Molly Moon's Hypnotic Time Travel Adventure (14 page)

“There is one, but there are far more friendly shopkeepers—don’t worry.”

“What has the nasty one done that makes him so horrible?” Molly persisted.

“Oh, you ask such strange questions! But I will answer. There is one very rich, cruel man who has a shop near the bazaar. He has a very short temper and he beats his wife and his children. I don’t like him at all because once he boxed my ears when I was simply sitting on his doorstep taking a thorn out of my foot!”

“Does he speak English?”

“Yes, but he is not a kind man, Mollee. You don’t understand.”

“I do. Trust me. Will you take us there?”

“As a special gift I will,” said Ojas. “But you have to remember, Mollee, after that my extra services will cost.”

“Fine,” said Molly, “but let’s get there quickly.”

Soon they were inside a large shop surrounded by shelves of folded clothes. Forest shut the silk curtain over the shop entrance behind them. Petula sniffed at the carpeted floor.

“Hello, is anyone here?” Molly called.

A brawny man with a potbelly emerged sleepily from behind the counter. As if to introduce himself he made a snotty, guttural noise and cleared the phlegm
from the back of his throat.

“Good afternoon,” said Molly. “We would like some clothes.”

The doughy-faced shopkeeper surveyed Molly’s jeans and mouse top and sneered. He lazily drew himself up and then he saw Ojas. For a moment he leered forward, but reminding himself that there might be business at stake, he resisted booting Ojas out.

Molly was onto him before he knew it. She tapped him on the chest and stared into his puffy eyes. His nose twitched irritatedly as he prepared to object to her prodding, but actually he was easy meat. In a second, her incredible eyes had delivered their blow straight to the core of his brain, reducing him to a nodding idiot.

“Now you are completely under my power,” Molly said. “I want clothes for us all. And after that, we would like some money. Quite a lot of it.” Ojas nodded. He’d already decided that, if he helped Molly, a lot of money was what he’d be charging.

The somnambulant man stepped forward and nodded to the girl, who now, in his eyes, seemed a goddess. He understood Molly’s language fairly well. In his trance he began selecting clothes from the shelves. Ojas watched with amazement as he found a long, box-collared, burgundy shirt for Rocky, with a pair of pajama-like trousers to match.

“Will this
kurta churinder
be all right for you, sir?”

He found a similar outfit in gray for Ojas. Ojas put it in a bag.

“I will save it for best,” he said. Forest chose a white
kurta churinder,
while Molly was given a steel-blue sari.

“This is no good,” she said, eyeing the miles of material that was being presented to her. “I’ll never be able to tie one of those things on my own.”

“What are you doing Mr. Shopkeeper!” interrupted Ojas. “Girls don’t wear saris in India; only women wear saris.”

The hypnotized man offered Molly a long, tuniclike outfit with trousers underneath.

“This
salwar kameez
?”

Soon, everyone was ready. Molly had a veil to throw over her head, and the boys all had mini turbans. On their feet they wore Indian moccasins, except for Ojas, who was more comfortable barefoot. Molly was given a purse filled with coins, and she also took a cotton bag that was strong enough to carry Petula, should she need to disappear suddenly.

As they left, Molly turned to the shopkeeper. She had been so busy that she hadn’t had time to think what pearls of instructions to leave the man with. So, pulling ideas from the air, she began.

“From now on, you will never say an unkind word
to anyone. You will be like a saint—”

“They don’t have saints here,” interrupted Forest.

“Like an angel?”

“No angels, either. How about a Jain?”

“What’s that?”

“Jains are a sort of Hindu who believe in peace and nonviolence. They try not to step on insects and they even wear white masks over their mouths so that they don’t by accident swallow a bug or flies. That’s considerate.”

The shopkeeper awaited his instructions.

“So, you will be like a Jain. And you will be extra kind to your wife and children, to make up for all the times you’ve hit them. And you will sing much more than you do now, and you will learn to play the… the…”

“The
shehnai,”
suggested Forest. “That’s a really cool Indian wind instrument. Like an oboe. You blow it.”

“The
shehnai,”
Molly finished. Then, without anyone knowing, she concentrated on her clear crystal, froze the world, and said, “And this instruction is locked in with the word ‘Singsong.’” Now she knew her instructions would stick. She let the world move again.

As they walked down the alley away from the shop the man broke into song.

“He was very lucky to be hypnotized by you!” said
Ojas. “To be given a new lease of life like that is worth far more than all that you took from him.”

“Yes, I think so, too,” Molly agreed, jingling the heavy gold coins in her new purse.

Zackya and his men found themselves at a tea stand. They were parched and thirsty from their search.

“You, woman,” Zackya said rudely, in Hindi, “tell me now. Have you seen a girl with a strange dog?”

The yellow-saried woman threw a stick down the alley for her young boy to retrieve. She didn’t want him talking about Ojas and his friends. As he ran off laughing, she shook her head.

“Would you like some tea and cake?” she asked, turning to push the pen Rocky had given her behind the sugar tin. There, too, was a small clay pot full of powders. The mixture was a traditional medicinal recipe of crushed herbs that gave whoever ate them a “purging of the bowels”—in other words, diarrhea. The tea lady surreptitiously sprinkled a good dose into the rude man’s tea. With luck, this would cause a delay in his journey and so help her friends.

Zackya drank his tea. As the woman threw her puppylike son another stick, a horrible thought struck him. Molly Moon’s escape was now a matter that he should report to Waqt.

Half a mile away, Ojas led Molly and her friends to the station. It was a long walk along dry, grimy roads heavy with animal traffic. Buffalo pulling carts, camels drawing wagons, and elephants, too, with canopied seats tied to their backs. In her new clothes Molly didn’t feel so conspicuous. She enjoyed watching women walk by with large brass water pots on their heads, and barefoot children tearing down the streets. The smell of burning incense, herbs, and cooking fires hung in the air, and the hot March sun shone down. They passed a snake charmer who sat before a large round basket playing a pipe so sweetly that his pet cobra danced. Molly wished that she could just enjoy her surroundings, but she knew that they had to hurry. The memories that were growing in her head from the younger Mollys told her that Waqt was already well away from Delhi.

They arrived at the Delhi train station and Molly put her veil over her head.

“Stay here, out of sight, at the back of the platform,” said Ojas, and he slipped away into the crowd.

Parties of British people thronged the station. The women were clad in cumbersome Victorian dresses, tight at the waist and full to the ground. They wore large, uncomfortable hats with nets over their faces. The men
with them were in white suits and heavy, helmet-shaped “topi” hats. Soldiers in breeches and high leather boots stood around chatting. Here and there sat children wearing starched clothes and white topis, stiflingly hot.

“This is an outrage!” complained an elderly Englishwoman to her withered husband. “That giant just
stole
our engine!” Molly noticed a sad set of coaches sitting engine-less on some spare track behind the main line.

“He’s so bally
tall,”
replied her husband in a clipped croaky voice, “that no one dare contradict him.”

“If I had been here,” said the woman in a very hushed voice, “I would have poked him with my parasol where it jolly well hurts!”

“My dear, don’t let it upset you. It will only make your varicose veins throb. Another train is on its way. And it goes in exactly the same direction. To Jaipur.”

Just then, there was a loud cry.

“Thief! Stop, thief!” A tall man was pointing through the crowd to a ragamuffin boy darting away from him.

“I don’t believe it,” Rocky said. “It’s Ojas!”

Molly at once focused on her clear crystal, and the platform life was brought to an immediate standstill, frozen into a tableau. The Victorian man’s hat was
tumbling from his head as he rushed after Ojas, and the people about him were as still as wooden carvings, their expressions of wide-eyed excitement stuck on their faces.

It took a few minutes for Molly to find Ojas. He was bending low as he ran and, so, well hidden. In his hand was a crocodile-skin wallet. Molly grabbed his arm, sending movement into him. As he shot away from her in full flight, she tugged him back. At once he saw the still world about him.

“What… what’s happened to everyone?” he asked, gaping in amazement. Molly was furious.

“Why did you do that, Ojas? You
knew
we didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. This isn’t a game, you know. We told you we needed your help. This isn’t helping us. You could have been caught. You know we can pay you. You didn’t need to steal a stinking wallet. And you shouldn’t steal—it’s bad.”

“Bad? BAD?” shouted Ojas. “You just stole off that shopkeeper. You just helped me steal from that police officer. Don’t be so high and mighty. You’re as bad as me. The difference is that I have no one in this world and I have to look after myself. It is not easy living on the street. I have to grasp opportunities when I see them!”

Molly was taken aback. She hadn’t tried to put herself
in Ojas’s position. She dropped her head.

“Anyway, I wasn’t going to go with you,” Ojas said. “All that talk of Waqt taking younger parts of you from your past—I didn’t believe it. It sounded mad. I thought you were all cuckoo.”

“I suppose it does sound mad.” Molly sighed. She looked at a Victorian boy beside her who was wielding a peashooter. She followed its line of fire to see the pea hovering in the air on its way to hit a large woman on the back of the neck.

“Look, Ojas, I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m a hypocrite. Would you please just put us on the train, though? And would you mind if I just put that man’s wallet back in his hand? I’ll make it up to you in money. You can put your new clothes on so that no one recognizes you. Then we’ll say good-bye.”

“Oh, no!”

“Please, Ojas.”

“Mollee, you should have shown me how you freeze the people like this—how you can make the birds hang in the air and the smoke from the train seem solid!”

“There wasn’t time.”

“No, but now that I’ve seen it, I believe the rest of your story.”

“You do?”

“Oh yes, and now that I know you are not mad, I will come with you.”

“You will?”

“Yes. I have no family ties and I feel like some adventure. But remember, I’ll do it for a price. Ten thousand rupees.”

Molly nodded. “That’s a deal, Ojas, but on one condition—that you don’t do any more attention-grabbing pickpocketing.”

“And you throw in that trip to the future, as well.”

“I will,” said Molly and, with that, they shook hands.

After another five minutes the wallet was back in its owner’s hand and Ojas was standing at the back of the station, dressed in his new gray
kurta churinder.
Molly let the world move.

For a few minutes the platform was chaotic as the Victorian man discovered the wallet in his hand and the panicked crowd around him checked their own belongings.

Then, in the train came, hooting like a giant boiling kettle on wheels, and the incident was forgotten.

It was a magnificent locomotive. First came its caged buffer and tall brass chimney, then its curved back where its water tank lay. Along the side of this were painted the words
The Delhi Rocket
Behind this was a
wide iron berth full of coal and the driver’s cabin. A fireman shoveled coal into the firebox, heating up the water in the tank. The driver brought the train to a halt and pulled the whistle again, releasing excess steam into the station. The waiting passengers burst into animation. Everyone began pushing and jostling to get on board.

“Why don’t we just go backward in time and catch the one Waqt caught?” asked Rocky.

“Too risky,” Molly replied. “I thought about it. If he catches us following him, that’s it. We’re as good as barbecued. Mind you, this train is filling up so quickly, I don’t know how we’re ever going to find a space.” Indeed, the Victorians, feeling they owned the train, had greedily filled the four best, fan-carrying carriages at the front of the train while Indians, whom the Victorians refused to sit next to, were already spilling out of the last two, hotter, carriages.

“Look at that! Segregation! Wow, disgusting, isn’t it?” said Forest. “You’ll be pleased to hear, Ojas, that in modern times, people of all races sit together! Citizens of the globe, man!”

“But there’s
nowhere
for us to sit,” Molly pointed out. “The carriages are bursting.”