‘The police told Bahadur’s ma that he ran away on his own. They said the same thing to Omvir’s ma-papa too,’ Pari says. ‘It’s good for them, right? They don’t have to lift a finger. If anything happens to us, it’s because we did it ourselves. If a TV goes missing from our homes, we stole it. If we get murdered, then we killed ourselves.’ [loc. 2251]
180 children go missing every day in India. About a third of them are never found. Many of them are street children, like the children of the basti (shantytown) in which Jai, aged nine, lives. Jai loves to watch police shows on TV in their one-room house, and when his schoolmate Bahadur goes missing he is determined to become a detective and solve the riddle of his friend's disappearance. He enlists his two best friends, Pari (female) and Faiz (male) in the quest to discover what has happened to Bahadur -- and then to Omvir, and to Aanchal, and to others ... Jai is convinced that the missing children have been taken by djinns. He's brightly oblivious to the real-world predators who stalk the basti.
The novel's opening -- about the ghost of a man known as Mental, who looked after street-boys -- made me think I'd be reading magic realism, or a story with supernatural elementss: while there is plenty of superstition here, nothing magical is made manifest. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a vivid depiction of poverty, corruption and inequality, peppered with unfamiliar words (basti, chutti-maro, chacha, paka, didi ...) The police are not on the side of people in the basti: they take bribes but do nothing, though the reappearance of the police commissioner's lost cat is a newsworthy event. Jai, desperate to replace some money he took before the theft is discovered, earns a pittance by working hard in a tea shop. His sister Runu is a star athlete who's always told that she'll grow out of running and settle down. The people of the basti are largely Hindu, but there are Muslim families too (including Faiz's), and religious tension simmers between the two faiths as accusations fly.
The city is nameless, beset by choking smog, and though characters occasionally mention Mumbai or Manali, nobody from the basti seems to have any expectation of ever leaving their own city. There is wealth, to be sure, in the hi-fi tower blocks that overlook the basti, but none of it will ever filter down to Jai or his friends.
Anapparna describes the basti in realistic, compassionate terms. It's not without beauty or kindness, though the deprivation and the sheer population density are uncomfortable to read about. I found this a difficult novel, because although Jai is bright, determined, joyous and playful, his opportunities are very limited: and because the abducted children, and thousands more like them, will never receive true justice.
The author's afterword made me think more about this: "I didn’t want to minimise the inequalities I had witnessed around me, but a story about a horrific tragedy risked becoming part of a stereotypical narrative about poverty and India that equated people with their problems." I didn't find the narrative stereotypical, and the vivid depictions of the men, women and children (and a buffalo, and a dog) of the basti made it clear that most of them were doing their best to live good lives: individuals, not statistics, not victims, not lacking agency or free will -- only powerless.
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