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Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara review – a dazzling debut

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/30/djinn-patrol-on-the-purple-line-by-deepa-anappara-review

Plucky young sleuths in a novel about child trafficking expose the brutal realities of life in an Indian shantytown

Deepa Anappara’s debut novel begins with nine-year-old Jai competing with his older sister in a headstand competition on the bed. From his upside-down perspective, he can see five holes in the tin roof of his house: “There might be more, but I can’t see them because the black smog outside has wiped the stars off the sky.” On the TV (“the best thing we own”) he watches a jaunty news item headlined “Dilli: Police Commissioner’s Missing Cat Spotted”. He can also see his mother shaping rotis in the kitchen corner, because their house has only one room. Still, as Jai’s father says: “This room has everything we need for our happiness to grow.”

We’re in the shantytown of an unnamed Indian city, and the TV’s cheerful solicitousness about the missing cat soon seems ironic as the scene is interrupted by a scream, and the family goes outside to learn that Jai’s schoolmate Bahadur has disappeared. What’s more, the authorities are callously indifferent; a police constable allows Bahadur’s terrified parents to bribe him with their only valuable possession, a gold necklace, only to insist that the boy will come back on his own. Jai resolves that, like the heroes of his favourite TV show Police Patrol, he will find Bahadur himself and unmask the evildoers. Soon he’s hot on the trail, enlisting his schoolfriends, Pari and Faiz, in the effort. The sensible and studious Pari is reluctant from the beginning, and Faiz, who is from a Muslim family, keeps insisting that the real culprits are djinni, who are unlikely to be caught by sleuthing. But as more kids disappear, and the grownups seem more interested in blaming their Muslim neighbours than in finding the culprits, Jai’s trio of juvenile detectives seem to be the missing children’s only hope.

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