Author Deepa Anappara on the importance of putting children ‘at the heart of the story’ in Djinn Patrol on the Purple LineThe novel tells the story of Jai, a nine-year-old boy who watches too many reality cop shows, thinks he’s smarter than his friend Pari and considers himself to be a better boss than Faiz .
Because I used to interview children for my reports on the impact of poverty on their schooling, I was interested in finding out how they made sense of these disappearances, how they lived with the fear of being kidnapped. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is an attempt to answer those questions through fiction. The children in my novel are composites of the children I had met and interviewed as a reporter. In Jai and his friends, I have tried to recreate their swagger and humour.
It was important to me that this story be narrated by a child so that we saw their viewpoint – how did they understand the horrors unfolding around them? What were their fears and hopes? What stories did they tell themselves about what was happening? Children seldom have any agency in these situations, and therefore, I wanted to put them at the heart of the story.
I wrote this novel so that children would be at the centre of a story about their disappearances, so it was important for me that they be present on the page, narrating their own stories for themselves. I think there is always a gap between who we think we are, and how the world sees us, and this gap is most evident in the chapters in which the missing children tell their own stories. We realise that even those closest to the children don’t really know them, or what they are up to.
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