The influences seep up as you read—Slumdog Millionaire of course, with its toilet lines, Kalpana Swaminathan’s chilling Greenlight and the real-life Moninder Singh Pandher’s murder house. Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line opens in the familiar territory of a basti. There, the mothers work in upper-class houses while the fathers scrape together a living. The story opens in the house of Jai and his Runu Di in a city which one puts down as Delhi because of the smog. They have a television on which Jai gets to hear exciting news like the disappearance of the police commissioner’s cat. He goes to a government school with his friend Pari and Faiz but his mind is on anything but studies.
Then, children start to vanish in ones and twos, starting with a boy called Bahadur. It is a fact that murders and disappearances occur in Indian slums where there are eyes in every corner and where gangs proliferate. Jai fancies himself as a detective and he organises his two friends in an attempt to find Bahadur when the...
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