Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

by Deepa Anappara

  Aanchal’s papa and the press-wallah and Drunkard Laloo and Kabir-Khadifa’s abbu agree and, in voices as loud as Papa’s, they ask to be let in. The constables help the inspector get down from the chair. He makes a call on his mobile. Then he announces that madam is a generous and kind woman, but she cannot have riff-raff rooting through her flat that costs five to ten crores. “Let us do our work,” he says. “Please, just wait here.”

  “How many zeroes in ten crores?” Faiz asks Pari as the inspector and constables go inside the gates.

  “Eight,” she says. She doesn’t have to count on her fingers.

  The gash in my palm stings. I stand away from everyone, tears running down my cheeks. I feel all alone. Even Bahadur’s brother and sister have each other.

  “As expected, madam’s house was empty,” the inspector says when he comes out.

  “Where’s my Runu?” Ma shouts.

  “Where’s Chandni?” Chandni’s ma asks.

  Other people pick up her words and our words and throw them at the inspector: “Chandni-Runu, Aanchal-Omvir, Bahadur-Kabir-Khadifa, where are they, where are they?”

  “They aren’t here,” the inspector says. “I suggest you disperse now, otherwise we’ll be forced to take strict action.”

  “You have done nothing for us,” Omvir’s press-wallah papa shouts. “Nothing. You never looked for our children.”

  “None of this would have happened if you had listened,” Aanchal’s papa says.

  “Listened,” Drunkard Laloo repeats.

  I hear something breaking. A stone has cracked the headlight of a police jeep. Who threw it? A twig zigzags through the air and my eyes follow it until it knocks the khaki cap off the police inspector’s head. People throw whatever they can at the police, the watchmen, and into the balconies of the flats.

  One stone hits a watchman’s forehead and blood flows out like water from a wide-open tap. The other watchmen puff up their cheeks and blow into the whistles they wear around their necks. There’s loads of pushing and elbowing and scrambling. Pari and I and Faiz are getting smushed like atta. Ma’s hands grip my fingers tightly. I can’t see Papa.

  People kick down the cages around plants, break off branches and, shaking them like spears, approach the watchmen. The policemen swing their batons. We push past them and, because there are so many of us, they can’t stop us. We jump over the barriers, we enter the watchmen’s offices, we throw the gates open. We run in, Ma and Pari’s ma and Pari and Faiz and Wajid-Bhai and me. I don’t even know what we are going to do.

  “Runu must be here,” Ma says.

  “We will turn their tower to dust,” someone shouts.

  I hear sirens, screams, batons smacking flesh, hands clapping, and people crying, pressing their mufflers or monkey caps or mask-kerchiefs against bleeding heads and arms and legs. Flocks of hi-fi people hop around their balconies, shooting us with their phones. Through the glass doors that lead into Golden Gate’s entrance room, I see a group of women from our basti who must work in the building.

  A golden light hangs from the ceiling, and two gold-and-white fans spin on either side of it. The floor is white and shiny like a mirror. Tall plants curl out of white pots in the corners, and their leaves are a rich shade of green I have never seen before, not even on the trees in Nana-Nani’s or Dada-Dadi’s village.

  “Gita, Radha,” Ma shouts.

  “Meera,” Chandni’s ma hollers.

  The basti-women who work at Golden Gate push open the glass doors that don’t have a single smudge on them. They tell us many things at the same time:

  “Something strange has been going on in the top-floor flat the past few months.”

  “Ever since that madam bought the flat. Six or seven months now.”

  “A guard said the top-floor flat gets deliveries even late at night. Past midnight even.”

  “Varun said it was new furniture, he said the owner was putting in shelves, counters in the kitchen. Who’s going to check if that’s true or not?”

  “The watchmen are always gossiping about her. They say she takes a different man up to her flat each night. But it’s hard to know for sure. We can’t see their faces, even on CCTV. The men sit in the backseat when she drives her SUV past the boom barriers.”

  A wail begins from behind me. It’s Bahadur’s ma.

  “We have to find out if our children are inside,” a man says.

  We run into the building. We are faster than the grown-ups, Pari, Faiz and I. We get into the lift. We have lost our mas and papas and Wajid-Bhai, but it doesn’t matter because some people from our basti have also entered the lift with us. Faiz presses the button right at the top: 41. We go up, zooming-zooming, fast like rockets. My head feels light. I lean against the glimmering steel wall. I sniff the metal smells, like Samosa. My nose tries to track Didi.

  The lift opens into a square room with marble floors and a door that’s shiny and black. We ring the bell by the door, we knock and kick until our feet hurt, and the boss-lady, mobile pressed against her ear, opens it. We race past her. She can’t stop us anyway; other basti-people are behind us and they corner her, push her against the wall.

  A chachi snatches the boss-lady’s phone and gives it to a chacha, who puts it in his jeans-pant pocket with a grin. Her phone keeps ringing.

  The windows in the flat stretch all the way from the ceiling to the floor. Everything outside looks small from here, the malls and the roads and the white and red lights of cars and maybe even our basti, but I can’t tell where our basti is. I can’t see people. The Purple Line train dashing across a bridge is a toy train on a toy bridge.

  Pari grabs my hand. “Don’t just stand there,” she says. “Focus.”

  We look around. Everything is in perfect order. Cushions sit up with their spines straight on cream sofas. Lights tucked into the ceiling shine like so many little suns, too bright to stare at. Fresh and fragrant yellow roses press against each other in black vases. Metal sculptures of birds and animals and gods sit still on the wooden shelves built into the walls. The rugs on the floor are soft like clouds.

  “The police will put all of you in jail,” the boss-lady threatens. Then I remember why I am here. I forgot. The strange thing is that other basti-people are behaving like me too. We are all open-mouthed. Our feet and hands move slowly in this room that’s bigger than twenty of our houses put together. The hi-fi flat is doing black magic to us, it’s stopping us from thinking; maybe this is how they trapped children.

  “Runu-Didi?” I say. Then I say it louder, “Runu-Didi? Runu-Didi?”

  Our handprints and fingerprints and footprints will destroy the evidence here, but what can we do? A man who says he has already inspected the whole flat shouts, “No children here.” He must know a chant that protects him from black magic.

  The boss-lady screams security, security, anybody there, anybody? Then she says, “I know your pradhan. You won’t see your houses when you return tonight. I’ll have that entire stinking slum of yours demolished.”

  “I’ll check the kitchen,” Pari says, which we can see from where we are standing. “Faiz, you check the bedroom, and Jai, take a look at any other room they have.” We can’t even guess how many rooms this flat has, or for what purposes.

  Through a narrow corridor, I run into the other room that’s a bedroom, with a big bed on which five people can sleep, and a wooden cupboard with four doors that takes up a whole wall. I check under the bed. The white bedsheet on it is crisp. The peacock-blue pillows have a new smell to them. I open the cupboard doors. Saris, salwar-kameezes, bedsheets, men’s shirts and trousers are folded neatly on each shelf.

  I go outside to the balcony that borders the bedroom. There’s nothing there except for plants in blue pots, and two chairs on either side of a low table. The wind is louder here, and it’s freezing-cold. My ears hurt. I shiver, I peer out int
o the smog, I shout Runu-Didi, Runu-Didi and, when there’s no answer no matter how many times I call her name, I go back inside.

  Behind a door in the bedroom, I find a hidden bathroom, with two washbasins and a tub and a shower too. The tiled floor is sparkly and dry; no one has used it.

  Just as I turn to leave, two men from the basti thunder into the room. “Look at the fan, look at the split AC, look at this bedsheet—is it made of silk? How much do you think this bed costs? One lakh? Three lakhs?” the men ask each other. They flop down on the bed and say, arrey-waah, how soft it is also.

  I hear Pari calling me and Faiz. Has the boss-lady caught her? I run outside, through the corridor where basti chachas and chachis have caused a traffic jam, and into the kitchen, where everything is painted blue-grey. People are opening cupboards and stealing spoons and masalas and even sugar cubes and salt containers. One man tucks a bottle of daru into the waistband of his trousers.

  Pari is kneeling on the floor by a washbasin, her head bent over a bucket. Faiz is by her side.

  “What is it?” he asks. “Are you okay?”

  Pari shows us what the bucket holds: brushes, soap-water bubbling inside plastic bottles, sponges and rags. Underneath it all lie three dark-brown glass bottles with labels that are hard to read. It takes me ages to figure out that one says Chloroform LR. The labels on the smaller bottles say Midazolam Injection BP and Mezolam 10 mg. I don’t know what that means.

  “Why is this here?” Pari asks.

  “What is it?” Faiz asks.

  “The headmaster talked about syringes and sleep-making medicines, remember?” Pari says. “Maybe you weren’t at school that day.”

  “Faiz was there,” I say. “It was before Tariq-Bhai was arrested.”

  “Chloroform puts you to sleep,” Pari says. “Even forever.”

  “Don’t touch the bottles,” I say. “Fingerprints. Evidence.”

  “Does this mean,” Faiz asks, “that the boss-lady is a child-snatcher? Did she and Varun run a child-snatching business together? Was this their headquarters?”

  “But,” Pari says, “this woman is a friend of the pradhan and the police commissioner. Does that mean…what does it mean? They knew she was a criminal and did nothing?”

  “Where has she kept Runu-Didi?” I ask.

  “We’ll find her,” Pari says. “The boss-lady will have to tell the police the truth now.”

  “Take a video of this,” Faiz tells a chacha who is picking up the knives in a drawer and examining them against the light, maybe to decide which one he should sneak out of the flat. “See, this bottle, it’s a sleep-making medicine. That Varun must have used it to kidnap children and bring them here to his boss-lady.”

  The chacha puts the knife down and does what Faiz asks. Police constables run into the kitchen, batons held high, panting, shouting, out, now, you monkeys.

  “We have proof that the madam of this flat, your commissioner’s best friend, is guilty. She’s a child-snatcher,” Pari tells them.

  “We have already taken videos of all this,” Faiz says, “and we have sent it to a thousand people. You can’t make it go away.”

  The policemen lower their batons. They ask the other people in the kitchen to file out. The chacha who took the video stays.

  “Check these labels,” Pari tells the policemen. “These drugs, they put people to sleep. Why does this woman have these in her flat? It’s illegal. You have to arrest her.”

  The kitchen is silent except for something humming, maybe the fridge or a light. A policeman tries to touch the bucket but Pari stops him. “Where are your gloves?” she asks.

  “That Varun must have hidden the bottles here. Do you think a boss-lady bothers with the rubbish under her kitchen sink?” a constable asks.

  A scream is growing inside me and I feel like I will explode all over the ceiling. I stand up and move my hand to the kitchen counter where there is a black bowl filled with oranges. I push it to the edge as Pari talks to the policemen. Then I tip it over. The bowl shatters. The oranges roll around the floor, stopping at people’s feet.

  Papa and Ma and Pari’s ma and Wajid-Bhai come into the kitchen.

  “Pari,” her ma cries. “I thought you had disappeared.”

  “Runu-Didi isn’t here,” I say to Ma and Papa.

  In the living room, the inspector explains to the boss-lady that it is in her best interest to go with him to the police station. “I can’t guarantee your safety here,” he says. Then he orders us to leave or face arrest. “You can see there are no children here. Madam can’t be held responsible for what that vile man did. But we’re taking her in for questioning anyway.”

  Papa and Wajid-Bhai shepherd us out of the crowd with their spread-wide arms. We take the lift down, walk past the entrance strewn with glass, out of the gate and the broken boom barriers. TV vans are parked on one side of the road, behind police vehicles. A reporter stands with a mike under a street lamp that has come on. The cameraman tells her to move a little to the left.

  “This is going to be on TV,” Pari’s ma says, sounding surprised. “Now the police will have to do something.”

  “It’s too late,” I say without meaning to, but after I say it, I know it’s true.

  ALL WINTER THE SMOG HAS BEEN STEALING—

  —the colors of our basti and now everything has turned grey-white, even the faces of Ma and Papa as a newswoman pushes a mike into their faces. I stand outside Shanti-Chachi’s door, half-hiding behind chachi.

  It’s been three days since we found the sleep-making bottles in the boss-lady’s Golden Gate flat. Our basti has become famous and also the opposite of famous. Every hour a new TV van pulls up at Bhoot Bazaar. Reporters who look only slightly older than Runu-Didi dash around with their camerapersons, talking to anyone who’ll talk to them.

  The journalist who is interviewing Ma and Papa now is doing a story about the parents of missing children. She told us so. Papa holds in his hands the photo of Runu-Didi we showed the police. Ma presses the pallu of her sari against her mouth.

  “We would like our daughter back please,” Papa says, extending Didi’s photo closer to the camera. His usually too-loud voice is so soft now, the microphone can barely catch it.

  The reporter swishes her hair back. “Speak up,” she mouths.

  “Our daughter, please, give her back,” Papa says. Then he and Ma stare into the camera in silence. The reporter makes a cut-throat hand gesture to the camerawoman.

  Shanti-Chachi calls the reporter over. “Did the police tell you why they ignored our complaints for so long?” chachi asks. “Did they say why they didn’t look for a single missing child for over two months?”

  The cameraperson zooms in on Shanti-Chachi.

  “Will the police let the owner of the flat go because she’s rich?” chachi wants to know. “Where has she hidden our children?”

  “Did you get that?” the reporter asks the camerawoman, who nods. She turns her back to chachi and says to the camera, “The residents of this blighted slum are accusing the police of negligence. Questions are being raised about the role of Ms. Yamini Mehra, the owner of the penthouse flat worth seven crores at Golden Gate. Ms. Mehra has asserted that she was unaware of her servant Varun Kumar’s nefarious activities in the flat. Meanwhile rumors are spreading like wildfire about Varun Kumar’s motives. Was he part of a child-trafficking ring or a kidney racket? What has he done with the children he snatched? Why did he collect souvenirs from his victims, which the police have pointed out, is the behavior of a serial killer?”

  Ma crumples to the ground. The camerawoman bends down so that she can catch Ma’s sadness for the news at nine. Shanti-Chachi runs to Ma’s side and puts her hand on Ma’s back before Papa can.

  “How can you live with yourself?” Shanti-Chachi shouts at the camerawoman. “You want us to cry, pull our hair out
, beat our chests. What will you get from it, a promotion, a big bonus next Diwali?”

  The camerawoman stands up.

  “Let’s go to another house,” the reporter tells her.

  “Yes, leave, that will be very easy for you to do,” chachi says. “We’re the ones who have to be here, today and tomorrow and the day after that. This is our life you’re talking about as if it’s just some story. Do you even understand that?”

  * * *

  Runu-Didi’s friends come to see us. They are here and Didi isn’t and it seems wrong. Ma asks them to sit on the bed, then we fold ourselves into the corners of our house. The girls don’t know what to say; we don’t know what to tell them. Ma’s alarm clock tick-tocks awkwardly, misshaping time between its slow hands. It feels like morning and night and yesterday and tomorrow and last week and next week all at once.

  Papa asks Didi’s friends if they had seen Varun Kumar hanging around the school. They say no. I saw him so many times and I talked to him too and I never thought he was the kidnapper.

  Didi’s coach visits us with Mitali and Tara and Harini and Jhanvi.

  “Runu, she was the best of the lot,” Coach says as if Didi is no longer alive. “Faster than anyone I have trained in my life.”

  “It’s true,” Tara says. “It will be tough for our team to win without her.”

  Nana and Nani call Ma on her mobile. “I told you that place wasn’t safe,” Nani says. “I told you to send the children to live with us.”

  Ma cuts the call.

  Pari and Faiz turn up with Wajid-Bhai, who says the lawyer his ammi has hired is certain Tariq-Bhai will be released soon. “Things always turn out okay,” he says.

  “When will you be back at school?” Pari asks me. “After the exams will work best. I told Kirpal-Sir he can expect you then.”

  “Pari’s ma is talking about moving to another basti,” Faiz says.

  “Shut up,” Pari tells him. “Your ammi is the one who’s planning to move.”

  “Move where?” I ask.