The Serpent's Secret (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #1)(16)
The buildings lining the main street seemed to be built by the same architect as those ramshackle alleyways, because they zigzagged too. They were slapped together haphazardly, with the top floors at slight angles to the bottom floors, so that nothing exactly lined up. Entire rooms seemed to be added on as afterthoughts and stuck out like pimples from the upper stories of some buildings. A twisted little pink house leaned so heavily on the patched green one next door it seemed to be riding piggyback. Bright saris and other laundry waved at me from the flat rooftops. On one crooked clothesline, I saw rows of colorful bills, each clipped with a large clothespin, as if someone had just washed out his life’s savings. Everything looked odd and precarious. The entire place seemed to be thumbing its nose at any principles of sense or gravity.
Looking for the princes, I scanned the faces in the crowd, which were both unfamiliar and familiar at the same time. Brown skin, black hair—it was a strange feeling to be around so many people who looked like me. Like I’d somehow come home to a place I never knew I belonged. But none of the faces belonged to Lal or Neel.
“Have you seen two brothers—one in red, one in blue?” I asked a rikshaw puller, who looked at me blankly.
“Ride? Ride? You want a ride?” the man asked.
I asked everyone I could as I made my way down the bustling street. Most people ignored me or just shook their heads and kept going. The crowd pushed me this way and that, and I had to shove my way through with my elbows sometimes. I walked past men with overloaded pushcarts, sleeping cows and water buffalos, footpath stalls selling everything from shoe polish to tooth powder to mountains of dizzying-scented flowers.
“For you, lady!” Someone dropped a thick white-and-pink garland around my neck. The scent was heady, the color of the pink flowers blinding.
“No, I don’t think so.” I returned the garland as politely as I could, then sneezed. The pollen count on these things was probably through the roof.
“You should learn to smell the flowers.” The merchant shook his finger at me.
The market was starting to feel less like a homecoming and more like an overload on all my senses. I hadn’t made it five steps before I was accosted again.
“Don’t diet—buy EZ Fit glass bangles!” a roly-poly lady in a polka-dot sari bellowed. She balanced a flat basket on her head. “Changes to fit your changing body!
“Hey, slippery,” she barked, poking me in the arm with her fleshy finger. Ow. “You buy some bangles from me.”
When I shook my head, she plunked her reed basket on the ground and crouched beside it. The folds on her belly jiggled as she worked so that she looked like a big bowl of polka-dot Jell-O.
“I really don’t think—” I began, but she pretended that she couldn’t hear me. The woman dug through a sparkling array of green, magenta, turquoise, and gold bracelets until she found what she was searching for.
“I have your color!” she insisted, pulling out a dozen silver and pink bangles that she slipped on her own robust arm. As she slipped them off, she grabbed my arm and began shoving the huge bracelets over my wrist. Strange thing was, they shrunk to fit me perfectly.
“Uh, no, thanks.” I pulled the bangles back off and dropped them into her basket with a clatter. “I don’t like pink.”
“It’s not a crime to like pretty things.” I caught the lady peering at my scar, and I put my hand over my arm to cover it. The bangle seller shrugged her beefy shoulders, heaving the basket on her head again. “You should eat something, maybe then you wouldn’t be so grumpy.”
“I’m sorry, they were very nice,” I began. “Maybe in a different color …”
But she was already hawking her wares again. “EZ Fit bangles—for the generously proportioned and the skinny-butt offspring of slimy snake creatures alike!”
What the heck did that mean? I got the feeling that maybe the bangle-selling lady wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer.
On the other hand, maybe she was right about one thing. I was pretty hungry. Maybe if I ate something, I’d feel less overwhelmed. As if on cue, my stomach moaned. I looked around at the signs on the shopkeepers’ stalls.
FRIED DRIED COCKROACHES. ALSO PILLOWCASES—DEEP-FRIED OR NOW, FOR YOU HEALTH NUTS, STEAMED.
As ravenous as I was, neither item seemed particularly appetizing. I stopped by a stall that was selling kati rolls—egg and meat with onions and chilis, folded into fluffy parathas, and then rolled up in a paper carrier. I inhaled the first one in about three bites and then bought three more with Ma’s rupees, eating as I walked. I rolled my eyes a little as they filled my mouth and stomach with spicy goodness. As I finished the last one, ineffectively wiping my oily fingers on the oily wrapper, something caught my attention.
Lazy? A slowpoke? Running from a rakkhosh? Try Mr. Madan Mohan’s motivational motion device!
(PATENT PENDING)
Huh. I had certainly run from a rakkhosh, and there was nothing to say I wouldn’t do so again in the process of rescuing my parents. This seemed like something I should investigate.
“Mr. Madan? Mr. Mohan?” I called from the counter.
From the back of the stall emerged a little man whose curling moustache was at least the length side to side as he was tall. He could barely peer over the counter, and stood on his toes to do so with an air of suspicion.