Our Children Now. It’s the old leaflet that the Hindu Samaj distributed after Chandni went missing. Someone has drawn a mustache on Bahadur’s photo. The police dredged up his shoes from a drain near a mall. They told Bahadur’s ma that they have also recovered his bones, but they need to do more DNA-testing to be hundred percent certain. The police haven’t found anything of Runu-Didi’s other than the scrunchie.
“Why don’t you stay?” Pari asks me when I say I’m leaving. “Ma is going to make Maggi for dinner tonight.”
“My ma won’t like it if I’m not home by then.”
I keep my head down as I fast-walk toward somewhere, not home, because I don’t want to go home just yet. But no matter how quickly I walk, chachas and chachis pounce on me and ask me the questions they can’t ask Ma and Papa. I should start running everywhere like Runu-Didi. Then these people won’t be able to stop me.
“Heard anything about your sister?” a man blocking my way asks.
“Your sister who was snatched,” a woman standing next to him explains as if I don’t know.
“Have the police called your parents about her?” asks a girl with black dirt folded into the creases of her neck.
“They say they don’t know how many children are missing,” the woman tells the man, “seven, twenty, thirty, maybe a hundred, a thousand even.”
“There aren’t that many children in our basti,” the man says.
“Arrey, they were kidnapping street children and those ragpicker children too.”
“The police are still doing DNA tests,” I say.
“How long will this testing take?” the girl asks.
“Months,” I say. I have no idea. Maybe when the CBI come, they’ll speed everything up. Maybe they won’t. I think Pari is right, and we’ll never find out what the monsters at Golden Gate did to Runu-Didi.
More jabbering chachas and chachis appear out of nowhere, trying to trip me with questions. I slip out of the crowd and run toward Bahadur’s house. I like to spy on other families that are sad like ours because I want to find out if they are doing anything different to stop ghosts from clutching their bones.
Shanti-Chachi keeps telling me that I have to man up now and take care of Ma and Papa. I am worried about Ma. Every night as we eat, she stares at my face, maybe hoping to see Runu-Didi in me, and then she turns away disappointed, tears trickling down her cheeks. Ma has also become so thin and weak I’m afraid she’ll fall down and die one of these days, and it will just be me and Papa, and Papa doesn’t even talk much anymore. He comes home smelling of hooch and staggers into bed. He’s becoming Drunkard Laloo 2.
Bahadur’s house is lying locked but there are TV people in front of it, interviewing Quarter. He has traded his black clothes for a saffron shirt and khaki trousers.
“We were the only party to step in when the local police refused to help,” he says. “We are an integral part of this community.”
I wonder if the pradhan and Quarter knew the truth about Varun; if the boss-lady gave the pradhan a cut for every child from the basti who vanished. I heard Shanti-Chachi’s husband say that to a man in front of him at the toilet queue.
I think of throwing stones at Quarter, then I decide I don’t want to make him angry. What if he kidnaps me? What will happen to Ma and Papa then? I walk toward Bhoot Bazaar instead. I’ll say hello to Samosa and then I’ll go home for sure.
* * *
Our house is full of bad dreams. Ma has them and I have them too. In my dreams Runu-Didi flies out of a balcony in the Golden Gate building, spreading out her giant wings. She’s Jatayu from ancient times but she’s also wounded and bleeding. Ma doesn’t tell me what her dreams are. From the way she gets up screaming, I can tell they are dreadful.
I feel a shadow, cold and lonely, passing over me. I look up, afraid it’s the bird, afraid it’s Didi. But the sky is empty. Something brushes against my legs. It’s Samosa. I kneel down to scratch his ears. His pink tongue flops out as if he’s smiling.
I search my pockets for food but they are empty. Samosa nuzzles up against my legs. He doesn’t care that I have nothing to give him. He’s my real friend. Faiz has left me and Pari is leaving me but Samosa will never leave me.
I go to Duttaram’s. He doesn’t talk to me because he’s busy.
I tell Samosa to come with me and we walk toward my house. I’m going to ask Ma and Papa if Samosa can live with us because, first of all, Samosa is clever; second of all, Samosa is like a policeman but a good one; and third of all, Samosa won’t let anyone snatch me. These are excellent reasons.
“Race you home,” I tell Samosa.
He watches me, wagging his tail.
“We’re going to see who runs the fastest. Theek-thaak?” I ask him. “On your marks, get set, GO!” Then I run as fast as I can. My heart feels like it’s exploding, my tongue hangs out like Samosa’s, but I only stop when I reach my doorstep. Then I breathe in and out with my hands on my knees.
I turn around to see where Samosa is. He’s trotting toward me, panting and looking puzzled. “I won I won I won,” I shout, scaring the chickens and goats near us. Samosa licks my hands. He’s not a sore lose
r.
“I’m the fastest runner in the world,” I say.
“What a joke,” I hear Runu-Didi say.
“Shut up,” I say and then I remember that though her voice is still in my head, she isn’t around. I sit down on our doorstep. Samosa puts his head on my lap. His fur is soft and warm. The TV blares in Shanti-Chachi’s house. “Should slums be demolished? Have your say. Send us your thoughts on…”
I gaze up at the sky. Today the smog is a curtain thin enough for me to spot the twinkle of a star behind it. I can’t even remember when I last saw a star.
“Look,” I say to Samosa. But it’s already gone. Maybe it was never there. Maybe it was only a satellite or an airplane. Maybe it was Runu-Didi telling me I shouldn’t worry because gods are real and are taking good care of her. She’s watching over me the way Mental watches over his boys, I just know it.
Then I see the star again. I point it out to Samosa. I tell him it’s a secret signal, from Runu-Didi to me. It’s so powerful, it can fire past the thickets of clouds and smog and even the walls that Ma’s gods have put up to separate one world from the next.
For
Divya Anappara
and
Param
AFTERWORD
I worked as a reporter in India from 1997 to 2008 and, for many of these years, I wrote news stories and features on the subject of education. Each day I talked to school and college principals, teachers, government officials, and, most important, students. Growing up in a home where finances were tight, I had believed that I had limited opportunities to pursue what I wanted to do, but as a journalist I saw that even those limited avenues were closed to young people from the most impoverished of backgrounds. I interviewed children who worked as scavengers or begged at traffic junctions, who struggled to study at home because of their difficult domestic circumstances, and who had to drop out of school after being displaced by religious violence. But most of them didn’t present themselves to me as victims; they were cheeky and funny and often impatient in the face of my questions. We as a society, and the governments we elected, had abandoned them, as my articles inevitably pointed out, but writing under the constraints of word counts and deadlines, I failed to communicate their humor, sarcasm, and energy.
Around the same time, I started learning about the widespread disappearances of children from poor families. As many as 180 children are said to go missing in India every day. These disappearances typically make the news only when a kidnapper is nabbed, or if there are graphic details surrounding the crime. Perhaps because of all the time I had spent interviewing children about their aspirations, my interest was naturally in their stories, but these were nowhere to be found. The media focused mostly on the perpetrators. Before I could investigate this further, a change in my circumstances resulted in my leaving India, the country where I was born and grew up.
The article that I hadn’t been able to write, about the missing children and their families, stayed with me. In London, I enrolled in a creative writing course and, for my first submission, tried to write about them and failed. I worried about the ethical questions having to do with the fictional representation of a marginalized, vulnerable group of people. I didn’t want to minimize the inequalities I had witnessed around me, but a story about a horrific tragedy risked becoming part of a stereotypical narrative about poverty and India that equated people with their problems.
In winter 2016, I finally went back to the story that I had set aside years earlier. In part this was because, with Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of the right wing in India and other countries, there was the sense that the world was closing in on those perceived to be “outsiders” or “minorities,” groups to which I now belonged as an immigrant in Britain. I thought of the children I used to interview, their determination to survive in a society that often willfully neglected them, and I realized that the story had to be told from their perspective. Nine-year-old Jai became my way into this novel. In Jai and his friends, I tried to capture the traits that my news articles had ignored: the children’s resilience, cheerfulness, and swagger.
My own life changed unexpectedly just as I started working on this novel. An uncle I had looked up to all my life, the kindest of people, a doctor who treated patients for free if they didn’t have money, died. My only sibling, six years younger than I, was diagnosed with a Stage IV cancer. Suddenly the questions that Jai and his friends were confronting, even if obliquely, became my own and those of my family. How does one live with uncertainty each day? How do you find hope when you are told there is none? And what about my nephew, only eight years old at the time? How does one explain mortality to a child? I found I couldn’t discuss these questions with others, not even my closest friends; instead, I turned to the characters in this book, seeking answers in their actions.
While personal experiences informed this book as much as professional, I should underscore that this novel is not my story, and it was never meant to be. But, in writing it, I was conscious of the narratives we craft to make sense of sadness and chaos, as Jai and others do in this book, and all the ways in which such stories may comfort or even fail us. This awareness erased on the page the many years between me and my characters, but ultimately Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is about the children, and them alone. I wrote this novel to challenge the notion that they could be reduced to statistics. I wrote this so that we are reminded of the faces behind the numbers.
A final comment. As I write this note, in September 2019, India is seeing a disturbing phenomenon wherein rumors and WhatsApp forwards about child-snatchers have caused mobs to lynch those accused, many of them innocent people from marginalized, poor communities, those perceived to be “outsiders” to the area, or those with disabilities. It comes in the wake of similar mob fury against minorities, particularly Muslims, and a growing atmosphere of distrust in the country. The contradiction inherent in this situation can’t be ignored: Children continue to disappear in India daily, child trafficking remains a real problem that doesn’t get much attention, and yet there are people quick to act as vigilantes on the basis of rumors and false news, perhaps driven by fears of the “other” stoked by those in power.
Hope comes in the form of charities that work with children from impoverished communities. Those interested in learning more about them can look up the following organizations: Pratham (prathamusa.org), Childline (childlineindia.org.in), Salaam Baalak Trust (salaambaalaktrust.com), HAQ: Centre for Child Rights (haqcrc.org), International Justice Mission (ijm.org/india), Goranbose Gram Bikash Kendra (ggbk.in) and MV Foundation (mvfindia.in).
GLOSSARY
ABBU
father
ACCHA
“I see”; “okay”; “yes”
ADDA
a place where people gather for conversation
AKHARA
a place where wrestling is taught and practiced
AMMI
mother
ARREY
a catch-all term used to express a range of emotions such as surprise, interest, exasperation, or excitement; can also be used to mean “hey”
BABA
holy; can also be a term of endearment
BADSHAH
monarch, king
BAJI
elder sister
BAKWAS
nonsense
BASTI
settlement
BEEDI
Indian cigarettes
BEN
sister; also used as a term of respect for a woman; can indicate closeness
BETA
son
BHAI
brother; also used to address a man
BHAIYYA
brother
BHOOT
ghost
CHAAT
sav
ory snacks
CHACHA
uncle; used here as a term of respect
CHACHI
aunt; used here as a term of respect
CHADDI
underwear
CHALO
“let’s go”
CHARPAI
a bed made with rope strung across a wooden frame
CHOKRA
boy
CHOR
robber; chor-police is a game children play
CHOWKI
a police station; in this context, a smaller police station that operates under a bigger one
CHUTTI
holiday, leave
DADA-DADI
paternal grandfather–paternal grandmother
DARU
alcohol
DHABA
modest restaurant that serve food, usually on the roadside
DIDI
elder sister
DOST
friend
EKDUM
completely
GHERAO
a protest in which people surround a person or a building; similar to picketing
GOONDA
thug
GULAB-JAMUN
a deep-fried sweet made with evaporated milk or milk powder, served in a sugary rosewater and/or cardamom-scented syrup
HAAN
yes
HAFTA
protection money (literally, “week”; protection money was typically paid weekly)
HATTA-KATTA
robust, strong, sturdy
JANTAR MANTAR JADU MANTAR
phrase used by magicians in India, similar to “abracadabra”
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line Page 30
