“Where do you have the money to buy gulab-jamuns? Just sit here quietly.”
I’m tired of people telling me what I can and can’t do. “Faiz got me a job in Bhoot Bazaar,” I blurt out.
“What?”
“I have to return the money Didi gave me to take the Purple Line.”
“She wants it back?”
“She hasn’t asked but I’m going to give it back. It will be a surprise. She doesn’t know I work. You can’t tell anyone.”
“You’re lying too much. About everything.”
“Come see for yourself.”
Pari waits until her neighbor-chachi’s back is turned, and then we sprint toward Bhoot Bazaar. It’s crowded like always. The biggest crowd is outside a shop that sells little Santas and teddy bears wearing round caps with ruffles around the edges.
Duttaram takes one look at me and says, “Where were you? Half-pay today. That’s all you’re going to get.”
“It’s wrong to hire children,” Pari whispers to me.
“Just go,” I say. She rolls her eyes at Samosa, who is licking his boy-parts under the samosa cart. He’s doing that to embarrass me in front of Pari.
“Get back before your didi does,” Pari says. She’s a rule-stickler but she understands why rules have to be broken too.
Duttaram asks me to buy cinnamon from a stall nearby because his stock has run out. “This winter-cold is making everyone constipated,” he says, “so they keep drinking tea for relief.”
“Isabgol is better,” I say.
“Don’t go around telling people that,” Duttaram warns.
I fetch him a bundle of cinnamon sticks. I listen to the basti-news that’s always floating around the tea shop. Today’s news is spiky with fear. People say they are worried about leaving their children alone. They blame the police who asked Chandni’s parents for a bribe instead of filing a complaint. Some people want to organize a protest against the police, others say that can only end with machines crunching our houses. One man says the pradhan and his Hindu Samaj party are planning a demonstration. Only Hindu children are being taken; therefore, the snatchings must be the work of Muslims. Another man says Aanchal’s boyfriend is a Hindu; that breaking news must have come from Naina, or her eavesdropping, bleach-whitened customer. It doesn’t stop people from blaming Muslims though.
Most of Duttaram’s customers are Hindus. They say Muslims have too many children and treat women badly. They say ultimately you can’t trust people who write from the right to the left like Muslims do in their demon language.
No one says Chandni ran away; she’s too small to go anywhere by herself. This means there’s a real snatcher in our basti, maybe more than one, and we don’t even have a Mental to save us.
* * *
Sometime late in the afternoon, Duttaram hands me a kettle heavy with tea, a thick cloth wrapped around its handle, and glasses stacked on top of each other. He tells me to take it to the customers at a jewelry shop in the next alley; he gets many calls on his mobile with such requests for chai deliveries. I’m walking, thinking about how much better I have got at carrying tea without splashing, when I clap eyes on Runu-Didi and she sees me too before I can hide. Didi is taking a shortcut home through the bazaar. Just my luck.
She’s so surprised she can’t speak. Her eyes turn round like an owl’s, her mouth opens and closes but no words come out, and even the sweat trickling down her face because she runs everywhere instead of walking seems to freeze for a moment. She steps closer, lifts my chin and inspects my face as if to confirm it’s me, Jai. Then she looks at the kettle and the glasses in my hands.
“I work now, only on Sundays,” I tell Didi quickly. “I’ll give you half of what I make. You can buy the shoes you need for running and get rid of these.” I point at her scuffed, black-and-white men’s sports shoes that Ma bought for her, second-hand, from a hi-fi building watchman.
“What—”
“Can’t talk. People are waiting for this chai.”
“Jai, tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m working,” I say, walking ahead.
“But why are you working? You don’t even do anything at home.”
“Pay me and I’ll get up early and collect water for you.”
“What do you need money for?”
I don’t say anything because we are at the jewelry shop now. I distribute the tea glasses to the burqa-clad women sitting on floor cushions, pointing at the necklaces and bangles they want to try out. The owner must be hoping to make a big sale to these customers if he’s paying for their tea.
“Five-star hotels don’t serve tea of this quality,” he tells the women.
Runu-Didi and I wait outside for them to finish.
“How long has this been going on?” Didi asks.
“Are you going to tell Ma-Papa about me?”
“Only if you tell them I’m still training.”
I try to whistle so I’ll sound cool, but only air comes out.
“It’s dangerous to stay out after dark,” Didi says. “Even an idiot like you knows that, right?”
“Duttaram sees a film every Sunday evening, so he shuts his tea shop by five latest. He watches even flop films. Last week he saw—”
“Just don’t get snatched, okay?” Runu-Didi gives me a strange pat on the head. I pretend a ghost has touched me and shake all over. She mock-punches me in the face. Then she takes off running again, bumping into people. They curse her and ask if she thinks she’s a hi-fi lady with an airplane to catch.
* * *
The next morning, I don’t get a chance to tell Pari and Faiz about what I heard at the tea stall because Pari scolds us nonstop for keeping my job a secret from her.
“You two have formed a boys’ club, haan?” she asks. “Fine, I don’t need you. I’m going to be best friends with Tanvi from now on.”
“Tanvi only cares about her watermelon backpack,” Faiz says.
Pari gets angrier and walks ahead of us. I whisper to Faiz that she doesn’t know I stole Ma’s money.
“I guessed that,” he says.
Pari doesn’t talk to us at assembly, or after. Kirpal-Sir starts his Social Studies lesson, which is on cricket, but we know more about the game than he does. Then a strange sound rolls into the classroom.
“Bulldozers,” somebody shouts.
“No,” I shout back. I don’t know what the sound is, but I don’t want it to be bulldozers.
“Silence,” Kirpal-Sir squeaks.
The sound becomes a roar. We dash out of the door and into the corridor. Kirpal-Sir doesn’t try to stop anybody. Outside the school walls, the roars become angry words: Give us our children back or else. A voice we recognize shouts through a megaphone: Don’t forget, India belongs to us, India belongs to Hindus. It’s Quarter.
“They were talking about this demonstration at the tea shop,” I tell Pari and Faiz. “But I didn’t know it was today.”
“Muslims took Bahadur and Omvir, and the other children also,” Gaurav announces in the corridor. “The Hindu Samaj will stop them.”
“Shouldn’t they be marching against the police?” Faiz asks.
“They said it’s against the police too,” I say.
Kirpal-Sir chats with other teachers in the corridor. When the demonstration sounds drift away, he asks us to return to the classroom. We take ages to sit. One boy even blows bubbles, dipping a plastic ring into a small bottle of soapy liquid.
“Don’t try to sneak outside during the break,” sir tells us when we’re done chasing the bubbles. “We’ll be lucky if this doesn’t turn into a riot.”
“There’ll be a riot?” Gaurav asks, and he can’t keep the happiness out of his face.
“You don’t start one now,” Kirpal-Sir says.
“Riot, riot, riot,” Gaurav chants, lookin
g at Faiz. The red tikka on his forehead seems to be flaming.
“He can’t do anything to you,” I tell Faiz.
“Let him try,” Faiz says.
The other Muslim students in our class squirm in their seats as if they have done something wrong.
“These people don’t mean what they say,” Pari tells Faiz. She doesn’t look angry with us anymore.
Faiz flattens the pages of his notebook. His hands are trembling.
CHANDNI
Gods were good, demons were bad. Spinach was good, noodles were bad. Yesterday was good like gods and spinach, but today was bad like demons and noodles. Chandni could tell because all evening Nisha-Didi had stomped around the house instead of walking, and Didi had chopped the head of a cauliflower as if she was cutting down a tree, and she had rocked Baby too hard while putting him to sleep. Just now when Chandni tried to sit on her lap as she did every night, Nisha-Didi pushed her off and said, “Go do something else.”
Chandni didn’t know what something else was. Every night, after the too-noisy, too-small baby fell asleep, Didi asked their brothers to do their homework, switched on the TV with the sound sponge-soft, and watched a serial where a woman slept in a hospital room for weeks and didn’t wake up even when her husband came to see her. First he went to see her every day and then he visited her hardly ever.
Nisha-Didi wouldn’t put on Chhota Bheem or Tom and Jerry, even if Chandni begged please-na-please-na-please-na. But Didi tickled Chandni and pretended to eat Chandni’s hands, whispering tasty-so-tasty until tears streamed down Chandni’s cheeks from holding in the laughter to keep Baby from waking up and crying. Baby was always crying, sometimes even when he was drinking milk from under Ma’s blouse, and then the milk got into his nose and he coughed and cried even more. Ma said Chandni had done that too when she was a baby, but Chandni liked grown-up things now, Kurkure and Kit Kat and aloo-tikki, and even the sight of Ma’s milk wetting her blouse was ewww.
Now their house was quiet and all Chandni could hear was the scribble-scribble sound of her brothers’ pencils on paper, and the low voices on the TV. Didi sat with the remote in one hand, turning the volume down when the men and women shouted on TV, and turning it up when they whispered. Then Baby started to wail. Chandni stuck her fingers in her ears. Baby’s poo smell got into her nose. Baby’s poo was stinky like old fish.
Didi took Baby outside to wash his dirty bum. Her brothers stopped studying and swiped the remote and changed the channels until cricket filled the TV screen. They pulled Chandni’s hair and laughed when tears filled her eyes. She got up and went to the doorstep and watched Nisha-Didi hush Baby. Baby’s mouth clung to Didi’s sweater and made a circle of wet.
Chandni held out her hands, asking to hold Baby. Didi put Baby in her arms, but Baby kicked and tried to break the pretty pink plastic necklace that Chandni was wearing. Didi took him back and said shush-shush, shush-shush. Didi tried to put him down on the bed but he wanted Didi to hold him. He was cranky, so Didi was cranky too.
Her brothers talked about cricket. They spoke at the same time, two voices, same words. They were born a year apart but Ma said they behaved like twins. Didi snapped at them to be quiet. Her brothers told Didi to stop behaving like their boss-lady. Baby bawled. “Can we mute his sound the way we mute the TV?” the brothers asked. Didi muttered words Chandni couldn’t understand. “Don’t swear,” the brothers said, pressing a button on the remote until the TV was louder than Baby.
“All of you will drive me mad,” Didi shouted, marching around the house, swinging Baby as if she wanted to chuck him out into the alley. Didi’s feet clanged against a pot of yesterday’s dal that she had reheated after adding water. The pot shook. The dal spilled onto the ground.
Chandni didn’t like it when Didi was angry. It happened almost never. Every day, Didi washed their clothes, made their lunches and dinners, and threw stones at the dogs that came to take big bites out of their bums when they pulled down their pants or rolled up their skirts to pee or poo at the rubbish ground. Didi did all this without scowling or shouting.
Chandni knew a way to make tonight better. She stood on a footstool and reached behind a framed photo of Durga-Mata hanging by the door and found the rolled-up twenty-rupee note that Nana had given her for her birthday when he visited them. He had told her to keep the money a secret. Ma and Papa would only take it from her and use it for something good like buying vegetables. Nana wanted Chandni to spend it on something not-so-good like buddi ka baal. That name alone put a bubble of laughter in her tummy. A cloud of pink sugar spun around a stick looked nothing like old-lady hair.
Outside it was dark. Chandni slipped out and walked quickly. No one called her back. She hopped to the bazaar, where some shops were shut and some weren’t. She wondered what time it was. No one had taught her to read a clock.
The candyfloss man was gone, and she felt a bit sad but then she saw a shop that sold gujiyas and gulab-jamuns was still open. She gave the sweets-shop man her twenty-rupee note and pointed at the gulab-jamuns drowning in a tray of sugary syrup, inside a glass case. The man scooped the gulab-jamuns into a plastic bag and leaned over the counter to drop it into her hands. He didn’t give her back any of her money. But that was all right. The gulab-jamuns were going to do jantar mantar jadu mantar to Didi’s bad mood. Just a small bite of the sweet and happiness would coat Didi’s tongue and polish her eyes.
The lane was almost empty. The night made rattle-tattle sounds and clitter-clatter sounds and clip-clop sounds and stomping sounds. Some sounds could have been left over from the day, when too many people talked inside shops and all the voices didn’t get a chance to be heard. Now they were coming out of cobwebbed ceilings and from behind doors and from under humming fridges and were as loud as they could be.
Chandni didn’t like the sounds, which wriggled into her ears like worms and were also scratchy like blankets.
Then she had a good idea. She cluck-clucked like a hen and bow-wowed like a dog and meow-meowed like a cat so that the sounds chasing after her in the dark wouldn’t know if she was a hen or a girl or a dog or a cat. This way the sounds would get confused and leave her alone. She skipped and jumped, her cat-tail puffing up, her chicken-beak pecking the ground, her dog-tongue licking the sticky syrup from the plastic bag splish-splashing onto her paws.
She was almost home.
THE HINDU SAMAJ DEMONSTRATION IS LONG—
—gone but there are signs of it everywhere. Walking home from school, our shoes step on leaflets that hold the faces of the missing. I pick one up. The photo of Bahadur on the leaflet is the same as the one his ma had given us, but this poster is black and white, so you can’t tell his shirt is red. Omvir’s hair is neatly combed away from his forehead, and he’s grinning into the camera. Aanchal is wearing a salwar-kameez with a dupatta over her head; she looks not at all like a brothel-lady. Chandni’s face is small and grainy. Under the photos are the words: Release Our Children Now.
“Did they see a Muslim snatch a child that they’re going around doing”—Pari’s fingers jab the leaflet I’m holding—“this nonsense?”
“Byomkesh Bakshi would have laughed at them,” I say.
“We should go to Chandni’s house,” Pari says. “Maybe we’ll see someone or something suspicious. We can’t let the Samaj keep blaming good people for evil things.”
She’s trying to make Faiz feel better because his mood is off.
Pari asks a woman sitting on the roadside, surrounded by sacks full of spices, if she knows where Chandni’s house is. The spice vendor points us to the left or the right, I’m not sure exactly, but Pari seems to have understood.
We go past the TV-repair chacha’s shop, which is shut, just like every Muslim’s shop in Bhoot Bazaar. If I were a Muslim, I wouldn’t keep my shop open either while Quarter and his gang shouted threats outside.
“Faiz, why don’t you go h
ome?” Pari says, glancing at the padlocked shutters. “That might be safer.”
“Will you just shut up?” Faiz says.
The alley ends in a clearing the size of three of our houses, bordered by piles of rubbish on one side that have been there for so long, everything has hardened like rocks. Goats try to find things to eat inside torn, ancient plastic bags. On the other side of the clearing is an electric transformer, a big, crinkled metal box that belongs to the electricity board, ringed by a tall iron fence. A severed Goddess Saraswati head with a jagged crack running across her shocked face lies in the weeds that thrive around the transformer. It’s a terrible omen.
A white sign attached to the fence has red letters that say DANGER ELECTRICITY, with a skull below it; the skull has a huge mouth with crooked teeth. It’s smiling, but it’s an evil smile.
Strings of jasmine and marigold are tied to the fence railings. Maybe this place is a temple for the broken goddess. Ma drags me to the temples around Bhoot Bazaar during Diwali or Janmashtami but she has never brought me here. Our basti is quite big, and people say it has over 200 houses, so even Ma with her too-strong mobile-phone network doesn’t know everyone and everything.
Two boys run into the clearing, screaming at each other. One hits the other with a stick, and the welts on the second boy’s skin change color from white to red in seconds.
“You know where Chandni’s house is?” Pari asks them. “Chandni, the missing girl?”
The boy with the stick points it in the direction of the houses that lie beyond the clearing. “Keep straight,” he says. Then he goes back to hitting his friend.
We walk to the edge of the clearing, where the lane splits into two alleys, one heading straight toward where the boy said Chandni’s house is, and the other turning right toward the highway.
“It seems like everything is happening around this transformer-temple,” Pari says.
“What everything?” I ask.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line Page 18