Book Review: Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

Book: Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

Author: Deepa Anappara

Pages: 368

Read: Hardcover pictured above

Read in: 4-5 hours

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Plot Summary: Three friends venture into the most dangerous corners of a sprawling Indian city to find their missing classmate.

Down 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.

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.

General Thoughts: This book has been garnering all the praise and alllll the hype even before it released. Normally, this kind of hype gives me cause to pause. But the premise of this book and it's setting called out to me and I am so glad I threw caution to the wind and went ahead and got this and read. 

IT DESERVES ALL THE PRAISE. 

Seriously, all the praise. 

It recently got long listed for the Women's Prize and I am sure this is just the beginning. 

Things I Liked:

1. Let's get this out of the way, this is a very well written, very atmospheric book. You are with Jai, Pari and Faiz in their basti (slum), you can feel the heavy smog settling into your lungs, you can see the slivers of a grey sky through the jangle of overhead wires, you can feel the menace of dark nights when someone is lurking in the shadows ready to pounce on you, you can smell the stench and feel the claustrophobia of tiny dwellings. Bringing the slums to life- brilliantly done! It shows that the author has spent time in various slums meeting and getting to know the people, who live there. I love when people write what they know! 

2. I loved how there are so many little stories interwoven to form the colourful tapestry of this beautiful book. We see the lives of many characters in the slum as well as of kids who beg on the street, kids who collect garbage for a living and just people who've lived and died before in the slum and the streets. Each of these stories was lovely in its own way- full of heartbreak in some cases and heartwarming in some others. 

3. The characters in this book are so well crafted and so lovely! The three kids- Jai, Pari and Faiz- are so real. They are not "over-smart" or "too mature" but just kids with varying levels of street smarts. Jai is the one, who fancies himself as the detective, inspired by his addiction to true crime police shows and detective stories. When the first child- Bahadur- goes missing, Jai is the one, who sagely tells Pari and Faiz that the first 48 hours after a child goes missing are critical in order to find him/her safely. Pari is the smart one. She is intelligent and is able to get people to talk and has the best ideas to take their investigation forward. Faiz is not directly involved in the kids' "investigation", but he helps get information and also helps out with money, since of the 3 kids, he is the one with multiple little jobs and, ergo, an income! 

Apart from the 3 kid detectives, we also get to see little snippets of the lives of the kids that go missing. Don't want to spoil anything, but a missing little five year old girl's story just broke my heart into a billion little pieces. 

The grownups in the basti are also interesting and real. As the number of missing children continues to rise, we see these poor parents- most of who are daily wage earners- come up with ways of babysitting their kids. We see people with vested interests, we see people searching for the kids at all hours of the night, we see people banding together to help families with lost children and we also see opportunists that try to add a communal tone to the proceedings. So, there is humanity in all its shades and this makes the world of this book all the more immersive. 

4. I love how real this book is. Everything from the homes, school, red light areas, little market places, families, relationships, people and situations. Nothing seems contrived or superficial. There is an air of sincerity throughout the book. 

5. Jai is a big fan and avid consumer of true crime reconstructions. Police Patrol is his show of choice, I cannot tell you how hard I related to this aspect of his character. My sister and I LOVE Crime Patrol, have for years and seeing a character being just as invested and obsessed with something we watch and love made me smile whenever it was mentioned here. And just like Jai, I guess at times, I find us being naive about 'real' police procedure too. I think like him, I expect the police to be diligent, empathetic and determined to nab the bad guys, no matter who the complainant is. But that is, unfortunately, not really the truth of our country. The police (I am sure not all of them) don't always do the right thing, don't always follow the rules and don't always do their utmost, especially for certain sections of the society. The harsh reality and the, often, callous treatment of those in need of their help was brought out really well in the book. It was hard-hitting and so, so heartbreaking to see parents beg and plead with callous cops to search for their child, to track the mobile phone of a missing teenaged girl, to just do anything really to help.  

6. I wonder if I am the only one who felt some serious Harry Potter vibes in this book. Not because of the whole Djinn thing but because of the whole Pari-Jai-Faiz trio and their shenanigans. It reminded me so much of Hermione and Harry and Ron investigating things and getting into all sorts of adventures. I don't know about you, but any book that reminds me Potter and Hogwarts is always a good thing be. 

7. This book will get under your skin, make you uncomfortable. Make you stop and think about the other side, the side that lives in close proximity to you, the one you drive past, maybe even hire help from. A world so close to us and yet it might as well be on another planet. I put the book down many times and stopped to think about how callously some people treat their help or how us urban, middle-class Indians are so blind to those, who live around us in slums and shanties. How no one really cares that so many people and children live in disgustingly dirty environs! How we've all become apathetic to the plight of our slum dwellers! Sigh. Like I said, this book gets under your skin and that's a good thing. 

Rating: 4.5/5 

Highly, highly recommend this book!