Scott, Sophie (May 2018). "Deepa Anappara wins Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize". www.newwriting.net . Retrieved 1 October 2020. This dazzling debut follows three children investigating a series of disappearances in the slums of India.

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line: Mystery and Thriller Books

A magnificent achievement: the endeavours of the Djinn Patrol offer us a captivating world of wit, warmth and heartbreak, beautifully crafted through a child’s unique perspective.” —Mahesh Rao, author of Polite Society I first tried writing this novel in 2009, but set it aside, unsure whether I had the authority to write about a marginalised, neglected community. I returned to it in 2016. I had written several short stories by then with child narrators; I had also read a number of books and watched films with child narrators. Added to this were my own personal experiences of loss and uncertainty, and the greater understanding of mortality that perhaps comes with age – all these factors in some way gave me the permission to write Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, and shaped its narrative.A partial of her novel won the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, and the Bridport/Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award for a First Novel. It is now being translated into 17 languages. Deepa’s short fiction has won the Dastaan Award, the Asian Writer Short Story Prize, the second prize in the Bristol Short Story awards, the third prize in the Asham awards, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where she is currently studying for a Creative-Critical Writing PhD on a CHASE doctoral fellowship. 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. It doesn’t help that the protagonist, Jai, is the least interesting character in the book. I realise he’s nine, but he comes across as selfish, narcissistic, and extremely unhelpful. His point of view is interesting, but I can’t help thinking that the book would have been elevated had it been told from Pari’s or Runu’s—Jai’s sister—point of view. The trio fast realize they are facing their unknown adversary alone. The police see the slum as a continual source of annoyance and threaten to bulldoze it to the ground. The wealthy people who live in a gated community of nearby high-rises couldn't care less. And with hysteria creeping in, the adults in the slum begin to turn on each other, causing a rift between the Hindu and Muslim factions within the settlement. With no help or resources, can Jai, Pari and Faiz solve this horrific mystery? A profoundly emphatic work of creative geniusthat will stay with you forever.” —Sonia Faleiro, author of Beautiful Thing

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

In 'Djinn Patrol On The Purple Line,' A Mystery In India". NPR.org. 3 February 2020 . Retrieved 1 October 2020. The final reveal felt like a complete cop-out—which may be true to life but the book seemed to be heading toward a definitive conclusion in Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line which was nothing close to what readers actually received.

Like 24% of the Indian population, the people in Djinn Patrol live in slums, and many of them work for the ‘hi-fi’ people in the nearby areas. They are people who live in poverty, who give hafta to the policemen so they don’t demolish their bastis, and still try to give their children the best future they can afford. When the children start disappearing one by one, their parents implore the police to investigate. The police refuse, citing various reasons such as the girl must have run off on her own (or with her older Muslim boyfriend). As the situation turns dire, the slum-dwellers take matters into their own hands, start vigils and try to find the missing children on their own. As the novel comes to its end, and the slum-dwellers catch the culprit, while the police are busy catching the commissioner’s cat, Jai thinks of how many lives could have been saved, if only the police in real life had been as efficient and honest as the ones on his beloved show, Police Patrol. Reality shows on TV are popular in India as it is elsewhere across the world, and the one about cops that Jai watches called Police Patrol is based on a similar, long-running TV show in India. It seemed natural that Jai would be inspired by what he watches on TV; popular culture in the form of TV and Hindi films do exert an influence on daily lives. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line] makes an urgent case for the protection of the country’s youngest and most vulnerable Timothy Harrison, Vogue, *Books to Look Our For in 2020* India is a very different experience when you are a girl, than when you are a boy—because of that, and the setting of the slum, Pari and Runu would have been better protagonists. Overlooking the slum is a gated community, populated by those at the other end of the economic spectrum, where Jai’s mother works for a demanding and domineering boss. The juxtaposition is nicely conceived and Anappara creates a sense of claustrophobia.

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara | Goodreads Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara | Goodreads

Anappara’s Jai is endearing, entertaining, and earnest; he keeps you on the edge of your seat. He is curious, courageous, cheeky, and unabashedly, unapologetically speaking his mind, and the truth: “The next India-Pakistan war the news says will happen any time now has started in our classroom.” Jai and Djinn Patrol are reminiscent of NoViolet Bulawayo’s 10-year-old protagonist, Darling (from We Need New Names), and her home, “Paradise,” the bitterly, ironically named shantytown, loosely based on Bulawayo’s Zimbabwean hometown. Both Anappara and Bulawayo stretch language successfully, and to similar artistic purposes. As for this author, she sits comfortably, and at ease, inside a child’s imagination — seeing as she does the world through his eyes. Djinn Patrol is a world of extremes and exaggerations. It is a world where inanimate objects come alive and a world of innocence, wit, and wonder. (“‘There’s nothing in this world I’m afraid of,’ I say, which is another lie. I’m scared of JCBs, exams, djinns that are probably real and Ma’s slaps.”) It’s also a world where spaces stretch and shrink, superimpose and segment (“The good and bad thing about living in a basti is that news flies into your ears whether you want it to or not”) and one which is described through a limited and limitless lexicon. Words twist and twirl, phrases trip over phrases, sentences play catch-up and turn cinematic. Zooming in and then out, Jai’s basti life bubbles, bustles, and bursts through Anappara’s figures of speech and punctuations — particularly personification and hyphens. Jai is a wonderful narrator, fully imagined and in Anappara's hands, his world takes shape with care yet without sentiment... Anappara took me effortlessly into the alien world of a slum in an Indian metropolis, and helped me to see it through a child's eyes Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times Anappara's] bright, propulsive prose...only accentuates the seriousness of her subject: the disappearance of children from villages in India, a real-life issue given intimate treatment here. Her work has won several awards for journalism, including the Developing Asia Journalism Awards, the "Every Human has Rights" Media Awards, as well as the Sanskriti-Prabha Dutt Fellowship in Journalism. [3] Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line was shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature in 2020.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. Discover the“extraordinary” ( The Washington Post)debut novel that“announces the arrival of a literary supernova” ( The New York Times Book Review),“a drama of childhood that is as wild as it is intimate” (Chigozie Obioma). The vivid, unruly novel Anappara wrote defies easy classification. Given the sometimes capricious exploits of its young investigators, "Djinn Patrol On The Purple Line" could conceivably be shelved in the YA mystery section. Yet Anappara also plays in a self-aware manner with the narrative; for instance, interspersing victims’ … accounts of their disappearances within the main story. By novel's end, the tale darkens into urban noir. Even so, Jai's pliant voice retains a stubborn cheerfulness, a will to believe in the possibility of deliverance in this fallen world.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR