Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

In Deepa Anappara’s debut novel, voices of hope provide a counterpoint to a backdrop of despair. Leading the chorus is nine-year-old Jai. Jai and his friends Faiz and Pari are determined to find the schoolmate who has disappeared from their slum, while the police are doing nothing. Jai watches Police Patrol on TV, so he knows how to be a detective. He is confident he will solve the mystery and return the boy home, even as another child goes missing… and another. And another.

Interspersed with Jai’s first-person narration are stories told by other children; orphans and runaways, the gangs of “train kids” who risk their bodies and lives to scavenge at the tracks for things that can be sold or recycled. Several of these chapters are titled “This Story Will Save Your Life,” and tell about ghosts who will protect certain groups of children if those children pray to them.

Jai is observant, often noticing things the adults don’t. He also doesn’t understand much of what he sees. He doesn’t understand why his parents are so insistent that he come right home after school (of course he never does). He chafes when they ignore his competence or tell him to be quiet when he shares something he’d heard. He believes there is a human villain at work in the crowded slum area where he lives, but he won’t completely reject Faiz’s theory–that’s it a bad djinn. In short, Jai is a real child, trying to cope with the terror of powerlessness.

As more children disappear, the neighborhood turns on itself. A Hindu religious leader is quick to put the blame on Muslim families, since at first no Muslim children have disappeared. This leads to violence against those families, and even when Muslim children are taken, some say that this is merely a blind or a cover. Fathers take refuge in alcohol, mothers in prayer. Anappara does not take the easy road here. She uses this horrifying idea to show us the complexity of the problems. Yes, there is corruption, particularly among the police, but one police officer points out how badly under-resourced they are. Social, racial and religious discrimination are at the root of many of the community’s problems–and so is poverty, with a government whose response to people in the basti or poor neighborhoods is to threaten to bulldoze their homes.

It’s really tempting to speak about the technical achievement in this story–particularly the creation of Jai. Jai is an innocent, unreliable narrator; a kind of narrator that is difficult to pull off. The amount of talent, concentration and hard work Anappara demonstrates here is inspiring. All of that is in service to the book’s heart, though.

In her Afterword, Anappara writes about her days as a journalist in India, and the plague of missing children in that nation. She was struck by the voices of the many street children she interviewed; they were tough, snarky, funny, and hopeful. In the midst of an exposé novel showing the day to day horror of the situation (as well as the power and the love), Anappara focuses on the strength of those young voices–voices that chose hope.

There is a moment, in a place Jai and his friends call the Shaitani Adda, that is a turning point for Jai. After that moment, events accelerate. In many cases of serial child abductions, while the case may be closed for law enforcement, there is no closure, there are no answers, for the families, and that’s the case here. At the very end of the book, when Jai is forced to accept what has happened, he still chooses hope, seeing, through a break in the constant smog, a star. That star is a signal, he decides.

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is not only a heartbreaking, complicated tale, it’s beautiful at the line by line level. Anappara uses many Hindi terms in the book, making Jai’s world immersive and real, and provides a glossary at the back.

The reader of Djinn Patrol will have to make a choice; choose the heartbreak so excruciatingly rendered on the page, or made the harder choice–Jai’s choice–and find a way to hope.