Dec 31

Dec 31 Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

Author: Deepa Anappara
Publisher: Random House
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Three friends venture into the most dangerous corners of a sprawling Indian city to find their missing classmate.

Down market lanes crammed with too many people, dogs, and rickshaws, past stalls that smell of cardamom and sizzling oil, below a smoggy sky that doesn’t let through a single blade of sunlight, and all the way at the end of the Purple metro line lies a jumble of tin-roofed homes where nine-year-old Jai lives with his family. From his doorway, he can spot the glittering lights of the city’s fancy high-rises, and though his mother works as a maid in one, to him they seem a thousand miles away.

Jai drools outside sweet shops, watches too many reality police shows, and considers himself to be smarter than his friends Pari (though she gets the best grades) and Faiz (though Faiz has an actual job). When a classmate goes missing, Jai decides to use the crime-solving skills he has picked up from TV to find him. He asks Pari and Faiz to be his assistants, and together they draw up lists of people to interview and places to visit.

But what begins as a game turns sinister as other children start disappearing from their neighborhood. Jai, Pari, and Faiz have to confront terrified parents, an indifferent police force, and rumors of soul-snatching djinns. As the disappearances edge ever closer to home, the lives of Jai and his friends will never be the same again.

Drawing on real incidents and a spate of disappearances in metropolitan India.

TL;DR Review

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a moving story about tragedy and class in India. The plot moves slowly, but it sparkles with character and voice.

For you if: You like character-driven novels that confront reality and aren’t afraid of grief.

Full Review

“We need ghosts more than anyone else, maybe. Because we are railway station boys without parents and homes. If we are still here, it is only because we know how to summon ghosts at will.”

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line was longlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize, which is what landed it in my lap. This is exactly why I love reading literary prize lists — they help me read books that I might have taken years to prioritize otherwise. I really liked Djinn Patrol, and I’m glad I read it.

Inspired by real events, the book takes place in a metropolitan area of India, primarily in a sort of slum neighborhood where the main character, a young boy named Jai, lives. When one of his classmates goes missing — and then more and more children start to disappear — Jai summons all his knowledge from watching police shows and recruits his two best friends to help him solve the case. This takes them all over the city, giving readers the opportunity to witness and reflect on issues of class, education, policing, Islamophobia, mob mentality, family, grief, and more.

This book is beautifully written, and it’s a particular triumph in character and voice. Jai is such a vivid narrator, one we love implicitly and root for vigorously. We see his neighborhood and journey through eyes wide open — as we read, we truly are him in a way that not all first-person novels achieve.

I did think that the pacing was a bit slow, and I spent time wondering what the purpose of different scenes was. I think that’s because I really expected it to be driven more by the novel’s central mystery of the missing children. And indeed, whenever I got to one of the chapters that showed what had happened to them right before they were snatched, I became a lot more invested. But by the end, I realized that even though it’s a mystery, it’s really more about setting and character than plot.

I may reread this someday; I think it’s the kind of book that will give you a little bit more every time you read it.