Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

Jai is nine, a connoisseur of television cop shows, resident of a basti at the end of the Purple metro line, one of the unnumbered settlements that serve an unnamed Indian megacity through its smog seasons, and when his classmate Bahadur vanishes, Jai does what Police Patrol has trained him for: he opens an investigation. He recruits Pari, the smartest child he knows, and Faiz, his Muslim best friend who keeps his own counsel about djinns, and the three run their detection through the basti's lanes, the bazaar, the metro station and the rubbish grounds, interviewing tea sellers and press wallahs with a nine year old's procedure, financed by stolen rupees and school lunch.

The comedy of the children's patrol is the novel's front, and Anappara spends it deliberately: as more children disappear, one, then another, then a girl from the basti's Hindu Muslim seam, the investigation the police refuse to conduct stays in the hands of children because nobody else will hold it. The parents' terror curdles toward communal blame, WhatsApp rumour assigning the vanishings to djinns or to the neighbours' religion according to taste, the settlement's precarity, one bulldozer order from erasure, disciplining every adult response. Jai's voice, funny, boastful, incompletely comprehending, carries the reader somewhere the ending does not soften: this is a detective story where the detective is a child because the system has decided the victims do not count.

Around three hundred and forty pages, with interleaved tales of the city's guardian spirits.

Best for readers who want the missing child procedural rebuilt from the ground the missing stand on, comic voice and documentary anger in one instrument.