Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

Original novel alert! Oh what a pleasure to discover a debut author whose book has a genre defying plot when so many "hot" new titles are just same old, same old. Deepa Anappara's (https://www.deepa-anappara.com/) "Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line" is informed by her first career as a journalist working in India's bastis (slums) and though the subject matter, the kidnapping, killing or trafficking of children is devastating, Anappara remarkably manages to inject snippets of humor and hope.

To even call the neighborhood of filthy, tin-roofed, single room hovels a slum is being too kind, but seeing it through the eyes of our precocious, optimistic, funny narrator, nine-year-old Jai, we understand that this is his and his family's home, a place of love and caring. Jai and his older sister are in school, both parents have jobs, and the community acts as caretakers, that is until the system breaks down and children start to vanish.

Jai's family owns one special item - a TV. Jai is addicted to Police Patrol. He engages his wonderfully overactive imagination and his two best friends, Pari, the smartest girl in his class, and Faiz who, at nine, already works in a tea shop where he picks up the basti gossip, to form a detective agency. Everyone knows that the police will be no help to a basti family. The police will take a bribe and walk away without a word. They would rather bulldoze the community than investigate even one missing child. 

As the three budding sleuths attend classes, interact with the neighbors, and prowl the dangerous marketplace with photos of the lost children in hand, the reader is treated to a vivid picture of daily life in a Delhi slum and a visceral sense of the odors of garbage and sewage mixed with the tantalizing aromas of tandoori chicken and spices. You feel at once the beauty and the despair, the pride and the anger of people locked in lives that offer no way up and no way out. This is especially so when you read the alternating chapters told from the perspectives of the missing young people themselves.

Anappara, now a professor and doctoral candidate in the UK, won a human rights media award for her work in Mumbai and Delhi reporting on the impact of poverty and religious violence on the street children of these cities. She wraps up the these hard facts in a beautifully written story, perhaps to make them go down more palatably. Class, race, and religion are insurmountable barriers to success yet Jai's voice keeps us from despairing.