Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

Author:Deepa Anappara [Deepa Anappara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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