User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Journalist and author Deepa Anappara draws our attention to the horrors and tragedy of the terrifyingly enormous numbers of children that go missing in India, a matter that is largely met by indifference in mainstream Indian society. The impoverished slums and community are depicted with an astonishing vibrancy as the people go about their daily lives and the challenges they face, lying within sight of the wealthy and powerful to whom the poor are invisible and a blight on their landscape. Annappara provides a pertinent social, political, cultural and economic commentary on modern India, with its huge wealth inequalities, class, sexism, crime, police corruption, abuse, exploitation, and religious tensions and divisions. Interspersed within the narrative are the folklore and superstitions that abound in the community, such as the Djinns.
Jai is a poor young 9 year old child, who is obsessed with TV crime drama shows, so when his class mate Bahadur goes missing, he wants to emulate those shows by investigating. He is assisted by the brighter and smarter girl, Pari and his friend, Faiz. In a narrative that brings danger and goes around in circles as more children disappear, their investigation comes far too close to home for Jai on a case where the grim realities of contemporary India bring a loss of innocence and underline an absence of all of childhood should be, safe, secure and protected. This is a harrowing and desperately heartbreaking read of a national tragedy where there are rarely any happy endings. A brilliant novel that highlights such an important and urgent issue in India. Many thanks to Random House Vintage for an ARC.
Rating: really liked it
4.5 "brilliant, immersive, heartbreaking" stars !!
2021 Honorable Mention ReadThank you to Netgalley, the author and Penguin Random House Canada for an ecopy of this novel. I am providing my honest review. This was released February 2020.
We are immersed in a semi-rural basti (slum in India) where children and teens begin to go missing. The police do not care but take bribes and most of the other families are busy working two and three jobs in order to survive and pay for their one room homes. The Hindus and Muslims live in an uneasy peace but blame each other for whatever calamities fall on the little community.
We see the world through 9 year old Jai and his best friends Pari (girl) and Faiz (boy) as they navigate their world through the constraints of poverty, gender, religion and family functioning. Ms. Anaparra with written artistic skill paints this world of pollution and destitution with traditions, community and will to survive. There is plenty of love in this dog eat dog dangerous world. She is able to impart the tastes, smells and sights of modern India and the difficulties and dangers that the underclasses experience day after day.
This is a sociological reflection under the guise of a mystery novel. A phenomenal debut !
Rating: really liked it
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line combines humour and warmth with tragedy and deprivation; innocence and optimism with bigotry and corruption. Despite the ‘djinn patrol’ of the title, there’s very little magic here.
Set in a
basti, or Indian slum, where children have vanished and the police are disinclined to help, the novel follows 9-year-old Jai and his friends as they play detective to try and solve the case. It’s an incredible window on daily life in such a place – the precarity of knowing the authorities could bulldoze your home at any moment, but also the strong family and community bonds that form there. The sights sounds and smells of the
basti are vividly evoked as Jai & investigate, and this immersive depiction is really well-balanced to be neither sensationalised nor sugar-coated.
The child characters are so endearing and naïve that I was a little unprepared for how dark this novel becomes by the end (I’ve since learned that the story is based on real events). The heart-wrenching conclusion really brings home some hard truths - about how poverty renders people invisible, and the way vulnerable communities are so often failed by the systems meant to protect them.
Rating: really liked it
I really enjoyed the atmosphere created. The environment reveals a distinct separation of classes and the varied lives according to social status and monetary value.
Police negligence, religious violence, and educational values are exposed through this fictional tale set in India. The language was great, and I enjoyed the story being told through the eyes of nine-year-old Jai.
“The man scratches at his feathery beard. “Kids around here disappear all the time,” he says. “One day they’ll have too much glue and decide to try their luck somewhere else. Another day they’ll get hit by a rubbish truck and end up in a hospital. Some other morning, they’ll be picked up by the police and sent to a juvenile home. We don’t make a fuss about anybody vanishing.”” The story itself became repetitive. After one child disappeared, Jai and Pari investigated and played detective, and I was into it. However, then the same thing just kept happening. Another would disappear, Jai and Pari would investigate, turn up empty handed and go home, then another disappear, etc. So,
the progress wasn’t as engaging as I would have preferred. For me, the most powerful chapters were “This Story Will Save Your Life” which were mostly stories of the djinns and other beliefs regarding wandering children.
My favorite scene was when Jai and Pari went to the railway station. Because of the title and blurb, I have to admit that I thought a big portion of this novel would take place around the railway. However, there was only one big scene there in the beginning. I wasn’t too pleased with the ending, but I respect the underlying messages delivered to the reader through that conclusion.
I think the themes embedded in this story are significantly valuable. However, the progression of the story was uniform. Overall, I liked the story because of the important leitmotifs. Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for this copy. Opinions are my own.
More on railway children:
Railway Children in India
What happens to "railway" children
Rating: really liked it
Thank you, Random House, for the gifted book.
In Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, journalist and author, Deepa Anappara, has the reader firmly on the ground in an Indian basti, with its sights, sounds, and smells of the yummy food wafting through the neighborhood, and all of it is through the eyes of the lovable child narrator, Jai.
The book draws attention to the large number of children who go missing in India daily. Did you know close to 200 children go missing there each day? Jai takes us along with him to school, among his small group of friends, within his home in the basti with his loving parents, and chachis who keep an eye on him, too, and in the local bazaar. One by one, children in the basti disappear, and everyone becomes more unsettled, rightfully so, seeking police help with little avail. The author’s insightful note at the end is a must-read for why she wrote the book and its importance to her.
This book was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, and it is most definitely worthy. Seamlessly written, with a powerful and critical message, I thank the author for this most thoughtful and thought-provoking book.
Many of my reviews can also be found on my blog: www.jennifertarheelreader.com and instagram: www.instagram.com/tarheelreader
Rating: really liked it
First and foremost, a large thank you to NetGalley, Deepa Anappara and Penguin Random House Canada for providing me with a copy of this publication, which allows me to provide you with an unbiased review.Delving into to the darker side of life in India, Deepa Anappara presents readers with this most impactful mystery. With close to two hundred children disappearing off Indian streets daily, this story about a missing child leaves the reader feeling a little less than comfortable. Jai may only be nine years old, but he seems to know just how life ought to be. When a boy goes missing in his school, Jai works with some of his friends to locate the young boy. Well-versed on police procedurals from his time watching television, Jai is sure hat he can lead a brigade just like on the screen. He’ll come across a great deal fo poverty, with people who will do and sell anything for their next meal, and travel late into the night to the far reaches of the city, all in hopes of capturing a killer, just like those on television. Refusing to back down, Jai encounters a number of stumbling blocks along the way, including incompetent police officers, members of gangs, and even the mysterious djinn, a spirit with a penchant for children. Forgetting the danger that creeps up regularly Jai will not return without answers, all in a place where another missing child is swept into the rubbish bin and forgotten. Jai refuses to ignore his intuition, even as those around him write him off as foolish. An interesting take with a strong backstory, surely of interest to some readers. That being said, I could not effectively connect with the story and it left me needing more to sustain my attention.
I am always fascinated to learn about new countries and cultures, particularly when the reader hails from that part of the world. Deepa Anappara not only spent her early life in India, but has written extensively about child disappearances and poverty on the streets. She brings much to the table in this piece, using a number of essential young characters to give the story a different perspective. The use of Jai and his friends helps to enrich the story for a reader who may know little about life on the streets or the horrible statistics about missing children. As this young boy looks for his classmate, he is fuelled by the sense that he, too, can locate someone in short order, as though he were closing a case before the credits scroll, like his favourite television personalities. The cast of characters seems to work well, different from one another and always trying to provide additional flavouring when it is useful. The story itself was well crafted and paces itself relatively well. I suppose I found myself lost in the shuffle from character depictions and how things developed. There is a strong story and the narrative keeps the reader intrigued, but I could not find a place on which to latch myself. Like many of the faceless people who see and hear nothing, I felt as though the essential aspects of the book passed me by. To see that others enjoyed it is pleasing, though I am surely going to sit in the minority outside the tent and say that this book was not one I found stellar.
Kudos, Madam Anappara, for shedding some light on the horrors of missing children. I trust many will find the pieces I could not in this novel and give you the praise you seek.
Love/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/
A Book for All Seasons, a different sort of Book Challenge: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
Rating: really liked it
This is a tragic story that underlines the shocking fact that an estimated 180 children go missing in India each day. It describes the religious, social, and financial divides problematic in modern India. The story immersed me in the vibrantly described sights, food and fragrances of its slum setting. Here the people mostly love their children and care for the people in their neighbourhood despite the poverty, drudgery, and the squalor in which they live. The trauma of missing children began to raise their suspicions, and anger at their corrupt and inefficient police force.
Nine-year-old Jai, a Hindu schoolboy is obsessed with detective and police shows on TV. He decides to become a child detective and enlists two of his schoolmates to serve as his assistants after a boy at his school, Bahadur, goes missing. Pari is smarter but is given a subordinate role because she is a girl. His friend Faiz, is. Moslem boy. He misses a lot of school as he needs to work to help his parents. Their investigation starts amidst complete indifference by the local police. The police make no effort to look for Bahadur, claiming he ran away.
The investigations by the three amateur detectives takes them into very dangerous parts of the city, such as the busy marketplace, the filthy local dump, the bordello district, and the train station at the end of the Blue Line. Rising above their dirty, ramshackle slum neighbourhood can be seen the highrise apartments and penthouses of the wealthy. As they interview families, shopkeepers, friends and suspects, they find no evidence of what happened to their missing schoolmate. Jai and Faiz suspect he may have been snatched by an evil Jinn (spirit), but the less superstitious Pari tries to dissuade them of this belief.
Soon other children go missing. Omvir, a friend of Bahadur, vanishes. Next, a 16-year-old girl, Aanchal, disappears. The police insist that Omvir has simply run away and refuse any search effort. Aanchal was a good girl employed as a beautician while studying English in hopes of becoming a call centre worker. The police, with no valid evidence, said she was a brothel worker in her 20s and had run away with a much older Moslem lover. When next, a 4-year-old girl disappears, not only are the parents of the missing distraught, but the entire neighbourhood is frantic and afraid for the safety of the children.
Since these five children were all Hindus, the suspicion and blame falls on local Moslems, putting innocent Moslem lives are in danger. When people complain about the inefficiency and disinterest of the police, they are threatened that their homes will be bulldozed for stirring up trouble. The case becomes more difficult when two Moslem children, a brother and sister, are next to disappear. Jai is becoming discouraged with his Djinn Patrol’s lack of progress, and then to add to the tragic crime wave, his older sister, a star athlete, is next to disappear.
Will Jai and his two friends manage to find any of the missing youngsters or any evidence of what happened to them? Who is committing these atrocious crimes? What is the motivation? Will his sister be found in time? What will be the aftermath for their families and neighbours?
Many thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for this poignant and heartfelt story based on alarming facts.
Rating: really liked it
Fourth read from the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction longlist.Most enjoyable for the richness of its sensory details. Cravings for samosas and tikka masala inevitably follow. It's easy to forget Deepa Anappara's protagonist is only nine years old, despite the occasional references to poop. The narrative structure is formulaic and the final chapters feel rushed, yet Anappara succeeds at piercing the smog-choked alleys of marginalized communities to reveal disturbing realities in present day India.
Verdict:
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line offers a robust sensory experience in lieu of suspense.
One of them whispered Mental's real name, which was a secret known only to them, and a shadow stirred in the lane. The boys thought it was a cat or a flying fox, though there was a charge in the air, the metallic taste of electricity on their tongues, the flicker of a rainbow-coloured bolt of light, gone so soon they could have only imagined it.
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The sky roiled blackish-blue above tangled cables and dusty street lamps. The market was mostly accustomed to the distant, steady thrum of the highway. His nose learnt to catch the weakest of smells from hours before - marigold garlands, sliced papayas served with a pinch of chaat powder on top, puris fried in oil - to guide his steps to the right or left in dark corners.
Rating: really liked it
[2.8] The strength of this novel is the vivid setting of the Indian basti (slum) and surrounding city that 9-year old Jai navigates. It is written as a light-hearted caper featuring Jai imitating a TV detective to find a missing friend. Until more children go missing and it is clear that there is a serious problem, it feels like a middle-grade novel. I ended up skimming the 2nd half. I'm not sure who the intended audience is - but it isn't me.
Thank you to Random House for the ARC.
Rating: really liked it
Anappara’s excellent debut novel is written from the POVs of children about children. As an Indian journalist, Anappara covered the deeply disturbing tragedy of children disappearing at the rate of nearly 180 per day. She felt that the personal stories of these children were getting lost amidst the appalling statistics. Thus, she wrote this novel primarily from the POV of Jai.
Nine-year-old Jai lives in a huge Indian basti (slum) in view of the ‘hi-fi’ luxury apartment buildings where his mother works as a housecleaner. He is the main narrator, although the stories of other children are included. He loves the TV program Police Patrol and when one of his classmates disappears, he convinces his friends Pari and Faiz to join him to find Bahadar. This endeavor may begin like a Young Adult mystery, but becomes darker as more children disappear and fear takes hold of the basti. Jai’s initial cheerfulness and swagger dissipate in the face of ever increasing danger.
Anappara infuses serious issues troubling her native India in her tale: the huge wealth inequities, the Hindu class system, misogyny, police corruption, and the Hindu-Moslem divisions. Recommend.
Rating: really liked it
“Do you know there are people who will make you their slaves? You’ll be locked up in the bathroom and let out only to clean the house. Or you’ll be taken across the border to Nepal and forced to make bricks in kilns where you won’t be able to breathe. Or you’ll be sold to criminal gangs that force children to snatch mobiles and wallets.” Hundreds of children go missing in India and some do not survive. The author of the book wanted to draw attention to these facts, but she also wanted to show the “resilience, cheerfulness and swagger” of the marginalized children that she had interviewed when she was a journalist. Those characteristics are captured in Jai, the 9 year old amateur detective, and his friends who try to track down why one if their schoolmates has disappeared. And he is not the only one who fails to return home. At least Jai tried to solve the mystery, which is more than can be said for the police, despite the bribes that they received from people who really couldn’t afford to pay them.
The mystery and detection part of this book was just ok for me. What I really liked about the book were the incredible details about life in a basti (poor area) of India. The author doesn’t bother to translate for non Indians so it’s like a disorienting immersion in the country - including the homes, jobs, food, schools, pay toilets and smog. For example: “Quarter runs a gang that beats up teachers and rents out fake parents to students when they get into trouble and the headmaster insists on meeting their ma-papas.”, “...he stops at a theka in Bhoot Bazaar to drink a quarter-peg of daru, which is how he got the name Quarter.” and “His nose learned to catch the weakest of smells from hours before – marigold garlands, sliced papayas served with a pinch of chaat powder on top, puris fried in oil — to guide his steps to the right or left in dark corners.”
The story is told primarily from Jai’s point of view, and he was a terrific child, but then there are also chapters from the point of view of each of the missing children. So, I liked the descriptions and the voices, but I’m just not that crazy about child detectives. Overall, I found the book both educational and moving.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
Rating: really liked it
Jail lives in a poor slum in India. Children start going missing and he decides to investigate like the detectives do in his favourite TV shows. But Jai is just nine years old. The local police are not interested in finding the children.
The depiction of slum life is harrowing. It has also been sensitively written. Sometimes the book is a bit confusing and repetitive. The story is intriguing, funny and heart wrenching. I really liked Jai and his two friends who tried to find the missing children. The story is tb old from Jai's point of view. The author paints a picture of what life is like living in a slum.
I would like to thank NetGalley, Random House UK, Vintage Publishing and the author Deepa Anappara for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Rating: really liked it
180 children go missing each day in India. Only 1 in 3 will ever be found. These are staggering statistics and the basis of this novel.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a coming of age novel set in the slums of an Indian city. Young Jai has a vivid imagination and a fascination with cop shows. When one of his classmates goes missing he enlists his two best friends, Pari and Faiz, into "detectivating" with him. As the three set about on their case we are introduced to the sights, sounds, and characters that fill the basti. Although this book shifts narrators to lend a voice to the victims as they go missing, it is told entirely from the perspective of children. Ranging in age from 5 to 16 you get to see how much they are neglected and overlooked, how much responsibility is placed in their small laps and the dangers they face as they try to navigate this world. You also get to see how they pass on knowledge through stories -
"Listen. This story may save your life." You're exposed to the corruption of the police force who are more concerned with collecting their hafta than looking for the lost. Police are not there to protect but to be feared. Parents are hesitant to report crimes. The threat of bulldozers demolishing their settlement is very real. You get to see how prejudice colors the investigation. Gender bias leads to adultification of female victims. Girls are mislabeled as older. Their sexual reputation becomes a focal point. Frictions between religious groups are exacerbated as rumor and innuendo lead to vigilante justice while the people wait for the police to respond.
Deepa Anappara has spent 11 years working as a journalist in India. Through her interviews with impoverished students she got to see their pluckiness in the face of adversity. She knew that she wanted to tell this story but felt that only a novel would give her the breadth to truly tell this story from their perspective.
Special thanks to NetGalley, Random House Publishing Group and Deepa Anappara for advanced access to this book.
Rating: really liked it
This starts out strongly but then becomes very repetitive somewhere along the way. The cover makes it seem like it will be a Boys Own Adventure type deal. It is not.
Rating: really liked it
Longlisted, and hopefully shortlisted, for the 2020 Women's Prize.
The title of this novel may be a little misleading, a little baffling. This wonderful book is about children who are going missing from the basti of Jai, the nine-year-old protagonist. A “basti” refers to a slum village in India. The title of the book refers to the “djinns” who Jai’s detective partner. Faiz, continually insists are the culprits who are taking the missing children, and the purple line is the railway line that the children use to get to the bazaar where they start their initial search.
“Djinn” in this novel are described as spirits who can possess animals. There are good djinns as well as evil. Pari, the third member of the detective trio, later in the novel even suggests that they start up a tv show called, “Djinn Patrol”.
Initially it is only one child who goes missing. Bahadur is a classmate of Jai. Nobody seems to be looking for him, the police certainly don’t seem perturbed. Jai takes it upon himself to become a detective and find Bahadur. Jai’s motive for finding Bahadur is not just about finding Bahadur, who is not a friend, just a fellow classmate. Jai’s mother believes that with all the fuss that Bahadur’s mother is making she will give the corrupt police more reason to bulldoze the basti, which they have already threatened.
It takes talent to write from the perspective of a nine-year-old-child and capture the authenticity of a young mind experiencing situations they have never encountered before and Anappara does an incredible job using some beautifully descriptive writing to describe the many unique sounds, smells, and general atmosphere only found in India.
The novel also makes your mind boggle. India, the most populous democracy in the world. The clash of religion, the caste system. The seemingly infinite gap between the rich and the poor. The anachronistic feel of India, which at times seems to be a fusion of a third world country and a modern western country with all the perks of modern technology.
Anappara captures all of this beautifully.
“No one will believe me but I’m one hundred per cent pakka that my nose grows longer when I’m in the bazaar because of its smells, of tea and raw meat and buns and kebabs and rotis. My ears get bigger too, because of the sounds, ladles scraping against pans, butchers’ knives thwacking against chopping boards, rickshaws and scooters honking, and gunfire and bad words booming out of video-games parlours hidden behind grimy curtains.”
“In front of us, sparks fall on the ground from a bird’s nest of electric wires hanging over the bazaar”.As the narrative progresses more children go missing and Anappara will devote a chapter to the perspective of the missing child. This is a masterstroke and these chapters are a direct contrast to the innocence and naivety of Jai’s chapters. They enlighten the reader to the reality of what is happening, build suspense, and prepare the reader for the later darker stages of the novel.
Racism rears its ugly head when it is realised that none of the children who have gone missing are Muslim, so naturally it is immediately assumed that the culprit must be a Muslim. The clashes between Muslim and Hindu, between India and Pakistan seem to be on a never- ending cycle in the news feeds and perhaps this is a jibe at the interminable confrontations.
In these later stages of the novel it darkens more and more as it closes on the ending. I thought that this also was needed and felt it was a natural progression for the narrative.
The novel draws attention to the many children who go missing in India. Abducted and sold for slave labour, the sex trade, many stolen from their lives and never seen or heard from by their family again.
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and have to commend Anappara for how effortlessly she transported me into the mind of a child, and the slums and bazaars of India. I think we will be hearing a lot more of her name in the future, 4.5 Stars.
