Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Jai is nine years old. He lives in a basti (neighborhood) on the edges of a city in India, surrounded by a teeming market bazaar, a railway station, and an enormous stinking garbage dump, with gleaming high-rise apartment buildings spiking up in the distance. He is clever (though not as clever as he thinks he is), dreamy, not too interested in school, and loves to watch crime shows on TV. His best friends (who “can see the thoughts inside my head”) are Pari, an ambitious, hardworking girl who gets excellent grades, and Faiz, a quiet boy who works various jobs to help his family. When a classmate who belongs to the “shouty group who hates Muslims” yaps about how Muslims all want to kill Hindus, Jai shrugs it off as nonsense because he knows Faiz would never kill him. In such offhand, yet clear-eyed observations, we see the neighborhood through Jai’s eyes as people queue for the toilet complex in the mornings, as they skirt the giant water buffalo who lazes in a narrow lane, as women diligently wash clothes in bowls after lugging water from the communal taps (when they are working). We realize that this is what we might call a slum. Yet this is not “poverty porn.” These are lively, shrewd, hard-working people who look out for one another, grieve for one another, and make their lives – some better than others.
Then children from the basti begin to vanish. Jai puts his “detectiving” skills to work to try to find his classmates, with decidedly mixed results. There are corrupt police and local politicos lining their pockets by threat and pretense, local hoodlums, false accusations and unjustified arrests. It is only when the disappearance of the children comes to involve a wealthy woman from the “hi-fi” apartments that the media and law enforcement begin to actually pay attention or do anything. Finally the lurid headlines begin to appear, and the first use of the sobriquet “Slumdog Kidnapping” makes you gasp. Slumdogs?! Jai and Pari and Faiz and Runu-Didi and Hakim? That can’t be right…
It’s a difficult trick to maintain a child’s point of view in a novel, but Anappara carries it off. She creates a complicated, noisy world full of smells and sounds and people shouting and weeping and talking. The pages brim with Indian terms – and for those readers who complain about it, there is in fact a selected glossary in the back of the book, but if you just keep reading, you’ll get it, and you wouldn’t get the flavor of the basti without them. A lovely, layered, wonderfully written story of the children she came to know as a journalist, who did not “present themselves as victims; they were cheeky and funny and often impatient.” Her journalistic work did not offer the opportunity to do them justice, but this novel does, with all their “resilience, cheerfulness, and swagger.” I hope she writes more novels.
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