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.”
“No problem.” Ojas laughed. “We ride on top.”
Molly looked at him. “On top of the train?”
“Most absolutely certainly, Mollee. On top is closer to the gods.”
“We could always go to the future and catch a jet train, or whatever they’ll have then,” Rocky reminded Molly. Then he shook his head. “But you know, Molly, on top sounds good.”
Eigteen
Waqt’s train was super-luxurious. He kept his own special coaches at Delhi station. Whenever he needed to go anywhere, all he had to do was have a pulling engine taken from another train, which is what he’d done today.
Waqt lay back on a bolster and thought how entertaining the angry, stuffy people at Delhi station had been.
It was lovely and cool. This was because in the center of the carriage was a large box with a huge lump of ice in it. A “punkah boy” sat on the floor in the corner operating a rope that swung a fan over this icebox, producing a cool breeze that wafted over Waqt and his fellow passengers.
Opposite him, the ten-year-old Molly sat with the puppy Petula on her lap. The six-year-old and the three-year-old sat beside her, and the baby Molly lay in a crib gurgling. All except the puppy were hypnotized.
The door of the compartment opened and three servants walked in. They quietly threw a white linen cloth over a table and began laying out plates of Indian food. A plate of tandoori chicken tikka and another of seekh kebabs. There were lentil papad wafers and raita (whipped yogurt with herbs) to dip the papad into. There were delicate puddings flavored with saffron.
Smelling the food, the puppy Petula opened her eyes. She jumped off the ten-year-old Molly’s lap and began barking at the table. The maharaja threw a cushion at her.
“SHUT UP, YOU THILFYAMINAL!” he shouted. Tersely, he ordered the punkah boy to play with the puppy.
The skinny boy jumped to his feet and pulled the puppy over to him. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small stone that he threw a short way across the floor for her. She retrieved it and, happy to be occupied, began sucking the stone.
Waqt cast his bloodshot eyes over his hypnotized guests. His gaze came to rest on the three-year-old Molly.
“Hmm. Testing you on this journey will pass the time.” He pulled a pair of chopsticks out of his pocket. Then, heaving himself upright, he crawled (because he was too big to walk in the train) toward the young Molly and clicked his fingers in front of her eyes.
The three-year-old Molly was at once present. For the previous few hours she’d been hypnotized, of course, but all that time she had watched the maharaja. She’d come to the conclusion that the giant was very like a tortoise she’d once seen on television. Now, able to speak, she said, “You’re gonna have to get a very, very, VERY big box to get into when you hivernate.”
The maharaja looked perplexed. He decided he wasn’t in the mood for a three-year-old today. He clicked his fingers, and the child was again in a trance. He turned to the six-year-old and, clapping sharply, released her.
The six-year-old Molly at once came to. The last time she’d been let out of her trance had been in the swing-bed chamber, and she’d cried her eyes puffy. Now she was more composed. The giant man didn’t seem as frightening as he had before. “Who are you? Have you ’dopted me? ‘Cos I don’t want to be ’dopted by you. Can you take me back to Briersville? I don’t want to live in Africa.”
“I see your logic,” said Waqt. “Don’t worry, I haven’t adopted you. I’m just borrowing you to see how talented you are.”
Molly looked at the hypnotized Mollys, struck by how like her they looked.
“Why are they all half asleep? You woke the big one up before, an’ she’s called Molly, too, isn’t she?”
“Observant, I see,” said Waqt, pointing the chopsticks at her. “Now, are you hungry? Because you are going to show me how dextrous you are. These are stopchicks. Everyone eats with them in China.”
“Are we in China?”
“No, but I spent fifteen years in China learning how to trime tavel.”
“Fifteen years! Weren’t you very good at it?” Molly asked innocently.
Waqt bristled. “Let’s see how good you are with these. You use them like so.” He crawled to the table and demonstrated how to pick up a piece of chicken tikka. “Now you can eat all you want, but only if you use the stopchicks.”
The little Molly took the chopsticks and looked at the food-laden table. She wrinkled her nose. “Got any ketchup?”
“No ketchup.”
“Are we in Africa?”
“Use the stopchicks.”
“Australia?”
“Use the stopchicks.”
“Never heard of a country called Usethestopchicks,” grumbled Molly under her breath. She frowned up at the tall man above her and said slowly, “An’—I—don’t—like—that—food, so I won’t use the chopsticks!” She turned and walked back to the velvet cushion by the wall, picking up the black puppy as she went. “Didn’t even say please,” she muttered.
Waqt was shocked. He wasn’t used to people disobeying him. He wasn’t used to the company of children.
“Don’t you dare…” Then it struck him that he wanted the baby Molly to grow up bold. “Good,” he finished. “Stubbornness is good. Now the next thing you are going to show me is whether you have an aptitude for languages. Repeat after me: ‘Elvaleah maleleia ey nuli.’”
The young Molly held the puppy to her chest and shut her eyes. They did French at school and she wasn’t very good at it. Just like she wasn’t good at sums or writing. She didn’t like being tested, and this man was starting to frighten her again.
“Good puppy,” she whispered in its ear. The puppy helped her feel safer. It reminded her of Rocky and Mrs. Trinklebury, the cleaner at the orphanage.
“Come on, repeat after me, ‘Elvaleah maleleia ey nuli,’” ordered Waqt. The small girl looked up at him.
“I won’t do your silly talking. An’ I want to go home,” she said.
Waqt growled and clicked his fingers. “Oh, go back into your trance.” He glanced down at the sleeping baby.
“Not a great beauty, are you?” he said to it. “A potato nose, closely set
eyes, and it doesn’t look as if you’re going to be a child genius, either. Nor an artist, musician, dancer, or mathematician.” Waqt’s mouth puckered as he saw that the baby he’d hoped to rear wasn’t going to be brilliant in every department. Then his lips parted in a grimacelike smile.
“But your talent at hypnosis will make up for your defects. Little Waqta, ugly as you are, you will be a genius hypnotist. Now. I will take you to Jaipur and begin the moon ceremonies to inaugurate you into my world—the crystal-fountain ceremonies! I have a feeling, my little Waqta, that you are going to be a huge magnet for the crystals.” The baby Molly gurgled.
The crystal fountains. How Waqt loved them. Few hypnotists knew of the sources of the crystals, but he did; he’d been initiated into the world of the crystal fountains in China. It never ceased to amaze him that they existed. For all over the world could be found very special, ordinary-looking cracked rocks, from which, on certain full-moon nights, the clear, red, and green crystals would emerge. Master hypnotists could draw them from the earth. Waqt was sure and very excited to think that this small baby would. “Does that sound good, Waqta?” he said, tickling the child’s chin. “Of course, it does.”
The puppy Petula watched the giant. She didn’t like the look or the smell of the huge man, and her instinct told her that it wasn’t good that he was breathing all over the baby. She walked over and sat down beside the tiny Molly and barked protectively.
“Not yours,” her small bark meant.
Miles behind Waqt’s train, and with Petula under her arm, the eleven-year-old Molly clambered up the iron stepladder at the very back of the Delhi Rocket. She faltered as new memories filled her head, but she brushed them away, determined not to dwell on them. She took Ojas’s hand and he hauled her up. The train’s sides dropped away like sheer cliffs, but there was a section in the middle with more iron bars to hold on to. Already people were sitting here. As they walked past them Petula sniffed at a chicken that was tucked under a boy’s arm and a goat that was sitting very quietly beside its owner. Petula could sense that these animals knew something about the journey ahead. With her canine reckoning, she deduced that up here the journey was going to be ten times as windy as when she’d ever stuck her head out of a car window while driving along. She licked her lips and began to snuffle her way under Molly’s veil.