* * *
“Arrey, why are you slow like Yakub-Chacha’s langda horse?” Pari shouts though I am only two feet behind her. My school bag knocks against my legs as I sprint, and it hurts. I wonder if I really want to solve the mystery of the missing children-brothel-lady. It would be nice to take a break to play or watch afternoon-TV, which is boring TV, but at least I don’t have to share the remote. This time of the day, Ma and Papa are working and Runu-Didi is training.
“You’re distracted so easily,” Pari says. “No focus. It’s ekdum-true, what Kirpal-Sir says about you. You get bad marks because you look at a question and then you see a fly or a pigeon or a spider and you forget you’re sitting for an exam.”
I don’t say anything because I have to save my breath for running. No detective on earth must have had to run as much as me. At least I am dressed for it. Byomkesh Bakshi fights crime wearing a white dhoti, and dhotis are the worst because they can slip off easily, leaving you in your chaddi in the middle of a bazaar. Everyone will laugh at you then, even the criminal you’re chasing. My trousers may be short and old, but I don’t have to worry they’ll bunch up around my feet if I ever get into a fist fight with bad people.
The kotha-alley is narrow, with tumbledown buildings on both sides. On the ground floors are shops that sell tarpaulin and paint and pipes and toilet seats. A muscly man flexes his biceps on a signboard, holding a PVC pipe the same way singers hold guitars on TV. Floating out of his mouth is a bubble that says STRONG!!! Another sign says HARDWARE in big letters and PAINTER, CARPENTER, PLUMBER ALSO AVAILABLE HERE in small letters. The shops are so boring, even flies haven’t bothered to visit. Above the shops are windows where brothel-ladies hang out, clapping their hands and whistling at passersby. Pari giggles. I think she’s brave for giggling but then I see her face and I realize she’s laughing because she’s nervous. It happens to some people. Runu-Didi smiles like an idiot when Papa scolds her.
Though it’s cold and smoggy, the brothel-ladies wear blouses and underskirts, no saris. Their lips are redder than blood and their necks are shiny with golden or silvery jewelry.
“Aanchal works here or what?” Pari looks up and asks a woman who’s hanging clothes to dry on washing lines strung below the open shutters. Pari has cupped her palms around her mouth so that her shout will go straight up to the woman without splashing into the ears of shopkeepers. The woman peers down, half of her dangling over the windowsill, and says, “Who’s asking?”
Pari looks at me. The woman will laugh at us if we say we are detectives.
“What business do you have here?” a shiny man wearing rings on all his fingers asks us. He’s filling a clay cup with water, from a dispenser placed on a low stool in front of a shop counter.
“We have business,” Pari says.
Someone pinches my cheeks. It’s a woman carrying a cloth bag stuffed with vegetables. Her hands are goose-bumped because she’s wearing a sleeveless shirt.
“You’re too young to be here,” she says. “Does your mother work in a kotha?”
“Basanti, don’t use up your charms this early in the day,” the man tells her. “I promise I’ll send you someone special.”
The woman smiles at us and waves goodbye. Her gold-colored chappals slap-slap against the pavement.
“You were asking about the girl who’s missing,” the man says to Pari. “I heard you. How do you know Aanchal?”
“She gave us tuitions,” Pari says.
That’s a bad lie. Why would a brothel-lady teach us Maths or EVS or Social Science?
“The Aanchal I have heard about doesn’t teach children,” the man says. He sips from his cup and gargles, but swallows the water instead of spitting it out.
“Where’s the reading center?” Pari asks him.
“You know where it is,” I say.
“There’s a reading center in a kotha here, isn’t there?” Pari says, shoving me aside.
The man extends his neck, splashes water on his closed eyes from the clay cup, then wipes the water with his knuckles.
“Two shops to the left,” he says. “Take the stairs to the first floor. I don’t know if anyone will be there now. They usually shut by late afternoon.”
“We’ll check,” Pari says. “Do you know a boy named Quarter? He’s the pradhan’s son.”
“You ask a lot of questions,” the man says.
“Have you seen him?”
“Which kotha does he work at? What number?”
“He doesn’t work in a kotha.”
“I don’t ask the men who come here for their names. I help them, and they give me money. That’s all.”
I hurry away from the man, who is thickening the air around him with his sliminess. Luckily, this time, Pari comes with me.
“Isn’t your reading center near Faiz’s mosque?” I ask. “How did it get here?”
“Must have walked,” Pari says. “Or did it take an e-rick?”
Her face is full of knowing. She looks exactly like this when she writes her answers noisily during an exam. If I as much as glance at her, she hides her answer-paper with her hands because she’s afraid I’ll copy her brilliant words.
We stop at the building where the shiny-slimy man said the reading center is. A staircase with cracked steps twists up into the musty-dark.
“The center here is for the children of brothel-ladies. The didis at my center work here on some days,” Pari says. “I have heard them talk about it.”
“This is the kind of thing an assistant should know,” I say. “Good job.”
Pari swats my arm.
We go up the stairs. The green walls on either side are crusted and brown in parts from old paan stains. Out of the corner of my left eye, I see a drawing of a boy-part that’s pointed like a gun at a woman’s mouth. Someone has tried to scribble over the boy-part to hide it, but they haven’t done a good job. I don’t laugh. Pari won’t like it.
We enter a room where the walls have wonky paintings of orange lions and green camels and blue coconut trees that look like they were made by small children, maybe the ones who are sitting on the floor right now, drawing and reading.
“Pari, what are you doing here?” a woman screeches.
“Didi, why, I came to see you,” Pari says. “They said you would be here.”
“Asha told you to come here?”
“No, I asked around and someone said you were at this center today. This place is nice, didi. Better than what we have.”
I lean against a fluffy lion-tail. Pari hasn’t pinned up the front of her hair, so it’s falling over her forehead. I can’t tell if her eyes are full of shame from lying so much and so fast.
“This,” says the didi, who wears a blue jeans-pant and a red sweater, “is no place for children.” But right away she knows she has said a silly thing because two of the little girls sitting on the floor look up at her. Their faces say: why are we here then?
“Outside,” the didi tells Pari with a sharp nod of the head. That includes me too. We obediently follow her to the landing, which is already narrow but made narrower by a shelf lined with empty plastic bottles, rope, and paint buckets with lids. Cobwebs drape the ceiling.
“Do your parents know you’re here?” the didi asks.
This is the biggest problem with being a child detective. I bet no one ever asks Byomkesh Bakshi or Sherlock-Watson about their parents.
“Accha, didi, you heard about Aanchal?” Pari asks. “You know her, don’t you?”
“I heard she’s missing.”
“Remember I told you about Bahadur and Omvir,” Pari says. “Our friends who have disappeared. Like Aanchal.”
“I’m sure Aanchal had nothing to do with your friends,” the didi says. “Maybe Aanchal mixed with the wrong crowd, maybe she was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Like you two.” She grabs
Pari by the shoulders and shakes her. “What do you think you’re doing, wandering around a place like this that your parents must have told you to avoid?”
“When did you see Aanchal last?” Pari asks as if the didi isn’t frothing at the mouth. “Did she come here the night she disappeared? She was supposed to be with a friend but she wasn’t.”
“Aanchal didn’t work in a kotha,” the didi says, and she lowers her eyes as if she wants to cry. “She visited our center—the center from where you borrow books, Pari, not this one. She asked for books she could read to improve her English. That’s the only time I met her.”
“She wasn’t a brothel-lady?” I ask and Pari pinches my arm so hard it hurts even though her nails have to get past my sweater and shirt to reach my skin.
The didi looks at me as if she wouldn’t mind pinching me either and says, “Who is this?”
“He’s an idiot,” Pari says.
“Don’t come here again, all right?” the didi says, breaking a splinter of wood sticking out of the shelf. “Go home now.”
We say okay-tata-bye and run down the stairs, not touching the sides even when our feet are about to slip. Outside, the lane is filling with men arriving in cycle-rickshaws and bikes and scooters.
“Should we find out if the TV-repair chacha came here?” I ask.
“That didi doesn’t lie,” Pari says. “If she says Aanchal didn’t work in a kotha, it means Aanchal isn’t a brothel-lady.”
“Then what is she?” I ask.
“We’ll talk to her neighbors. They’ll know.”
That’s a good idea. I wish I had thought of it.
“Chutiye, don’t even try to take my photo,” a brothel-lady shouts at a boy holding a phone in the direction of her window. A slipper lands on his head. He throws it back. Men in autos put their heads out and whistle.
Pari holds my elbow. Trying to make our way out of the crowd is like trying to swim with heavy weights tied to my legs. It’s been ages since I swam. In Nana-Nani’s village there are ponds for us to swim in, but we have to share them with buffaloes.
* * *
At home, I change out of my uniform, sit down on the floor with my Hindi textbook, and underline the words of a poem that I have to learn by heart for tomorrow’s class. The poem wants to know why the moon is sliced in half on some days and why it’s a circle on other days. The worst thing about the poem is that it doesn’t answer its own question.
Runu-Didi pushes the door wide open and steps inside. Her sweater is bundled in her hands, her hair is damp, and yellow sweat stains hoop the armpits of her shirt. She kicks me out so that she can change, then leaves to gossip with her basti-friends. Didi studies even less than I do.
“He can’t stop looking at you,” I hear one of the girls tell Didi. She must be talking about the spotty boy or Quarter whose eyes follow any girl passing by; I have seen him watch Runu-Didi too.
Ma and Papa come home, and our house starts smelling of the leftover bhindi bhaji Ma has brought with her from the hi-fi flat. I can’t wait to eat it. I sniff the plastic packet in which it came. Ma clouts me on the back of my head.
“I’ll grow up stupid if you keep hitting me there,” I say.
“Jai,” Didi calls from outside, “your friend is here.”
I run out, wondering what big lie Pari told her ma to get permission to leave her house at night. But it isn’t Pari. It’s Faiz and his elder brother Tariq-Bhai.
“You finished work early,” I tell Faiz.
“He does what he feels like,” Faiz says of the kirana shop owner. “Closes at nine one night, twelve another night.”
Now that I have a job, I know we servants have to adjust our watches according to our master’s clocks.
Tariq-Bhai grins at me. He has got dimples like Shah Rukh Khan and he’s dressed smart like a superstar too in a full-sleeved grey shirt, and black trousers held up with a thick belt.
“Theek-thaak?” he asks.
“Yes, bhai,” I say. “All fine.”
“We were having dinner when Faiz insisted he had to speak to you,” Tariq-Bhai says. “I thought I’ll come with him for a walk. It’s time you got your own mobiles, don’t you think? Then you can talk to each other whenever you want, midnight too, no worries. I’ll get you a connection at a good price, Jai. Special rate. With my employee discount, it will be cheap.”
“Bhai, no need to be a salesman here. Jai doesn’t even have five rupees. You won’t make any commission through him.”
Tariq-Bhai laughs.
“Ma won’t buy me a mobile,” I say.
“She will one day,” says Tariq-Bhai. “And that day you must remember me.”
“Can I talk now?” Faiz asks, and Tariq-Bhai says sorry, sorry, and wanders down the lane, away from us. Tariq-Bhai doesn’t treat Faiz like he’s a fool, the way Runu-Didi treats me.
“I met the TV-repair chacha today,” Faiz says.
“At the mosque?”
“Arrey, you know I was working today. But after the malik shut the kirana store, I went to the TV-repair shop, I talked to the chacha. I told him I’m in Bahadur’s class. He said just last week he found an elephant toy that Bahadur had hidden behind an old TV. Also an envelope with cash.”
“An elephant toy?”
“It was blue and orange, he said. I know, ekdum-stupid. But listen, the TV-repair chacha thinks the envelope has all the money he ever paid Bahadur. Bahadur must have hidden it there. If he had taken it home, Drunkard Laloo would have found it, and that cash would have turned to daru in two minutes. That might still happen. The chacha said he gave everything to Bahadur’s ma.”
“If Bahadur ran away like we thought, he would have taken that money with him.”
“That’s what the TV-repair chacha said. Unless Bahadur forgot about it.”
“Who forgets about money?” I ask.
“Nobody,” Faiz says. “Not even crorepatis.”
We both stand around in thinking silence for a while, a silence filled with basti noises, husband-wife arguing, TV blaring and baby wailing.
Then someone screams. My knees knock together. But it’s just Tariq-Bhai playing night-cricket with two boys down the lane. They have textbooks for bats and a small plastic ball. Faiz leaves me to take up the wicketkeeper’s position. Tariq-Bhai spins the ball. It’s a googly. The edge of the batsman’s book touches the ball, which bounces straight into Faiz’s hands.
“Out,” Faiz shouts. He and Tariq-Bhai high-five each other, their smiles so big I can see their teeth glinting even in the jittery light of the bulbs hanging outside houses.
Runu-Didi never plays cricket with me. Sometimes she challenges me to a running race, but it’s no fun playing a game that I’m hundred-percent pakka I’ll lose.
“Jai, join us,” Tariq-Bhai says.
“Jai, dinner is ready. Ma wants you inside,” Runu-Didi says.
Didi is the ruiner of my happiness.
THE BASTI IS LOSING ITS SHAPE—
—in the smog when we get out of school the next day. Shadows sprawl across the roofs of houses where punctured cycle tires, bricks and broken pipes weigh down tarpaulin sheets. I should be lying under a blanket on Ma-Papa’s bed, watching TV. Instead I’m doing detective work in the cold. I want to give up, but I can’t say that to Pari. She’s treating this mystery the same way she treats an impossible-to-solve Maths problem, making a million notes and wasting the ink of a thousand pens. I can’t let her beat me.
We walk toward Aanchal’s house. Faiz found out where she lives from shopkeepers.
“When will we work on our presentations?” Pari grumbles. Kirpal-Sir has asked us to collect pictures of winter vegetables and fruit for homework, but no one’s going to do it because we don’t have newspapers or magazines in our houses.
“If you want to study, go home and study,” Faiz say
s. “But you won’t do that, will you? You like playing detective.”
“We aren’t playing,” Pari says. “This is serious. Lives are in danger.”
“You can’t save people from bad djinns,” Faiz says. “Only exorcists can do that.”
“We can be exorcists too,” I say.
Faiz throws punches at me with his eyes. “You have to recite verses from the Quran to fight djinns. If even one thing goes wrong, the djinn will kill you. That’s why only trained people do it.”
“Baba Bengali might have training,” I say.
“Hindu babas don’t know the Quran or anything about djinns.”
Pari grits her teeth. Our djinn-talk annoys her.
The houses in the alley where Aanchal lives are pucca houses made of brick. Some are ground plus one. They must have their own toilets at the back too.
We stop next to a woman sitting on a brick, washing vessels, and ask her where Aanchal’s house is. The woman points to it with a soapy finger. A bearded goat bleats at us from the doorstep.
Pari picks up wilted leaves from the ground and feeds the goat. The bell around the goat’s neck rings each time it chews, which is too many times. A boy who must be our age, wearing a red-and-white checked shirt that’s thick like a sweater, comes to the door and pushes the goat outside with his knees. His face has the roundness of someone who eats too much.
“What do you want?” he asks. A truck horn blares loudly on the highway.
“Aanchal,” Pari says.
“She isn’t here. Who are you?”
“We were wondering if Aanchal knew our friends, Bahadur and Omvir. They have also disappeared,” Pari says.
“We heard about them after they went missing.”
“Ajay, who are you talking to?” a woman barks from deep inside the house.
“Nobody,” the boy says. “Some children asking about Aanchal-Didi.”
“Send them away,” the woman shouts. It must be Aanchal’s ma.
Faiz tut-tuts under his breath.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line Page 14