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theStack A childhood drAmA

thAt is wild, intimAte
Superhuman river — StorieS of the GanGa Drawing on a spate of disappearances in metropolitan
By Bidisha Banerjee; Aleph; 226 pages; 499 India, Djinn Patrol captures the fierce warmth, resilience
and bravery that can emerge in time of trouble
Bidisha Banerjee confesses to have been fascinated with the Ganga
ever since she pretended as a child, that the Kolkata municipal Down market lanes crammed with too many
tapwater was Gangajal. “In 2009, I heard that the people, dogs, and rickshaws, past stalls that smell of
Ganga was going to dry up by 2035... this claim hit cardamom and sizzling oil, below a smoggy sky that
me like a bucket of cold water. I was studying in the doesn’t let through a single blade of sunlight, and
US, and was fortunate enough to be able to return to all the way at the end of the Purple metro line lies a
India and travel along the majestic river. I witnessed jumble of tin-roofed homes where nine-year-old Jai
a solar eclipse from the river at Varanasi and trekked lives with his family. From his doorway, he can spot
up to Gaumukh, where its waters begin. By January the glittering lights of the city’s fancy high-rises, and
2010, it turned out that — even though the effects of though his mother works as a maid in one, to him
global warming are causing the Himalayan glaciers they seem a thousand miles away. Djinn Patrol on the
that feed the Ganga to melt — the 2035 figure was an Purple Line plunges readers deep into this neighbor-
overstatement and the Ganga, at least in our lifetime, will not run hood to trace the unfolding of a tragedy through the
out of water,” Banerjee, who has been trained in environmental sci- eyes of a child as he has his first perilous collisions
ence and climate change policy, explains with much feeling. with an unjust and complicated wider world.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jai drools outside sweet shops, watches too many
reality police shows, and con-
CapitaliSmS — towardS a Global hiStory siders himself to be smarter
Edited by Kaveh Yazdani & Dilip M Menon; Oxford University Press than his friends Pari (though
she gets the best grades)
Here is a scholarly works that challenges conventional wisdom that and Faiz (though Faiz has an
capitalism is a Western concept. In India, writes David actual job). When a classmate
Wishbrook, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, goes missing, Jai decides to
“wealth has come to be accumulated and secured use the crime-solving skills
in the hands of a very narrow elite, entry to which he has picked up from TV to
is protected by various forms of social ascription find him. He asks Pari and
— religion, caste and family. However, and recipro- Faiz to be his assistants, and
cally, labour has been increasingly stripped of its together they draw up lists
share in the social product and seen its skills and of people to interview and
security ‘casuslised’ as its community institutions places to visit.
suffer even more intensive battering and squeez- But what begins as a
ing. “If this process is what actually produces the fastest-growing game turns sinister as other
capitalist economy in the contemporary world, it leaves room for a children start disappearing from their neighborhood.
provocative thought. Perhaps Anglo-Americana ought no longer to Jai, Pari and Faiz have to confront terrified parents, an
be regarded as providing the template for understanding the global indifferent police force, and rumors of soul-snatching
history of capitalism,” Wishbrook concludes. djinns. As the disappearances edge ever closer to
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- home, the lives of Jai and his friends will never be the
same again.
CalCutta niGhtS Drawing on real incidents and a spate of disap-
By Hemendra Kumar Roy; Niyogi Books; 138 pages; 295 pearances in metropolitan India, Djinn Patrol on
the Purple Line is extraordinarily moving, flawlessly
What a punch this slim volume packs as it unveils the darkest imagined, and a triumph of suspense. It captures
secrets of the City of Palaces from Chitpur bordellos to Chinese the fierce warmth, resilience, and bravery that can
opium dens! “I have been witness to most of the things mentioned emerge in times of trouble and carries the reader
here,” says Roy in what he describes as a book written “for an adult headlong into a community that, once encountered, is
male audience” that was published almost a century impossible to forget.
ago. Calcutta, then the capital of British India, was A former journalist, Anappara won much acclaim
teeming with people from different parts of the coun- for her debut novel, winning several prestigious work-
try besides Europeans and other foreigners. It was a in-progress awards for her early chapters.
city of sin, pleasure and suffering. All this created a According to Anappara, as many as 180 children
unique cosmopolitan setting, coloured with shades go missing every day in India. Having worked as a
of debauchery, darkness and crime. As the author journalist in Delhi and Mumbai, she is familiar with
puts it, “like a detective, I have roamed the streets to the conditions in Indian slums. She writes: “The idea
gather these accounts. While gathering the accounts for this novel was sparked by my anger and disap-
of the prostitutes’ quarters, I have received assistance pointment at a system that had failed the very people
from many first rate ‘experts’. it was supposed to protect.”

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