Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a story about three children ¬ Jai, Pari and Faiz – a story that’s deeply cracking under the ills of hate, pollution and society, and even when it reads like a fantasy, mystery absorbing prose, woven with vivid images, a hugely disturbing India looms for us to reckon with.
Papa says we are going on a patrol as soon as the smog let's a bit of morning light into our basti.
But outside our house the world's changing...
In her fiction, Deepa Anappapra gives the voice of the book to the voice of children, who live in a world of confusion. This confusion is not about seeing cities change or the emergence of alternate intelligence, it is a confusion in the world of masks and smog, it is a confusion of seeing friends move, of feeling a future missing, of seeing abuses hurled at each other; it is the confusion about ‘presence of precarity’.
When Jai’s bastimates go missing, he along with his two friends – Pari and Faiz – chalk out plans, walk through multiple theories, travel ‘prohibited’ places, all in order to find out about missing children of his basti. In their mission, they travel to Purple Line Metro, meet Mental’s kids, work in tea stalls, sell roses on highways, see the insides of police stations, study at reading centers, dream of becoming athletes, and finally go missing—not just literally, but also metaphorically, because for the children who aren’t missing, multiple things change: they shift home, they become witnesses to bribes, they change schools, they miss mid-day meals, they skip schools; they miss their classmates; they become detectives.
This isn’t your typical suspense. Nobody is found out. No one is killed. Nobody is reformed. These are kids who are copying sleuths while doing homework and seeing Police Patrol on T.V. Pari has read of Sherlock Holmes, Jai has heard stories of Byombkesh Bakshi, and Faiz is just, well, busy! They have so much going in their internal life and even then, these are also kids who see their losses through the lens offered by others.
But this isn’t your typical sad story either. Sadness, I think, is a terrain of adults. So is melancholy. So is grief. In this regard, this is a missing story—it will make you miss so many names, places, animals, things, that you might even chant with Jai’s mother “Please don’t get snatched. Please don’t get snatched…” nine times. In her debut work of fiction, Anappara, never reveals the exact name of the place or the year that the book is set in.
We know that the basti is near Mumbai and Purple Line connects this story happening on the outskirts of a city to the city of Mumbai. Omniscient Smog is the one revealing time and days in the story. In one way, this Smog is the timeline. Initially, it felt like I was in a future or an alternate universe. But then, once I had met Mental’s kids and become a witness to Jai’s world, it became clear – This is the ‘now’ and everything that is being told of is of now, putting the very urgency loud being demanded in tackling climate emergency bare for the readers.
The smog looked like a devil’s own breath. It hid the street lights and made the darkness darker. To calm himself Bahadur thought of all the things he liked to do: pulling the orange years of a blue mother – elephant toy, an elephant baby the size of gol-gappa nestled in its trunk, brought on a whim from a roadside vendor at Bhoot Bazar; swinging on rubber tyres tied to the branches of toothbrush trees; and holding a warm brick swaddled in rags that his ma gave him on moon cold nights. He imagined her rubbing his chest with Vicks Vapo Rub though he had only seen this on TV and they didn’t have a tub of the ointment in their house. But it soothed him, and he decided to hold on to that picture until he fell asleep.
Then: a movement in the alley that he sensed in the ground. He cocked his ears for footsteps but there was nothing.
Climate Emergency is not its main theme which perhaps involves a child’s realisation that the real threat is hate, fear of the Other, and the realisation about the intersecting dangers of being poor in India. But with this precarious environment and possibility of riot looming everywhere, how are we growing up when we are seeing hate, injustice, threatened skies, treeless and forestless exteriors all around us? The danger isn’t just for society, it is to the very core of our existence: These are children in the story. They are not really detectives. They are never meant to uncover the ‘truth’ of missing children or how the children get lost or show the future of children or find out who the snatcher is—
On coming out of the metro station, Jai notices: "We come out into the smog that has wiggled into every corner of the city & coats our tongues with ash…People are wearing black mask with white skulls to stop his nose from breathing the bad air. The masks in the city are hi-fi, pink with black buttons, red & green with mesh strips, and white with yellow snouts & straps. They make people look like giant two-legged insects."
There is a climatic crisis understanding between weather, season and animal behaviour in the story. It feels like it’s a story post the years of lockdown, post the pollution of Diwalis, post 2020s, but then it also feels like it is the story of right now, this exact moment that you and I are present in. Even though the children see others in mask, they themselves are not wearing any mask. Why? Where is the tension of climate crisis in the book? How are people not getting sick of smog? How are they still able to go on with daily business when the sky is being continuously torn apart?
We pass hi-fi buildings, gone before we can look into windows….and the tops of trees going grey in smog. Three streaks of green zoom close to the train and disappear. ‘Parakeets’, Pari tells me. I feel like I’m in a dream…From the chatter in compartment, I know the trains are late because of the smog, but I can’t tell how late.
The sky one encounters is part of one’s community, and one has obligations to them.
I gaze up at the sky. Today the smog of curtain thin enough for me to spot the Twinkle of a star behind it. I can't even remember when I last saw a star.... She is watching over me the way Mental watches over his boys, I just know it. Then I see the star again. I point it out to Samosa. I tell him it's a secret signal, from Runu didi to me. It's so powerful, it can fire past the thickets of cloud and even the walls that Ma's gods have put up to separate one world from the next.
In Djinn Patrol, Jai helps us to imagine a nonhuman perception as well.
The Basti is losing its shape in the smog when we get out of school the next day. Shadows sprawl across the roof of houses where punctured cycle tyres, bricks & broken pipes weigh down tarpaulin sheets.
…
All winter the smog has been stealing the colours 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 love that all chapters are either from children’s, or supernatural Djinn’s point of view, making us listen to so many individual voices, thoughts and dreams. Anappara’s prose does not concentrate on solving the cases of missing children, but on showing the ‘mysteries’ of such cases. She reveals how there is nothing mysterious about missing children in India. This is because we know such stories. We may even know the ‘whodunit’ scenario. The real mystery is this reality—this gap that the story reveals when her prose highlights the world of child just before they are ‘snatched’.
Runnu stood now in the empty classroom, it's walls darkened by cobwebs and inky fingers, the black board cracked at the edges & whitened by years of chalk. Curls of smog crept in like unruly tendrils through the windows that wouldn't shut fully. She saw for herself a life that would be a series of misunderstandings, and hated herself – the world – for it.
In the end, I wanted a different future for all its children including Jai, Pari and Faiz, because I didn’t want any of them to lose out. I wanted a different present and past for them. I wanted them to grow up together. But this doesn’t happen, because when I read their stories I realised what helplessness is all along, along with wonder.
One can also wonder perhaps because one wants to escape the helplessness of giving an exam, while a bastimate gets lost, and abuses are hurled from one community to another.
A climate fiction cannot
substitute for a firm enactment and caring policy towards environment, but a
climate fiction provides a stage of basic reconfiguration that may induce
wonder, helplessness, openness and perplexity needed to make impact on
nature-consciousness.