Daily Recco, December 30: There is a Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

Remember the time in your childhood when you fancied yourself as Sherlock Holmes and used to look out for mysteries to solve? Be it finding the hidden bag of candies at home or spying on the new “shady-looking” neighbour, who in your over-imaginative child-brain is an escaped convict?

This is what three preteen friends try to do to find their missing classmate in Deepa Anappara’s coming-of-age novel Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line. Nine-year-old Jai considers himself to be smarter than his friends Pari and Faiz, who incidentally are the brain and brawn behind their sojourns. When one of their classmates goes missing, Jai sees it as an opportunity to bring out his hidden detective, which has been developed and honed from emulating reality police shows on TV. His assistants in this adventure are Pari and Faiz.

The city (that may or may not be Delhi, despite the mention of the Purple Line Metro and the basti underneath) is dangerous, the children are daring, parents are worried, the police is indifferent, and then there is an entire angle of the children’s souls being snatched by djinns. The elements put together make Deepa’s writing racy.

The way the novel is structured around children with the intricacies of their behaviour accurately portrayed reflects the author’s training and work as a journalist. Deepa’s research and reportage on poverty and religious violence affecting children, their lives and education, has bagged her the Developing Asia Journalism Awards, the Every Human has Rights Media Awards, and the Sanskriti-Prabha Dutt Fellowship in Journalism. 

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is Deepa's debut novel that has also bagged her the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize in 2019, was shortlisted for the 2020 JCB Prize and long-listed for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction.

Read the novel to unravel the mysterious world of children in a remote basti of sprawling Indian cities, their thoughts and challenges.

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