“Don’t talk to these Musalman-people,” the woman who started the fight says, pushing her pallu closer toward her neck. I can see her belly button. It’s turned down like a sad mouth. “They shout Allah-Allah over their loudspeakers day and night and none of us can sleep.”
“In Lord Krishna’s name, please stop. You’re frightening the children,” Pari’s ma tells the woman.
“If your child goes missing, you’ll sing a different tune,” the woman says, pointing a long, black fingernail toward Pari’s face, making Pari snap her head back.
“I can find a hundred people to do your job, like-that-like-that,” Ma’s hi-fi madam screeches so loudly on the phone we can all hear her. The madam has switched to English, which Ma says is something she does when her anger is extra-hot.
The monkeys on the toilet roof growl. Faiz’s ammi clutches Farzana-Baji’s shoulder as if her legs have turned rubbery and she’s about to faint. “Ammi, Ammi,” Farzana-Baji shouts, panic rounding her eyes, the loose folds of her abaya turning and spinning with her every time she moves.
“I remember I owe you money,” Ma tells her hi-fi madam. “It was very good of you not to cut it from this month’s salary.”
Men with their mufflers tied around their faces lunge toward Faiz and his brothers. Mugs and buckets clank and clash. Faiz screams and closes his eyes and puts his hands over his ears.
“Madhu, chalo, let’s get away from here,” Pari’s ma says.
The hi-fi madam’s anger keeps spewing out of Ma’s phone. Pari runs toward Faiz, and Wajid-Bhai punches a man taunting him. A scuffle breaks out, and Faiz clings to Pari. Someone shouts that they’ll grind every single Muslim into the ground like so many cockroaches. Faiz’s ammi and Farzana-Baji hobble toward Wajid-Bhai and Faiz.
“They’re children,” Faiz’s ammi tells the angry men. “Let them be.”
“Stop this,” Pari’s ma blubbers. “We don’t want a riot in our basti.”
Clever men use the melee to scramble over others so that they can get to the toilets without paying the fees. The caretaker runs after them. The woman behind us smiles and her face brightens like she has managed to do a big poo after ages. Faiz and his ammi and his brothers and sister flee the toilet complex, Pari holding Faiz’s hand, and Pari’s ma shouting Pari, wait, wait.
“If this is how the new year starts, imagine how it will end,” someone says.
I had even forgotten it was New Year.
* * *
Ma decides she has to go to work after her hi-fi madam’s phone call. “All that TV you watch,” she tells me, “it isn’t free.”
She’s scared of her hi-fi madam; she can’t admit it, so she’s trying to make me feel guilty instead.
After she leaves, Runu-Didi starts washing clothes. I helpfully point out the dirt-smudges she’s missing.
“That’s it, enough,” she says, splish-splashing me with soapy water.
Didi hangs the washed clothes to dry, then she ignores her other chores to gossip with her basti-friends. She doesn’t have training today because it’s New Year, when even her strict coach loosens his iron-hold on his athletes.
I calculate how many more Sundays I have to work to make up the 200 rupees I took from Ma’s Parachute tub:
I slogged at the tea shop for seven Sundays;
Duttaram paid me half of what he promised on five Sundays, and my real salary of forty rupees twice;
how long before I hit my target?
This is tough like a real Maths problem. I add and multiply and subtract and then I have the answer. Next Sunday, even if Duttaram pays me only twenty rupees, I’ll have 200 rupees altogether.
I hear angry noises and look up. In the alley, a Hindu woman with sindoor on her forehead shakes a slotted ladle at a Muslim vendor wearing a skullcap. “What does the front of my house look like to you? A garage?” she screeches. He hurries his pushcart, bright and beautiful with oranges, away from her door.
“Child-killer,” a boy shouts as the orange-seller’s cart squawks through the alley.
Runu-Didi gestures that I should go inside the house. “Something terrible is about to happen, I can feel it,” she says.
She doesn’t look scared; she never does. Even now she speaks coolly, as if she’s just warning me it might rain, and I should carry an umbrella.
I don’t feel like gathering clues about the missing Muslim children. I will learn everything about them and I still won’t find them. I just know it.
I pretend to study, I think about Pari and Faiz, I wonder if Faiz’s ammi is at the police station asking for Tariq-Bhai to be released. Then it’s time for lunch. Didi lets me watch afternoon-TV. I play cricket in our alley with a few neighbor-boys who are older than me. I doze off for a bit and soon it’s evening and Ma and Papa come back home. Papa and I watch a 20/20 game, which Papa likes much better than one-dayers and Tests because they’re short.
Today is how every day used to be before Bahadur and others disappeared, when I wasn’t a detective or a tea-shop boy. It’s a good day, the very best. Being a detective is too-tough. Maybe I don’t want to be one after all. Maybe Jasoos Jai can retire un-hurt, okay-tata-bye. I don’t know what I will be when I grow up. Sometimes when Ma sees the marks I get, she says Pari will be an IAS officer, a district collector or something, and I will be her peon.
* * *
Late that night I wake up hearing knocks on doors and wails and howls. Papa gets out of bed and fumbles in the darkness until he finds the light switch. The yellow bulb is angry we have woken it up, and it hisses and crackles.
“JCBs have come?” I ask.
“Is it an earthquake?” Runu-Didi asks.
“Outside,” Papa shouts.
Ma picks up the Parachute tub. She ties it to the pallu of her sari. She bends down and looks at our precious-things bundle by the door. It’s been waiting for this exact moment for almost two months, but Ma doesn’t cart it out.
We scuttle into the alley. Our neighbors dash out of their houses too, some carrying torches. The lights catch the startled eyes of goats and dogs.
“Wait right here,” Ma says, pushing me close to Runu-Didi.
“Maybe your djinn has snatched again,” Didi says.
I look up and down the alley, imagining a djinn swooshing through the air toward us, and I half-hope, because I’m standing next to Runu-Didi, and because Didi is bigger and taller than me, that it will take her instead of me. Please please please.
PAPA AND SHANTI-CHACHI GO TOWARD THE SCREAMS—
—to find out if we should run away from the basti or hide in our homes. Shanti-Chachi’s husband talks to Ma, nervously scratching his man-parts when Ma’s head is turned.
Runu-Didi and I wait on our doorstep, a single blanket pulled up over our heads, prickling our skin. “Sit still,” Didi says each time I stretch my legs to stop them from falling asleep.
I wonder what the gods want from us. Maybe a bigger hafta like our basti police. Maybe a grander puja than Thumper-Baba’s. Maybe it was grand enough and the gods just don’t care about us. Maybe maybe maybe. I’m sick of maybes.
“There they are,” Didi says and stands up. Her side of the blanket falls to the ground. I try to fold the blanket so that Ma won’t be angry with us for dirtying it, but it’s heavy and spiky and it feels like I’m trying to smush a thorny kikar tree and my fingers hurt. It makes me sad that I’m too small to do even such a stupid thing. Tears burn my eyes.
“Don’t cry,” Runu-Didi says. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
“I’m not crying.”
Didi takes the blanket from my hands, and her training must have made her strong because she forces it to behave and folds it neatly in seconds.
Papa picks me up. I’m not such a small child that I should be carried around, but I press my face against his neck. I can hear his breathin
g. It’s loud and panting, like Samosa’s. Torch beams swing around the alley, lighting one half of a satellite dish, a quarter of a washing line on which someone has hung their clothes to dry, pigeons waking up on rooftops and fluttering their wings.
“Fatima’s buffalo,” Shanti-Chachi says, her voice cracking like glass, “it’s dead. Beheaded.”
I look up. When butchers like Afsal-Chacha kill animals, it’s only to eat them. Nobody would want to eat Buffalo-Baba. Even a useless man like Drunkard Laloo considers him God.
Shanti-Chachi has slipped her hand into the crook of her husband’s elbow. Runu-Didi draws half-circles on the ground with her right foot.
“Someone left the buffalo’s head on Fatima’s doorstep,” Papa says.
“Fatima can’t stop crying,” Shanti-Chachi says. “She loved that buffalo like a child. It gave her nothing, not even enough dung for a day’s fuel. Still she spent so much money feeding it.”
Papa puts me down, and I run into our house. I slide under Ma-Papa’s bed. I’m brave in the day, but my braveness doesn’t like to come out at night. It’s sleeping, I think.
“Jai, what are you doing?” Ma asks. She has followed me into the house.
I must look ekdum-stupid. Only half of me fits under the bed because of the bags and sacks she has stored in her cave. Ma kneels down. “Come out, sona,” she says. She calls me sona only when she loves me more than anyone else in the whole world. Ma removes the Parachute tub from the pallu of her sari, and she wipes the dust from under the bed off my face with the sari’s edge. I wriggle out so that she can clean me properly. Ma returns the Parachute tub to the shelf. Papa and Didi come inside.
“Did a djinn eat Buffalo-Baba?” I ask.
“There are no djinns, Jai,” Papa says. “It’s the work of goondas. The buffalo’s head was cut neatly with a sword. There are bloody tracks going up and down Fatima-ben’s alley.”
Djinns don’t need weapons. They can behead people just by thinking about it.
“The Hindu Samaj boys must have killed Buffalo-Baba because he’s Fatima-ben’s,” Runu-Didi says. “To teach Muslims a lesson.”
“We worship cows,” Ma says. “Our people would never do such a horrible thing.”
“Everyone knows the Samaj boys have swords,” Didi says. “They bring them out during riots. We saw it on the news, haan, Papa?”
“I’m going back to Fatima’s,” Papa says. “The poor woman is so shocked.”
“Don’t do that,” Ma pleads. “Don’t go out—who knows what horrible thing will happen next?”
But Papa has already put on his outside sweater and a monkey cap. “At least take a muffler,” Ma says. “It’s very cold outside.”
“Madhu, meri jaan, will you leave the worrying to me for once?”
Runu-Didi looks embarrassed like she always does when Papa calls Ma his life or his liver or his heartbeat. But it makes me feel safe.
Ma puts a muffler around Papa’s neck as if it’s a garland and she’s marrying him again.
I can’t believe Buffalo-Baba is gone. He never hurt anybody, not even the flies that went buzzing round and round his eyes for hours until they got tired and dropped dead right between his horns.
* * *
We lie down to sleep and the next thing I know, it’s time to wake up and Ma and Papa are arguing about who should go to work. Last night Ma was worried about Papa, and now she sounds like she wants to push him into a djinn’s mouth. They do this each time something awful happens, though they know they can’t watch us every day. They are fooling themselves, but not me. I sit on my mat with the cold clawing my throat. I’m pakka Papa is going to get his way again, but Ma wins the argument to everyone’s surprise, even Ma’s, it sounds like.
“Don’t you dare complain if I lose my job,” Papa says as he click-clicks his fingers at me, telling me to get up. “I don’t even know how we’re going to eat this month. Looks like we’ll have to use your emergency money.” Papa walks to the kitchen shelf and grabs the Parachute tub. My stomach twists into a ball. Ma snatches the tub from Papa and puts it back on the shelf.
“This isn’t the time for jokes,” Ma says.
“Who says I was joking?” Papa says.
“It’s just for today and tomorrow,” Ma says. “Shanti said she can watch the children on Sunday, and Monday they’ll be back at school.”
Runu-Didi and Ma go to fetch water. Papa says he’ll take me to the toilet complex.
“Buffalo-Baba?” I ask when we are outside.
“It’s all cleared out,” Papa says.
“Fatima-ben took it?” I ask.
“A butcher from Bhoot Bazaar.”
“Afsal-Chacha?”
“Who’s that? Have you been talking to strangers in the bazaar again? Didn’t I tell you not to do that? Bhoot Bazaar isn’t a playground for children.”
“I don’t play,” I say.
We pass a dog that looks like Samosa. I hope Samosa is all right. I hope he stays away from djinns and people with swords.
We are cursed, just like Faiz said, poor Faiz who is now a hawker-boy. Ma says Faiz’s ammi is disappearing inside her abaya. She’s worried about what her eldest son is eating in prison: rice cooked with cockroaches, tea stirred with fallen-off lizard tails, water seasoned with rat droppings.
“Will we go hungry this month?” I ask Papa.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“But you’ll go to work tomorrow?”
Papa shrugs. Ma or Papa will have to open the Parachute tub soon if they keep taking chuttis like this.
I’m so close to the finish line. All I need is twenty rupees.
“Papa—”
“Look, Jai, we’ll be fine. You aren’t going to starve.”
* * *
When we are having our rusk-breakfast, Pari’s ma brings Pari to our house for safekeeping. Ma must have told Pari’s ma to do that over the phone. She didn’t even think to tell me first.
Pari doesn’t want rusk because she has had breakfast already, probably Maggi noodles, which she’ll eat five times a day if she can.
“You aren’t studying or what?” she asks.
“Listen to her, Jai,” Papa says.
Papa walks with Ma and Pari’s ma to the end of the lane. He comes back and chats with our neighbors. Then he asks Runu-Didi what she’s making for lunch though we only ever have rice and dal. He switches on the TV, sits on the bed and shakes his legs. He keeps changing channels. He hums a tune. He combs his hair, using a steel tin on a shelf for a mirror. He sings. Usually by the time he gets home he’s so tired, he just lies on the bed and watches TV. If he decides to sing, it’s never more than one song. Now he can’t stop singing.
“Papa, we’re studying,” I say.
“Of course,” he says. He turns down the volume of the TV as if that’s the problem.
Pari and I sit on the doorstep. I interrupt her studying to tell her we can’t be detectives anymore. “What all can we track? We don’t even know the Muslim children’s names.”
“Kabir and Khadifa,” Pari says. “They’re nine and eleven. They don’t go to our school, but to some free school near our basti. Their mother is about to have another baby.”
“You’re making this up,” I say.
“I heard it in the ladies’ queue.”
A frown pulls down the corners of her mouth and draws lines between her eyebrows. “What’s he doing here?” she asks.
It’s Quarter with his gang-members and a few men from the Hindu Samaj. They talk to the people in our alley. When they reach my house, Pari and I stand up.
Quarter smells a bit like daru, but he looks fresher and cleaner. I squint at him to understand why and I realize it’s because he has shaved off his almost-mustache and not-quite-beard.
Papa and Runu-Didi come to the door.
“This is the pradhan’s son,” Pari tells Papa. We still don’t know Quarter’s real name.
“Has someone else disappeared?” Papa asks hurriedly.
“We’re trying to find out who’s causing all this trouble in the basti,” Quarter says, looking at Runu-Didi. “Is there anything you can tell us? Have you seen any Muslim acting suspiciously?”
Papa pulls Didi back and stands in front of her.
“You shouldn’t be trying to sow divisions in this community,” Papa says, which sounds like something a good newsperson would say on TV.
Quarter unrolls and then rolls up the sleeves of his black shirt. His hair is slicked back with oil or something more expensive like Brylcreem, which the TV ads say is a cream for men and not boys.
I wonder if Quarter killed Buffalo-Baba with a sword he hides in his hi-fi home. I look at his black canvas shoes to see if there are splashes of blood, but there’s only mud. Then I remember he hires others to do his dirty work for him.
Quarter tilts his head at an angle from where he can still see Runu-Didi, maybe.
“Don’t you have something on the stove to watch?” Papa asks Didi. She goes to the kitchen corner. Then Papa talks to Quarter, forcefully, his hands clasped behind his back. “Things are getting worse every day. Your father should be doing more for us. He should be asking the police to find the kidnappers. He should be telling Hindus and Muslims to stop fighting.”
I watch Quarter’s face closely though I have given up detectiving; I can’t help it. With the TV-repair chacha in jail, Quarter is back to being a prime suspect. He scratches his chin with the tip of his thumb. Papa’s words scatter onto the ground, for hens to peck and goats to chew, because Quarter’s ears are shut and they can’t get in.
SHANTI-CHACHI IS OUR BOSS-LADY FOR SUNDAY BUT—
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line Page 21