“We’ll go,” Pari tells the boy. “But can you help us please? We’re desperate to find our friends. The police have done nothing.”
Pari isn’t letting me ask about Aanchal’s old man-friend.
“The police aren’t helping us either,” the boy says. He gestures that we should shift away from the door.
“Just today a policewoman told Papa, why are you crying, your daughter has run off with her mullah-boyfriend. But my didi didn’t have a boyfriend. The day she disappeared, she went for English lessons like she does four times a week.”
“Isn’t your didi a—” I say but Pari cuts me off with, “Your didi goes to college?”
“She failed her tenth-standard exams this June,” Ajay says. “She works at a beauty parlor, and she also goes to people’s houses to do mehndi and face-bleaching and hair-dyeing and that type of thing, but really what she wants to do is join a call center. That’s why she goes for English lessons.”
I have too many questions I can’t ask. First of all, why does a brothel-lady want to work in a call center? Second of all, how can Aanchal be twenty-three if she was only in the tenth standard this year?
“The police told Bahadur’s ma that he ran away on his own. They said the same thing to Omvir’s ma-papa too,” Pari says. “It’s good for them, right? They don’t have to lift a finger. If anything happens to us, it’s because we did it ourselves. If a TV goes missing from our homes, we stole it. If we get murdered, then we killed ourselves.” Her hair rushes over her face as she furiously shakes her head while speaking.
Ajay hangs on to Pari’s every word as if they are made of sugar or gold.
“How old is your didi?” I ask.
“Sixteen. Six years older than me.”
Pari’s police report got Aanchal’s age wrong.
“People say such terrible things about Didi. She has never been to a kotha. Just because she’s beautiful—”
“This place is so backward, I’m telling you,” Pari says. “If the basti-people had their way, all the girls would stay at home and learn to cook and never go to school.”
“Exactly,” Ajay says.
I don’t know how Pari does this; wherever she goes, she makes friends with everyone she meets, like Guru. She would probably be best friends with Mental too if she met his ghost.
“We haven’t seen you around our school,” Pari tells Ajay.
“My brother and I go to Model School,” he says. “Aanchal-Didi went to a senior secondary near it.”
“Isn’t Model a private school?” Faiz asks, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand. “How does your father pay such high fees?”
“It’s not by making my sister work in a kotha,” Ajay says threateningly, his face inching closer to Faiz’s.
“That’s not what he meant,” Pari says.
“Faiz asks everyone about money because he doesn’t have any,” I say. It’s the right thing to say. Ajay drops his tough-guy look.
“A rich man’s jeep hit Ma, so he had to give her compensation,” he says. “Ma also makes T-shirts from home for an import-export business. She gets good money. That’s why we can go to private school. But I don’t like it there. It’s terrible.”
“Really?” Pari asks. She looks shocked. Private school is Pari’s idea of heaven.
“The rich kids call us names. Bhangi, kabadi-wallah. Rat-eater. Cow-killer. They tell us we stink. They tell us they’ll kill us.”
“What idiots,” Pari says. “If it gets too much, you can always come to our school.”
“Our school is terrible,” Faiz says.
“And we have Quarter,” I say. “A good school would have thrown out a goonda like him.”
“Quarter the pradhan’s son?” Ajay asks.
“Yes, him. Did your sister know Quarter?” Pari asks.
“I don’t think so.”
Pari looks at the goat that’s bravely chewing a Kurkure wrapper as if it’s only a leaf, and says, “Accha, why are the police saying your didi has a boyfriend?” She slips the question in as if she has just thought of it, but I know it’s been waiting to cartwheel off the tip of her tongue from the second Ajay said mullah-boyfriend.
“Papa kept calling Didi’s mobile, nonstop at first. Each time, he got the same message, the number you’re trying to reach is currently unavailable. But one time a man picked up the phone. He said what do you want? and then he hung up before Papa could answer. Papa told the police about it and they twisted his words and now they are saying Aanchal-Didi is with a man.”
“Why would a man pick up her phone?” Pari asks.
“Maybe he stole it,” Ajay says. “That’s what Papa thinks.”
“Did your didi lie about where she was going? The day she disappeared?” I ask.
Pari glares at me. She would have asked the same question, but nicely. I don’t care. Ajay is talking anyway.
“That day Aanchal-Didi told us she was going to watch a movie with Naina after her English class. Naina is her friend from the beauty parlor. The first time Papa called Naina, she said Aanchal-Didi was with her. But then it got really late, and Papa called Naina again and only then Naina said, I haven’t seen her today at all. Aanchal asked me to tell you she was with me. Papa went crazy after that. He has been going to hospitals to check if Didi was in an accident and is lying in casualty.”
“Is anything missing from home,” Faiz asks, “like your sister’s clothes or your father’s wallet or—”
“There’s never any money in Papa’s wallet, only Ma’s.” Ajay pushes the goat away from a soapy puddle that it’s trying to lick. “Didi didn’t take anything from home.”
“Where does she study English?” Pari asks.
“Let’s Talk in Angrezi. It’s about twenty minutes by auto from here. Buses are there too, but I don’t know which ones go to the institute.”
“Is it any good?” Pari asks as if that matters to our detectiving.
“Didi didn’t say.”
I know there’s an important question I have to ask but it’s not coming to me now.
“Did your didi know Hakim, the TV-repair man in Bhoot Bazaar?” Faiz remembers for me. “She didn’t, right?”
He probably decided to come with us so that he could ask this one question.
“Why would she know a TV-repair guy?” Ajay says.
“Of course she wouldn’t,” Pari says. “Where’s this parlor where your didi works?”
“Shine beauty parlor. Only for ladies and children.”
I have seen it from the outside. It has black-tinted glass windows and doors decorated with photos of famous actresses.
“Ajay, get back here,” says a woman with grey hair, standing at the door of their house, tapping the crutches in her hands against the floor. It must be his ma.
He runs off at once. What a baby.
“I have to go to work,” Faiz says.
“Ask Tariq-Bhai if he wants to play cricket tonight,” I shout after him.
* * *
The alley in front of Aanchal’s house curves into the highway, and right at its entrance is a dhaba and an autorickshaw stand. A group of men lean against their bikes by the dhaba where puris puff up crisp and golden in hot oil. Tied to one of the four poles that holds up the dhaba’s tin roof is a photo of Lord Ganpati in a fancy frame that has disco lights flickering blue, green and red.
We stop at the autorickshaw stand and ask the drivers how much it costs to go to Let’s Talk, even though Pari and I don’t have any money. Two hundred rupees, they say.
“You can travel hundreds of kilometers on the Purple Line for loads less than that,” I say.
“Take the Purple Line then,” an auto-driver says. “Oh wait, you can’t, can you, because it doesn’t go to Let’s Talk.”
Pari ignores his jibe and tells him about Ba
hadur and Omvir. She asks if they had seen Aanchal with the missing boys.
“Aanchal has no time for boys unless they’re at least ten years older than your friend here,” an auto-driver says, pointing at me.
“Did she take an auto last Saturday?” I ask.
“That was the day she vanished,” Pari adds.
“She doesn’t need an auto-woto. She’s a princess with her own chariot,” a driver says.
“With a bearded man as her charioteer,” another says, laughing.
“The TV-repair chacha?” I ask. “Is his beard orange and white?”
“Mullah-type fellow, but young,” the driver says.
Then they talk about Aanchal’s papa as if we aren’t standing there.
“I told him just last week to have a word with her.”
“His daughter is making her own money. He doesn’t provide for her. What does she care what he thinks?”
The other drivers make sympathetic clucking noises.
“Aanchal’s papa still drives an auto?” Pari asks.
“He hasn’t worked in years. Too ill,” a driver says, shaking his head. “Poor man. There he is.”
An auto has joined the others at the stand, and a man with straggly hair steps outside. He’s wearing a full-sleeved cream shirt with black stains around the cuffs.
“No luck today?” someone asks as Aanchal’s papa pays the auto-driver, and he says, “She isn’t in any hospital. I went to the city today to check.”
“Have you talked to Aanchal’s mullah-boyfriend?” I ask. “She could be with him.”
A blanket of quiet falls on our group, turning up the whirring noises made by the vehicles on the highway. Then Aanchal’s papa raises his hand and leaps toward me, his eyes almost bursting out of their sockets. I pull up the strap of my school bag, preparing to run. But a cough racks Aanchal’s papa and he has to stop to take deep, loud breaths. I make my escape, Pari next to me.
“You fool,” she hisses as she overtakes me.
* * *
Policemen have police stations and detectives have fancy theka-type places where they can sit and chat about their suspects. But Pari and I have to hold our meetings outside the toilet complex or at the school playground. Today, though, my house can serve as the office of my Jasoos Jai Agency, at least until Runu-Didi gets back from training. Pari and I are going to swap case notes about what Aanchal’s brother Ajay just told us. I don’t have actual notes. They are in my brain.
Pari asks if I have newspapers at home, which we can check for fruit-veg photos for her school presentation. I don’t even bother answering.
Shanti-Chachi sits on the charpai outside her house, combing her hair. I can tell she dyed it today because it looks blacker than it did in the morning, and it’s also blacker than Ma’s not-dyed hair.
“You should have got home a lot earlier,” chachi tells me.
“It’s not that late,” I say.
Inside my house, I tell Pari that we have to interview Naina, Aanchal’s beauty-parlor friend, and keep under observation our three suspects: Quarter, the TV-repair chacha, and Aanchal’s papa, a hot-tempered, shameless man who lives off his wife and daughter. Of course, djinns are still my main suspects, but I can’t discuss them with Pari.
We talk about what Ajay told us.
“This case is tough,” I say, “because we aren’t one hundred percent sure there’s a crime and a criminal. Aanchal could have run away. Bahadur and Omvir too.”
“The man who answered Aanchal’s mobile, he could be a criminal,” Pari says.
“But what’s he doing with Aanchal?”
“Don’t you remember what the Children’s Trust fellow told us?” Pari asks. “Haven’t you seen it on Police Patrol ? People use children and women for all kinds of bad things, not just cleaning toilets and begging.”
I imagine someone making me clean our toilet complex and shudder.
Runu-Didi gets back from training. Pari asks her how it went.
“Didi goes to school only so that she can train,” I say. “Not even for the midday meal. Definitely not for studying.”
“Nobody asked you,” Pari says.
Didi’s clothes are dusty and bloodied where she fell down and stones grazed her skin, but she doesn’t seem to be hurting. She says she’s going to the toilet complex for a bucket-bath. She looks for coins to pay the caretaker, under the pillows on the bed, in the pockets of Papa’s trousers hanging on nails, and on the clothesline inside our house. She doesn’t touch the Parachute tub. Then she turns to me.
“Ma gives you extra money to pay for baths and I know you don’t even wash your face,” she says.
Pari looks embarrassed for me.
The water in the toilet complex is too-cold in winter, so sometimes I don’t touch it and come out pretending to be clean. But I try to wash my face every day.
“How do you know what happens in the gents?” I ask Didi. “Do you peep inside because you want to see that spotty classmate of yours wearing only his chaddi?”
Pari pushes me and tells me to zip it as if Runu-Didi is her sister. Then she says, “Didi—Quarter and Aanchal, did they know each other?”
It’s a stupid question but it stops Didi’s eyes from burning me.
“Why do you ask?”
“Just.”
“Quarter used to sing songs whenever he saw Aanchal. He gave her Valentine’s Day cards all year round, like in June, or October.”
“They were boyfriend-girlfriend?” I ask.
Didi looks at me with contempt, then she says, “She took his cards, she took everyone’s cards. The girls at the water tap talk about it all the time. Quarter sang songs declaring his love for Aanchal, but for Quarter, that’s nothing special. If we were to go by his songs, he’s in love with every girl in the basti.”
“And Aanchal? She liked Quarter?” Pari asks.
“Who knows?” Runu-Didi says. “She had many admirers. People say she liked the attention.”
I don’t know what any of this means. I can’t ask either because right now Runu-Didi hates me for no reason.
AANCHAL
The girl sensed the skittering among the men gathered by the dhaba opposite Let’s Talk in Angrezi. Their heads swivelled as her blue sandals squeaked against the tiled steps leading out of the institute, and their gazes tethered themselves to her, moving as quickly as she did. She pulled her yellow dupatta down to cover her arms. Only that morning, her mother had warned her against dressing for the boys in the Spoken English class. No good would ever come out of wearing a sleeveless suit in the cold weather, her mother had said, the crutches in her hands tut-tutting at the same pitch as her voice. She had insisted Aanchal wear at least a dupatta.
It didn’t matter because yellow was Aanchal’s color, even more so against the black winter air that stuck to her skin like wet tar. Besides, Aanchal was hardened to the cold, to the desire that ripped through the eyes of the young men who bribed the receptionist at Let’s Talk to glimpse her timetable so that they could learn it by heart. Shirking jobs or studies, they showed up outside the institute at the exact hour her class got over, like now. The worst of them gestured at her crudely. Others whistled or surreptitiously raised their phones to click her photo. A few of them had her phone number too; the receptionist had taken offense when Aanchal suggested that at least certain details of her life be allowed to remain private. All day Aanchal’s phone beeped with messages from these strange men: hi! Hai!!! Can I make friendshp with u? how r u? u got my massge? And those were just the decent ones.
She knew what they said about her in the basti and the alleys of Bhoot Bazaar. Men and women, the young and the old, even the wives who took many lovers because their husbands couldn’t satisfy them or beat them too often, and the husbands who spent their earnings on hooch and mistresses, disassembled her character
with the viciousness of starved dogs chancing upon a scrawny bird.
Let them have at it, these people who yearned for something more real and close at hand than the dramas they watched on television. Let them spin stories from a skirt that in their eyes was too short, or the bearded boy they had seen her with. A Muslim, that too. Tauba tauba, now that’s a girl who has no shame. Remember how young she was when she started? They gossiped and returned to their homes pleased that their own children, while disappointing or ill-behaved or plain-faced, at least didn’t embody utter moral failure like she did.
She made her way from the institute, seeing in the periphery of her vision the looming shape of a man following her. She refused to acknowledge his presence, but his steady footsteps caught up with her.
Remember me, he said. Remember what we talked about.
She did remember him, his face, the touch of menace in his voice. She quickened her pace, but not before she heard him say: Don’t be shy now, we know what you’re like.
A few months ago, his fingers had drummed against the glass windows at the beauty parlor where she worked, until she stepped out and asked him what the matter was. He outlined his proposition for her as if it were no more remarkable than deciding the length of fabric required to stitch a lehenga. She considered it; how could she not? She had heard of the fast money that college girls who worked as escorts made. That money would have got her out of the basti, away from a father who was always angry with her, and a mother who was perpetually puzzled by a daughter who was nothing like the rest of the family.
Perhaps this man was back because the pause between his question and her no had been too long.
Hello, madam, I’m talking to you, he said now.
Near her, schoolgirls haggled with bangle sellers. A hawker shook garlic heads in a bamboo basket, and their loose skins swirled up into the air like white butterflies. A young man balanced three empty metal bowls on an older man’s head for a laugh. Everything around her was ordinary. Except for this man.
She hissed at him to leave her alone, or else she would call the police. The man moved closer. She waved at someone indistinct in the distance, forcing a cheerful smile onto her face before hurrying toward a huddle of construction workers around a dosa vendor. His stall stood in front of a building that changed its form each day, behind porous green sheets and scaffolding.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line Page 15