Since he was 7 years old, Bahadur has been sleeping outside in the alleys of a nearby bazaar whenever his mother is forced to stay overnight “to care for madam’s feverish child or to serve guests at a party.”Īs I read this chapter and the ones that follow, I was reminded of James Wood’s “How Fiction Works” and the remark he makes in his discussion of “What Maisie Knew” - that in telling the story from a child’s vantage point, Henry James allows the reader to “live inside her confusion” but also gives us writing that’s “so flexible, so capable of inhabiting different levels of comprehension and irony.” Anappara improvises further still, inhabiting the inner world not just of one child but of a growing number of children who are lost to their families. Since the authorities couldn’t care less about Bahadur, Jai decides to investigate his classmate’s disappearance himself.īefore Jai’s jumble-tumble of an investigation can begin, the novel’s perspective shifts again as Anappara takes us, for one chapter, inside the head of the missing boy and reveals how far from the truth the basti’s gossip really is. His favorite shows are “Police Patrol” and “Live Crime.” Sometimes his mother turns them off in the middle of a murder because “it’s too sick-making.” But more often she watches with him and calls the policemen “sons-of-owls” for being so slow to catch the criminals. For Jai, who lives in a smog-blanketed city much like New Delhi, it’s the small television inside his one-room shanty that captures his imagination. In “Pather Panchali,” Apu is fascinated by nature. (Warning: If you begin reading the book in the morning, don’t expect to get anything done for the rest of the day.) But that handy formula misses the heat and mystery of what Anappara creates. In the glowing reviews that are sure to come, no doubt much will be made of the fact that Anappara started out as a journalist in Mumbai and Delhi her storytelling genius, it might be assumed, must be rooted in her reporter’s eye for detail. Even before she had finished “Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line,” her novel-in-progress had won three literary awards. ![]() Rich with easy joy, Anappara’s writing announces the arrival of a literary supernova. In Jai, Anappara has created a boy vivid in his humanity, one whose voice somersaults on the page. The focus then tightens, bringing us the story through the eyes of a 9-year-old named Jai who lives in a basti, an impoverished colony that abuts the railway line. The “Purple Line” of Deepa Anappara’s first novel is a metro system in another imaginary Indian city, and the book opens along its tracks, as seen from the perspective of a group of street boys. The book ends in a railroad station as they board a train to find a better life in a hectic city. It was based on another “first,” the debut novel of the same name, originally published in 1929 by Bhibuti Bashan Banerjee, which depicted Apu and his family in their village in rural Bengal. ![]() Its first installment, “Pather Panchali,” or “Song of the Little Road,” burst onto the world cinema scene in 1955 and remains a masterpiece. Perhaps the most trenchantly portrayed boy in India is Apu, the character at the center of Satyajit Ray’s famed film trilogy. DJINN PATROL ON THE PURPLE LINE By Deepa Anappara
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