Author Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a quick read but haunts the readers for a long time, says Kavitha Murali
It starts as an innocuous tale of three kids, Jai, Pari, and Faiz, reminding the reader of Harry, Hermione and Ron from that magical world of Harry Potter. Jai is adventurous, not exactly studious. Pari is the intelligent and ambitious one. Faiz is a bit flaky, neither here, nor there, but his friendships are important to him. The story isn’t set in a middle class society or in a gated complex. The backdrop isn’t an orphanage or a boarding school. It is set in the slums of Delhi, where adults hop from their abodes to the high rises next door to perform their duties as house-helps and nannies, drivers and cleaners and kids roam around doing whatever they want to do.
And then, the story truly begins. Children disappear one by one from the slum. The initial hypothesis is that they have run off, for who will live in the slum and put fight for light, food and bathing water. Perhaps, they wanted to escape their drunken and abusive fathers. Oh, are more of them disappearing? Perhaps, the Djinn took them.
Our trio gets into the ring to investigate, mimicking detectives chasing clues. Their journey takes them many places within the slum, on the periphery of the highway, near the high rise, as far as the central railway station even. The reader roots for the kids, even though it sounds childish. Perhaps, they invoke memories of the 3 Investigators and Famous Five, if we could only have some hot scones and picnic baskets to go with it. But, a sharp rap on the proverbial knuckle brings one back to the real world, an unfair one that values slum children many notches lower than the other children because, aren’t they children of the slums, one of many disposables?
Deepa has built a book that can be read quick enough but will haunt the readers for a long time to come.