Djinns, Virus and a Whodunnit- Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (Deepa Anappara)

As CoVid-19 spreads its nefarious tentacles all over the world, self distancing and reading seems to be the new way of life. However, if you are in India, willful denial works better it seems. So, while I wait for my company to take cognizance of the problem, I sit in office frantically sanitizing my hands every 5 minutes and reading in between to sanitize my head from all the CoVid-19 conspiracy theories that are circulating in all the water-cooler talks. It is in this amazingly morbid state of affairs that I started reading Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line. Already feted by most in the publishing community, Deepa Anappara's book is in the longlist of the Women's Prize 2020. With a CV like that, I started the book with trepidation, because I genuinely did not want to read a "heavy" read in these already stressed times. However, the 9-year old narrator Jai with his comrades the Hermione-like Pari, the forever anxious Faiz and the mongrel Samosa, take you to the days of your Famous Five binges, only this time it is in the stark and narrow lanes of the slums in Delhi. Children are disappearing from the slum and of course the police or the administration aren't bothered. So it is upto the young detectives to find out how and where these children are disappearing.

Anappara's story of the basti and the surrounding high-rises are familiar to any reader who has ever lived in the bustling jungle of the Indian metropolitan, where inequality and indifference are the only currencies of living the good life. Jai, much like Harper Lee's Jem provides the child's scrutiny of our lived lives which when prodded unravels quickly into the absurdity that it is. So while kids go missing, the high-rise madams ask their maids if their missing child is worth more than their jobs, the police refuse to take FIRs and the most convenient suspect is an aged Muslim man.

Anappara's story also alludes to the infamous Nithari case (https://www.livemint.com/Politics/W3UVdT8AW4j8TLrlX1sElI/Nithari-serial-killings-A-timeline-of-the-case-so-far.html) specially in the police's apathy and refusal to take the parents seriously and instead stating that the kids must have run away as well as the protests that followed post the first discoveries of the body parts.

While the kids continue with their whodunnit with often hilarious results, the story is often visited by djinns and ghosts because when governments and gods fail, it is the supernatural which seem to be the only one looking over them--let it be the djinn palace visited by all and sundry, from the basti people to the newly elected ministers to Junction-Rani, the vengeful who comes to the rescue of women travelling alone at night to Mental, the saviour ghost of all lost children.   

Anappara is clinical in her presentation of the the two diverse worlds that reside in the same postcode and the invisible lines of the separation that keep the peace between them. Her characters are people almost all of us have met in our maids, their children, their family affairs. Jai's Runu-di, Bahadur, Faiz, Tariq are the faces of those innumerable children who fall into the cracks of a world which sees these kids as ones who should be indebted to the world for just being allowed to exist rather than dare to have dreams of their own.

“ In our world we are doing daily battle with djinns and kidnappers and buffalo-killers and we don‘t know when we will vanish.”.  Anappara's novel is a tale of India that we don't want to acknowledge in all the glitzy PM addresses or India the Great ads. It is the India that fuels the glitz and yet remains hidden in the dense smog that surrounds the highrises. While we all talk of social distancing and being safe, it is the world that still comes to do our dishes, wash our clothes and are expected to keep working even when we all sit in the comfort of our self-isolation and update our social media about the need to be vigilant about the virus. Anappara's book is a great read for these times of self-isolation and reviewing the dynamics of our social structures. Through the words and mind of three young kids and the vanishing children, her commentary is a sharp strike onto our stupored brains which takes our privilege as a fundamental right and live our "woke" lives on Facebook and Twitter. 
      
Till the next time
Keep reading and keep safe