Djinn Patrol On The Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

 

Jai and his friends Pari and Faiz live in a crowded basti or neighborhood.  His family consists of his sister, mother and father.  His father works construction and his mother works in a high rise for a rich woman, spending her days cleaning and cooking for others in a location Jai can only imagine.  What he knows are the crowded streets, the market redolent of spices and butchers and dirt.  Jai's sister is the track champion of their school but Jai isn't interested in school  He lives for his television shows, especially the police ones and imagines that he is a crime fighter as well.

Then a classmate goes missing.  Jai is sure he can find him with his friends' help.  They go around asking questions.  Faiz is sure that a djinn has taken the boy.  The boy's family go to the police but they are only interested in cases where they can get a bribe and brush the family off, saying the boy obviously ran away.  Then a second boy goes missing, then a teenage girl.  The basti, mainly Hindu, insists this must be the work of Muslims.  When Muslim children are also taken, the mystery deepens.  Can Jai and his friends find the truth?

This is a debut novel from an Indian author with a journalist background.  It explores the disparity of how crimes are investigated depending on the victim's background.  I thought about the Atlanta child murders while reading this book, how the police were slow to realize a serial killer was working the streets of Atlanta just as the police in this case were slow to investigate missing children from a basti.  Anappara uses the naivete of a child to explore how justice is often uneven depending on social class and how crime is the same in its effect no matter who it targets.  This book won the Edgar Award the year it was released and was a Woman's Fiction longlist choice.  This book is recommended for those readers interested in other cultures, mystery and literary fiction.