Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line: A Novel

by Deepa Anappara

Overview

Discover the “extraordinary” (The Washington Post) debut novel that “announces the arrival of a literary supernova” (The New York Times Book Review),“a drama of childhood that is as wild as it is intimate” (Chigozie Obioma).
 
WINNER OF THE EDGAR® AWARD • ONE OF TIME’S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Washington Post, NPR, The Guardian, Library Journal

In a sprawling Indian city, a boy ventures into its most dangerous corners to find his missing classmate. . . .

Through market lanes crammed with too many people, dogs, and rickshaws, past stalls that smell of cardamom and sizzling oil, below a smoggy sky that doesn’t let through a single blade of sunlight, and all the way at the end of the Purple metro line lies a jumble of tin-roofed homes where nine-year-old Jai lives with his family. From his doorway, he can spot the glittering lights of the city’s fancy high-rises, and though his mother works as a maid in one, to him they seem a thousand miles away. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line plunges readers deep into this neighborhood to trace the unfolding of a tragedy through the eyes of a child as he has his first perilous collisions with an unjust and complicated wider world.

Jai drools outside sweet shops, watches too many reality police shows, and considers himself to be smarter than his friends Pari (though she gets the best grades) and Faiz (though Faiz has an actual job). When a classmate goes missing, Jai decides to use the crime-solving skills he has picked up from TV to find him. He asks Pari and Faiz to be his assistants, and together they draw up lists of people to interview and places to visit.

But what begins as a game turns sinister as other children start disappearing from their neighborhood. Jai, Pari, and Faiz have to confront terrified parents, an indifferent police force, and rumors of soul-snatching djinns. As the disappearances edge ever closer to home, the lives of Jai and his friends will never be the same again.

Drawing on real incidents and a spate of disappearances in metropolitan India, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is extraordinarily moving, flawlessly imagined, and a triumph of suspense. It captures the fierce warmth, resilience, and bravery that can emerge in times of trouble and carries the reader headlong into a community that, once encountered, is impossible to forget.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593129289
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/11/2021
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	204,795
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Deepa Anappara grew up in Kerala, southern India, and worked as a journalist in cities including Mumbai and Delhi. Her reports on the impact of poverty and religious violence on the education of children won a Developing Asia Journalism Award, an Every Human has Rights Media Award, and a Sanskriti-Prabha Dutt Fellowship in Journalism. A portion of her debut novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, won the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize, the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, and the Bridport/Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award. She has an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia,  where she is currently studying for a Ph.D. on a CHASE doctoral fellowship.

Read an Excerpt

I LOOK AT OUR HOUSE WITH—

—upside-down eyes and count five holes in our tin roof. There might be more, but I can’t see them because the black smog outside has wiped the stars off the sky. I picture a djinn crouching down on the roof, his eye turning like a key in a lock as he watches us through a hole, waiting for Ma and Papa and Runu-Didi to fall asleep so that he can draw out my soul. Djinns aren’t real, but if they were, they would only steal children because we have the most delicious souls.

My elbows wobble on the bed, so I lean my legs against the wall. Runu-Didi stops counting the seconds I have been topsy-turvy and says, “Arrey, Jai, I’m right here and still you’re cheating-cheating. You have no shame, kya?” Her voice is high and jumpy because she’s too happy that I can’t stay upside down for as long as she can. 

Didi and I are having a headstand contest but it’s not a fair one. The yoga classes at our school are for students in Standard Six and above, and Runu-Didi is in Standard Seven, so she gets to learn from a real teacher. I’m in Standard Four, so I have to rely on Baba Devanand on TV, who says that if we do headstands, children like me will: 

·       never have to wear glasses our whole lives; 
·       never have white in our hair or black holes in our teeth; 
·       never have puddles in our brains or slowness in our arms and legs; 
·       always be No. 1 in School + College + Office + Home. 

I like headstands a lot more than the huff-puff exercises Baba Devanand does with his legs crossed in the lotus position. But right now, if I stay upside down any longer, I’ll break my neck, so I flump to the bed that smells of coriander powder and raw onions and Ma and bricks and cement and Papa. 

“Baba Jai has been proved to be a conman,” Runu-Didi shouts like the newspeople whose faces redden every night from the angry news they have to read out on TV. “Will our nation just stand and watch?” 

“Uff, Runu, you’re giving me a headache with your screaming,” Ma says from the kitchen corner of our house. She’s shaping rotis into perfect rounds with the same rolling pin that she uses to whack my backside when I shout bad words while Didi talks to Nana-Nani on Ma’s mobile phone. 

“I won I won I won,” Didi sings now. She’s louder than next-door’s TV and next-to-next-door’s howling baby and the neighbors who squabble every day about who stole water from whose water barrel. 

I stick my fingers in my ears. Runu-Didi’s lips move but it’s as if she’s speaking the bubble language of fish in a glass tank. I can’t hear a word of her chik-chik. If I lived in a big house, I would take my shut-ears and run up the stairs two at a time and squash myself inside a cupboard. But we live in a basti, so our house has only one room. Papa likes to say that this room has everything we need for our happiness to grow. He means me and Didi and Ma, and not the TV, which is the best thing we own. 

From where I’m lying on the bed, I can see the TV clearly. It looks down on me from a shelf that also holds steel plates and aluminum tins. Round letters on the TV screen say, Dilli: Police Commissioner’s Missing Cat Spotted. Sometimes the Hindi news is written in letters that look like they are spurting blood, especially when the newspeople ask us tough questions we can’t answer, like: 

Does a Ghost Live in the Supreme Court? 
or 
Are Pigeons Terrorists Trained by Pakistan? 
or 
Is a Bull this Varanasi Sari Shop’s Best Customer? 
or 
Did a Rasgulla Break Up Actress Veena’s Marriage? 

Ma likes such stories because she and Papa can argue about them for hours. 

My favorite shows are ones that Ma says I’m not old enough to watch, like Police Patrol and Live Crime. Sometimes Ma switches off the TV right in the middle of a murder because she says it’s too sick-making. But sometimes she leaves it on because she likes guessing who the evil people are and telling me how the policemen are sons-of-owls for never spotting criminals as fast as she can. 

Runu-Didi has stopped talking to stretch her hands behind her back. She thinks she’s Usain Bolt, but she’s only on the school’s relay team. Relay isn’t a real sport. That’s why Ma and Papa let her take part though some of the chachas and chachis in our basti say running brings dishonor to girls. Didi says basti-people will shut up once her team wins the inter-district tournament and also the state championships. 

My fingers are going numb in my ears, so I pull them out and wipe them against my cargo pants that are already spattered with ink and mud and grease. All my clothes are dirty like these pants, my uniform too. 

I have been asking Ma to let me wear the new uniform that I got free from school this winter, but Ma keeps it on top of a shelf where I can’t reach it. She says only rich people throw clothes away when there’s still life left in them. If I show her how my brown trousers end well above my ankles, Ma will say even film stars wear ill-fitting clothes because it’s the latest fashion. 

She’s still making up things to trick me like she did when I was smaller than I’m now. She doesn’t know that every morning, Pari and Faiz laugh when they see me and tell me I look like a joss stick but one that smells of fart.
 
“Ma, listen, my uniform—” I say and I stop because there’s a scream from outside so loud I think it will squish the walls of our house. Runu-Didi gasps and Ma’s hand brushes against a hot pan by mistake and her face goes all sharp and jagged like bitter-gourd skin. 

I think it’s Papa trying to scare us. He’s always singing old Hindi songs in his hairy voice that rolls down the alleys of our basti like an empty LPG cylinder, waking up stray dogs and babies and making them bawl. But then the scream punches our walls again, and Ma switches off the stove and we run out of the house. 

The cold slithers up my bare feet. Shadows and voices judder across the alley. The smog combs my hair with fingers that are smoky but also damp at the same time. People shout, “What’s happening? Has something happened? Who’s screaming? Did someone scream?” Goats that their owners have dressed in old sweaters and shirts so they won’t catch a chill hide under the charpais on both sides of the alley. The lights in the hi-fi buildings near our basti blink like fireflies and then disappear. The current’s gone off. 

I don’t know where Ma and Runu-Didi are. Women wearing clinking glass bangles hold up mobile-phone torches and kerosene lanterns but their light is wishy-washy in the smog. 

Everyone around me is taller than I am, and their worried hips and elbows knock into my face as they ask each other about the screams. We can tell by now that they are coming from Drunkard Laloo’s house. 

“Something bad is going on over there,” a chacha who lives in our alley says. “Laloo’s wife was running around the basti, asking if anyone had seen her son. She was even at the rubbish ground, calling his name.” 

“That Laloo too, na, all the time beating his wife, beating his children,” a woman says. “Just you wait and see, one day his wife will also disappear. What will that useless fellow do for money then? From where will he get his hooch, haan?” 

I wonder which one of Drunkard Laloo’s sons is missing. The eldest, Bahadur, is a stutterer who is in my class. 

The earth twitches as a metro train rumbles underground somewhere near us. It will worm out of a tunnel, zoom past half-finished buildings, and climb up a bridge to an above-ground station before returning to the city because this is where the Purple Line ends. The metro station is new, and Papa was one of the people who built its sparkly walls. Now he’s making a tower so tall they have to put flashing red lights on top to warn pilots not to fly too low. 

The screams have stopped. I’m cold and my teeth are talking among themselves. Then Runu-Didi’s hand darts out of the darkness, snatches me, and drags me forward. She runs fast, as if she’s competing in a relay race and I’m the baton she’s about to pass to a teammate. 

“Stop,” I say, hitting the brakes. “Where are we going?” 

“Didn’t you hear what people were saying about Bahadur?”

“He’s lost?” 

“You don’t want to find out more?” 

Runu-Didi can’t see my face in the smog but I nod. We follow a lantern swinging from someone’s hands, but it’s not bright enough to show us the puddles where washing-up water has collected and we keep stepping into them. The water is icky and I should turn around but I also want to know what happened to Bahadur. Teachers never ask him questions in class because of his stammer. When I was in Standard Two, I tried going ka-ka-ka too, but that only got me a rap on the knuckles with a wooden ruler. Ruler beatings hurt much worse than canings.

Editorial Reviews

A dazzling debut.”—The Guardian

“Warning: If you begin reading the book in the morning, don’t expect to get anything done the rest of the day. . . . In Jai, Anappara has created a boy vivid in his humanity, one whose voice somersaults on the page.”—The New York Times Book Review

“[Jai’s] remarkable voice retains a stubborn lightness, a will to believe in the possibility of deliverance in this fallen world.”—The Washington Post

“A moving case for perseverance and hope.”—Time

“Jai is endearing, entertaining, and earnest; he keeps you on the edge of your seat. He is curious, courageous, cheeky, and unabashedly, unapologetically speaking his mind, and the truth.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“There’s nothing quite like coming across a writer whose style is a world in itself. . . . Jubilantly and astutely written, bursting with compassion for its characters and a sense of vivid adventure, at once both childlike and wise.”—Financial Times

“[An] entrancing novel . . . full of humor, warmth, and heartbreak.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“This fictional account of a serious problem is told with humor, grace, and tension—giving a sense of the overcrowded slums and the friendship, suspicion, and love found within them.”—NPR

“A debut novel that is teeming with life despite its deadly subject matter.”—The Irish Times

“More than a thriller, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a moving coming-of-age story. . . . Anappara’s vision of this community is vibrant, rather than defined by lack.”—Paste

“Storytelling at its best—not just sympathetic, vivid, and beautifully detailed, but completely assured and deft . . . We care about these characters from the first page and our concern for them is richly repaid.”—Anne Enright, Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Gathering

“[An] entrancing novel . . . full of humor, warmth, and heartbreak . . . Anappara paints all of her characters, even the lost ones, with deep empathy, and her prose is winningly exuberant. . . . Engaging characters, bright wit, and compelling storytelling make a tale that’s bleak at its core profoundly moving.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A model of verisimilitude . . . [Jai] comes to life on the page to live on in readers’ memories.”—Booklist

“[Anappara’s] bright, propulsive prose . . . only accentuates the seriousness of her subject: the disappearance of children from villages in India, a real-life issue give intimate treatment here.”—Library Journal

“A stunningly original tale . . . I stayed up late every night until I finished, reluctant to part from Deepa Anappara’s heart-stealing characters.”—Etaf Rum, New York Times bestselling author of A Woman Is No Man

“A brilliant debut.”—Ian McEwan

From the Publisher

12/09/2019

Anappara’s witty, resonant debut tracks a series of child disappearances from an Indian slum through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy. Jai lives with his friends Pari and Faiz in a slum next to a rubbish dump and the crowded Bhoot Bazaar, part of an unnamed city constantly beset by smog. An opening tale of a local benevolent ghost named Mental introduces the children’s shared magical thinking. When Jai and his friends learn that one of their classmates, Bahadur, has been missing for several days, Jai, a fan of police shows, decides that he and his friends will do their own detective work and find Bahadur since the police show little interest in the matter. Jai’s carefree nature lends a lighthearted tone to an increasingly grim tale as more children disappear and his team of sleuths find evidence pointing to a serial killer. His quest is aided by Pari’s voracious reading habits, which make her the better detective, and Faiz’s Muslim faith, which helps them stay on course when his community is blamed for the kidnappings. Interspersed with the trio’s investigation are single chapters devoted to each of the disappeared children. The prose perfectly captures all the characters’ youthful voices, complete with some Hindi and Urdu terms, whose meanings, if not immediately obvious, become clear with repetition. Anappara’s complex and moving tale showcases a strong talent. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

This audiobook is much more than a mystery; it is an intimate record of the poverty, the misery, and the aspirations of those living in marginalized and vulnerable communities in India where children are disappearing. Narrator Antonio Aakeel voices 9-year-old Jai, a fan of police television shows who decides that he and his buddies will find the missing children. While Aakeel doesn’t sound like a child, he does masterfully convey Jai’s boyish enthusiasm, fears, and frustrations. Himesh Patel skillfully narrates the tales of the djinns that introduce each section. Indira Varma narrates the afterword by author and journalist Deepa Anappara, who shares that the origins of this story are based on her investigations into the tragedy of missing children. E.Q. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

MAY 2021 - AudioFile

This audiobook is much more than a mystery; it is an intimate record of the poverty, the misery, and the aspirations of those living in marginalized and vulnerable communities in India where children are disappearing. Narrator Antonio Aakeel voices 9-year-old Jai, a fan of police television shows who decides that he and his buddies will find the missing children. While Aakeel doesn’t sound like a child, he does masterfully convey Jai’s boyish enthusiasm, fears, and frustrations. Himesh Patel skillfully narrates the tales of the djinns that introduce each section. Indira Varma narrates the afterword by author and journalist Deepa Anappara, who shares that the origins of this story are based on her investigations into the tragedy of missing children. E.Q. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

MAY 2021 - AudioFile

★ 2019-10-28
A debut novel by an Indian journalist tells a story full of humor, warmth, and heartbreak about children growing up in a Delhi shantytown.

The narrator of most of this entrancing novel is 9-year-old Jai, who lives with his parents and older sister, Runu-Didi, in a basti, or slum, near the terminus of Delhi's Purple Line train tracks. When a school friend, a shy boy named Bahadur, disappears, Jai, an avid fan of TV crime shows, goes into action. He and his two best friends, a bright girl named Pari and a hardworking boy called Faiz, investigate. Young as they are, they know all too well how little regard the police have for people like them. Their basti is reminiscent of the Mumbai neighborhood depicted in Katherine Boo's Beyond the Beautiful Forevers: riven with grinding poverty yet bursting with life and always under threat of being bulldozed if the powers that be are unhappy. Jai has loving parents who work tirelessly to support their two kids, but he also knows how to chew a twig "to fool my tummy into thinking more food is on its way" when his next meal is uncertain. There's an almost Harry Potter-ish vibe to the relationship among the three intrepid kids, and Jai's voice is irresistible: funny, vivid, smart, and yet always believably a child's point of view. Anappara paints all of her characters, even the lost ones, with deep empathy, and her prose is winningly exuberant. But she also brings a journalist's eye to her story, one that is based on the shocking numbers of children who disappear from Indian cities every day. Jai wants to believe that Faiz is right when he says Bahadur was spirited away by a mythical djinn because the reality of his fate, and those of other children even closer to Jai, is too dreadful.

Engaging characters, bright wit, and compelling storytelling make a tale that's bleak at its core and profoundly moving.

Kirkus Reviews