Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

by Deepa Anappara

  She approached the stall, a flush of shame spreading across her chest as if someone had spilled a hot cup of tea on her. In the basti, people said men chased her because of how she dressed or how she acted. She made it worse for herself by refusing to hold her books close to her dupatta-sheathed chest or by slouching in the manner of bashful girls who pretended they could avoid censure by shrinking closer to the ground.

  She knew she had no reason to be embarrassed. But in moments like these, it seemed to her that perhaps those in the basti were right. Why did she think she was special? The chorus in her head was sometimes the same as the chorus in the alleys of the basti.

  Sorry, excuse me, she said to the workers around the dosa stall. They parted at once, as if deferential to her clothes that were ironed and neat and still carried the scent of the perfume she had sprayed on herself that morning, and to her face, moisturized twice a day with Lakmé Absolute Skin Gloss Gel Crème. The men wore stringy clothes specked with paint and dirt and cement.

  The dosa vendor and a child who was helping him spread the batter on a hot tava looked at her questioningly. Raising an index finger, she pointed to a construction worker’s dosa plate and indicated she would like one too. The child spread the batter on the pan, expertly smoothing out lumps with the back of a ladle and crisping the dosa with dollops of oil. In spite of everything, the delicious smell of it made her mouth water. The construction workers watched her, but they did so with no sense of authority and mostly with an expression of surprise.

  Her phone rang, and she was relieved when she saw Suraj’s name flashing. She answered his call. It turned out that he had come to pick her up at Let’s Talk, though they were supposed to meet at a mall only an hour later. She told him she was just ahead. He said he would find her. She fished out forty rupees from her handbag and gave it to the child, who was folding her dosa onto a plate. She asked him to give it to someone else; she had to go, she mimed with her hands and eyes. The child looked horrified at the idea of someone turning down food they had paid for.

  When she came out of the crowd, she saw the man was still there. Then Suraj’s old bike stopped next to her and the man retreated.

  Below Suraj’s helmet visor, she could see that his eyes were red. He worked all night and must have had only three or four hours’ sleep. She sat behind him with her arms encircling his waist and her chin resting on his right shoulder. She didn’t feel cold even when Suraj started the bike and the wind whisked her hair.

  He took her to a mall and drove into its underground parking lot with its hi-fi parking charges. First they had to pass a boom-gate attendant who lived in her basti, and whose eyes blazed with recognition and judgment as they locked with hers, and a guard, also from the basti, whose job it was to inspect the underbellies of cars with a portable search mirror. The men took extra time to let them through.

  Inside the mall, they went to a McDonald’s where she bought Suraj an aloo-tikki burger though she had already spent beyond her budget for the day. They sat by huge glass windows that overlooked a bridge on which Purple Line trains drifted like white apparitions in the black smog. Suraj attempted to return his helmet-flattened hair to its original style but failed. They watched street urchins being shooed away by the security guards standing next to the metal detectors at the mall entrance. His arms pressed against hers. She could see the outline of his biceps under his tight sweater.

  Suraj’s fingers spelt out L-O-V-E on the side of her thigh. Her jeans were thick and snug, but the heat of his touch made her shift in her seat. He draped his left arm around the back of her chair. They took small bites of the burger so that the other would have more. He asked her about her lessons and suggested that she talk to him in English, but that only made her tongue-tied. He spoke to Americans all night at his call center. Her English-speaking skills, despite the classes she diligently attended, didn’t go beyond where do you work and how was your day.

  He asked her about her mother and father and brothers. She wondered what her parents would make of him, if they would worry that he was an upper-caste boy who would discard her when he tired of her, or if they would see the stillness in him that she admired most of all, the calmness in his voice that reflected a lack of expectation on his part. He wanted nothing from her, or only what she was willing to share. This was new to her. The boys and men whose messages rumbled her phone all day and night were clear about their intentions, their wants, though some of them attempted to couch these in flattering terms.

  Even in her own house, unspoken demands seeped through the walls to enter her room where she sat with TOEFL textbooks. Her mother wanted her to pay her brothers’ tuition fees and, some day in the future, marry well. Her brothers acted as if it was her responsibility, as the elder sister, to share with them the money she earned as a beautician. And her father? He lashed out at her when she didn’t listen to him, calling her too-stupid-too-slow to pass the tenth standard exams. He always apologized quickly, weeping, choking back the phlegm that his cough brought to the corners of his mouth.

  Suraj’s phone rang. Office, he mouthed to her, and took the call. The image of the burly man who had followed her earlier came into her mind. She glanced around the McDonald’s, fearful she would see him slurping a Strawberry Shake. But no, there were only office workers grabbing a bite, boys and girls her age, and indulgent mothers giving in to their child’s burger cravings, nannies standing to the side holding Tupperware boxes crammed with home-cooked food in case munna-munni changed their minds about what they wanted.

  Her mother must, at this very moment, be looking at her phone, wondering where her daughter was. Aanchal sent her a message saying she was still with Naina. I’ll be late, I’ll let myself in.

  Suraj finished his call and asked her to eat the last of the burger. He showed her on his phone a rowhouse that had been put up for sale in a gated community a few kilometers away from the malls. Within its ivory-painted gates there was everything, swimming pools, gyms, gardens and supermarkets. Her phone beeped and she switched it off.

  Suraj took her to the cinema on the top floor of the mall and paid for the tickets that were much more expensive than the burger and they watched an American film which he said would help them improve their English. The actors spoke so quickly their words sailed past her ears. There was much violence. She couldn’t decipher the reason for the frequency with which characters appeared on the screen only to be knocked down by a fist or a bullet. But Suraj was engrossed and she pretended to enjoy it too.

  After the movie they walked around the mall, finding spaces in the stairwells where they hoped CCTV cameras couldn’t see them kiss. Suraj said he had to mend a rip in an expensive sweater bought at a sale from Gap, so they left the mall and drove to the part of Bhoot Bazaar where a slew of tailors sat in a row, measuring tapes wound around their necks like scarves, their feet at the ready on the pedals of their sewing machines, their signboards promising both sewing and dry-cleaning “without smell” in a matter of hours.

  She was shivering in the cold by then. Suraj offered to lend her his jacket but she refused. While they waited for his sweater to be mended, they had masala chai and dal-chawal at a stall where everyone gawked at the two of them feeding each other without shame and maybe a bit of pride.

  When his sweater was done, and it was time for him to start his shift, Suraj drove her to the turning off the highway; from there, she could walk to her house in under a minute. He looked exhausted but also sad to leave her company. He said he would wait until she reached her home and called him. She insisted it was unnecessary. Though the dhaba was closed, the autorickshaw stand still had two or three drivers sleeping in the passenger seats of their autos, their legs sticking out, feet encased in holey socks.

  Suraj’s phone rang again. He didn’t answer it, but he took a laminated lanyard out of his pocket, hung it around his neck, and told her to call him as soon as she entered her room. In his
voice were flecks of an American twang, as if he was already in his office.

  As she walked home, a dog barked at her, but its heart was not in it. The air creaked as if made of wood. She turned around, hearing something, the dog’s loud breaths, stones being crushed underfoot. A hand reached for her in the darkness and she jumped and said Suraj, but of course, he was on the road right now, probably going faster than the speed limit. Be careful, she told him in her head.

  But then the same voice she recognized from before asked her to stop. She wondered if he had been stalking her all day.

  Leave me alone, she screamed at him. Do you want me to wake up the whole basti?

  He stood in front of her with his arms crossed against his chest, as if to tell her to try it. The shimmer of a golden sunbeam caught her eye as he moved, but then it was snapped up by the dark.

  I’M WAITING IN A TWISTY QUEUE—

  —to use the toilet, waving at Faiz who’s standing ahead of me with his brothers, when I spot Bahadur’s ma in the ladies’ line. There’s an empty space of two feet in front of her and also behind her though all the other women and girls are jostling against each other.

  She sees me and gives up her prime position to walk in my direction. Maybe she knows we went into her house without her permission and got Samosa to sniff Bahadur’s notebook.

  “You couldn’t find my son, na?” Bahadur’s ma says.

  The constantly farting man ahead of me holds in his farts so that he can hear her clearly.

  Bahadur’s ma pats my head and my skull jumps under the touch of her fingers. “You did well,” she says. “You and that little girl. Only the two of you wanted to help me.”

  “We put the photo back,” I whisper.

  “I saw.”

  “Chachi, do you want to stand here?” Runu-Didi calls out from her line, stepping back and making space for Bahadur’s ma because her earlier spot, though marked with the mug she had brought with her, has been claimed by another woman. Bahadur’s ma nods. She squeezes my shoulder and I avoid her eyes because she’s making me feel guilty, like I was the one who stole Bahadur. Then she leaves.

  “What did you do for her?” the farting-chacha asks.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  The other chachas in my queue talk about how awful it is to have to go from morgue to morgue, to check if your child is lying underneath a white bedsheet. That’s what all the parents of the missing have been doing. “There’s no greater misfortune than to outlive your child,” a chacha says.

  I feel like crying. Two monkeys on the toilet-complex roof lean forward and bare their teeth at us. The smog is less today, so I can see them clearly.

  * * *

  I scold Faiz on our way to school. “You aren’t doing any detective work,” I say.

  “When did that become my job?” Faiz asks.

  “You aren’t helping either,” I say to Pari. “Nobody is. Even Samosa, all he does is eat.”

  “Just like you,” Pari says.

  Faiz laughs with his knuckles in his mouth.

  “I asked you to keep an eye on the TV-repair chacha. Where are your case reports?” I bark at Faiz.

  “Chacha is always at his shop, from nine in the morning till nine at night. He’s not a criminal-type.”

  “You watched him yesterday?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “But you said you were going to work,” Pari says. “That’s why you didn’t come with us to talk to the auto-wallahs.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you didn’t watch him?” I ask.

  “Not yesterday.”

  “Will you watch him today?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s Friday. Don’t you have to go to the mosque?” Pari asks.

  “True, I have to pray.”

  “Our case will never be solved at this rate,” I say. I stamp my feet.

  “Cool it,” Pari says.

  “Tariq-Bhai gave me a good idea yesterday that might help you,” Faiz says.

  I don’t believe it. Faiz is trying to make me not-mad.

  “Tariq-Bhai said every phone is given a special number called an IMEI number. And what happens is that even when you put in a new SIM card, the IMEI number stays the same. The police can track that number with the help of Airtel or Idea or BSNL or Vodafone.”

  “He’s sure?” I ask, though I have seen the police track phones with IMEI numbers on TV. I just didn’t remember it until now.

  “Tariq-Bhai knows everything about mobiles,” Faiz says. “He’s smart. The only reason he’s working in an Idea shop instead of doing an engineer job is because he had to drop out of school when our abbu died.”

  “The police need to find out what the special number for Aanchal’s phone is,” Pari says. “We know the kidnapper is using the phone. He answered when Aanchal’s papa called.”

  “If it’s a kidnapper,” I say, “why hasn’t he asked for a ransom?”

  “We basti-people can’t pay ransoms, everybody knows,” Pari says. “Snatchers will make more money by selling the children they have snatched.”

  “Djinns don’t need ransoms,” Faiz says. “Or mobiles.”

  * * *

  I became a detective not even a month ago, but I feel old and wise like a baba from the Himalayas as I push open the door of Shine beauty parlor after school that day.

  The beautician tells Pari that yes, she’s Naina. She looks only a little older than Runu-Didi, but she’s fancy; her eyebrows are thin, high arches that make her look constantly surprised and her hair is soft and straight like it has been pressed with a charcoal-iron.

  “You came here for a haircut?” Naina asks Pari while also brushing a white paste onto the cheeks of her only customer, a woman reclining on a black chair.

  Pari touches her half-dome protectively. “Of course not,” she says, insulted someone even dared to suggest such a thing.

  I say, “We—”

  “Don’t talk,” Naina says, but she’s saying that to the woman on the chair. “Keep your eyes closed.”

  The customer-lady is getting bleached. Ma says Runu-Didi will need a hundred bleaches before someone will agree to marry her. Didi has ruined her color by running in the sun.

  “If you feel like it’s burning, tell me,” Naina says to the customer-lady.

  Faiz inspects the lotions and sprays on a counter, humming with happiness. My scolding has had zero effect; he’s not doing any detectiving. Pari explains to Naina that we are looking for Bahadur and Omvir.

  “I said Aanchal was with me when she wasn’t, but so what?” Naina says to Pari. “Don’t you lie to your parents? Do they know you are here now? And boy, you keep your dirty hands away from my products.”

  Faiz puts a can that he’s been sniffing back on the counter, but slowly.

  “Aanchal’s father is strict, na?” Pari says.

  “Did Aanchal have a bearded friend?” I ask. I know I have done the right thing by not saying Muslim-boyfriend.

  “How is that any of your business?” Naina asks, applying the paste on the woman’s forehead briskly.

  “We want to find out if the person who took Aanchal also took our friends,” Pari says.

  Naina puts the brush down and wipes her hands with a light-green towel stained white in parts. “Aanchal’s friend isn’t a kidnapper,” she says.

  “Does he do TV repair?” I ask.

  Naina’s strange eyebrows arch even higher. “Stop this nonsense,” she says, swatting at us with her towel. “Go now, I have to work.”

  “Who is Aanchal’s friend then?” I ask.

  Naina shakes her head. “What is this world coming to that little children think they can talk to me like this,” she says.

  I turn to Pari and raise my shoulders. Pari lowers hers. We have to leave now, I guess. But then Na
ina decides to speak: “Aanchal’s friend isn’t a Muslim. I don’t know where people get such ideas from.”

  Faiz stops picking at the lotion that has clumped around the mouth of a bottle. Naina has his full attention now.

  “Aanchal has known him for a while. He has a good job at a call center. And the night she disappeared too he was working. Call-center workers, they have to clock in and out with their ID cards, so that’s not something you can lie about.” Naina pats the customer on her shoulder though the customer is sitting still like a dead person with a dead-white face. “He’s worried about Aanchal. He calls me every day to check if she’s back.”

  “What’s his name?” Pari asks. “Is he from our basti?”

  “Aanchal doesn’t like basti-boys,” Naina says. “They trouble her all the time.”

  “Do you think Quarter took Aanchal then?” Pari asks. “The pradhan’s son? He troubles her, we heard.”

  “Why would he snatch her? He hasn’t tried anything like that until now.”

  “Is Aanchal’s call-center friend old?” I ask. “In the basti they were saying she has an old-man-boyfriend.”

  “Where do people find the time to make up so many lies?” Naina asks. “Of course her friend isn’t an old man.”

  “Naina-Naina, now it’s burning,” the customer-lady says.

  “We’ll wash your face, and everything will look better than before,” Naina says, helping the customer-lady up by holding her elbow. “Time for you to leave,” Naina tells us.

  “See, the TV-repair chacha is just that, a chacha,” Faiz says when we are outside. “He’s nobody’s boyfriend.”

  “Even if he didn’t know Aanchal, the chacha is still a suspect because of Bahadur,” Pari says.