Here Is Real Magic Read online

  Our progress had been disrupted by a marching band procession and we’d been forced to the side as a parade of musicians in full regalia marched somberly down the road. I watched, unbelieving, as the musicians in bright white uniforms with blue and gold bandolier sashes and oversized military caps stomped toward us. Just before them, two gloomy middle-aged men dressed all in white pedaled a bicycle-powered cart hauling an enormous diesel generator that coughed and sputtered dark smoke into the air. Thick cables stretched behind the generator and linked three dozen marching pairs of men and women, each hoisting above their heads a large hooplike target of concentric circles glowing with maybe forty red and yellow lightbulbs, like electrified picket signs at a protest. I had no idea what they were. So frequently on this trip I would begin to feel as if I had a grasp on this new place, as though I were becoming one of those world-savvy travelers who could ease effortlessly into a new culture. But then, invariably, something like this marching band and its phalanx of electrified-sign bearers trudging through the night would come along and scrape away any sense of familiarity I had found.

  “This is a wedding party!” Dabbu shouted over his shoulder. After the card trick the other day, he had shown us where he usually parked his rickshaw and offered to be our driver during our time in Varanasi. He nodded along with the music as a man marched passed us, morosely pounding the bass drum slung over his chest. Another man blew forcefully into a trumpet, but the sound was lost in the general din of the band, the grind of the generator, and the honking of the traffic, which had not let up despite the late hour. No one smiled.

  “It’s one hell of a party,” I shouted back. “Why are they all so sad?”

  “It’s late,” Dabbu replied, as if that explained everything. We made slow progress for five minutes as the parade kept coming—an unending stream of motorcycles, light bearers, marching musicians, and cyclists. Overhead the moon was almost full.

  I had agreed to this meeting without really knowing what to expect, and as we drove, the words “tantric” and “yogi” rolled uncomfortably around in my imagination. Before leaving for India I knew nothing about tantra other than its vaguely erotic associations and some frankly impressive rumors about the musician Sting. After an uncomfortable conversation with a surprised Rashmi, I learned that in India, tantra is an ancient tradition of meditation techniques and spiritual practices. He thought it would be relevant to my search for magic because many of its adherents claim that tantra imbues them with certain powers that could only be described as magical—levitation, disappearance, the ability to perform miracles. Still, I had no idea what I was about to see.

  Andy had not abandoned me on this admittedly dubious outing and he had the camera out and rolling as our rickshaw finally emerged from the parade and plunged back into the thick vein of traffic surging through the city. We turned down a dirt path that passed between two high stone walls and ran on like a secret passageway through the city. Eventually we emerged onto a quiet street, then turned down another. We were well off the main road now. Finally, the rickshaw turned into a courtyard and Ratti looked down at a piece of paper to confirm the address. Dabbu turned off the engine and we got out.

  Four-story apartment buildings ringed the courtyard—all dark—and a concrete staircase led up to the building in front of us. Andy pointed the camera at me and said, “Nate, what are we doing?”

  “We’re outside an apartment building somewhere in Varanasi, about to meet with a tantric yogi. I think he’s going to perform a ceremony. Someone gave us this address. Now we’re here.” Just saying it out loud made me realize how absurd the situation really was. I was in an unfamiliar city inside a foreign country on the other side of the planet, about to walk into this abandoned-looking apartment building to watch someone do God knows what, all because a film producer I didn’t know thought it might be helpful. Navigationally, my closest reference point was the hotel, but I was at least a thirty-minute rickshaw ride through the dark from there and I couldn’t even point in the direction of the hotel within 180 degrees of being right. For all practical—and even all theoretical—purposes, I was completely lost.

  Ratti walked up the staircase and opened the door. It led to another staircase and we began to climb. The building felt like a parking garage, cold, hard, and dark, and our steps echoed up the stairwell ahead of us. I could hear doors closing as we approached. Bare electrical cables were stapled into the walls, which were covered in graffiti I couldn’t read. We reached the fourth floor and walked down the hall to the last door. The bulbs in this part of the hallways were all broken, and the only light was a faint red glow coming from under the door, as though we had discovered our own private entrance to hell.

  Ratti checked the paper again and then looked at me.

  I knocked.

  The man who answered wasn’t naked, but he wore nothing but a cloth around his waist and wasn’t happy to see us.

  “What is it you want?” He had a thick beard and a mane of black hair. His eyes were hot and they darted first at me, then at Ratti, and then settled, glowering, on Andy’s camera. “What is it you want?” he asked again. “Now you tell me.”

  By this point I was ready to go, but Ratti began to speak to the man in Hindi. The man looked at me very carefully and then back at Andy. They spoke for a full minute. Then, grudgingly, the man invited us inside.

  A low table dominated the room, surrounded by stacks of books and papers. A large tome lay open next to a notebook covered in scribbly handwriting, and as we entered the yogi set them aside. Nothing there provided any immediate insight as to exactly what a tantric yogi did, but it appeared to include a great deal of reading. Above, an oversized portrait of a fat Indian man staring off into the distance hung on one wall. Another was dedicated to a platform or altar covered with ornate silver picture frames and a collection of stones arranged intricately on the red tablecloth. The air smelled like paperbacks and burning incense. The yogi asked us to sit on thick cushions next to the table.

  “You people are very late,” he said. “I understood you were coming to see the evening ceremony that must happen at sunset. It is now well past sunset, and so I am uncertain why you have come at all. I will ask you again. What do you want?”

  I looked at Ratti. Ratti looked at Andy. Andy looked at me.

  So I began to talk. I spoke about my trip. I spoke about magic and disillusionment. I spoke about wonder and mystery and how I was on an adventure to expand my understanding of what a magician could be. “I met someone who thought I should speak to you,” I said, “and I believe he told you we were coming. So we’re here. If you have anything to say that might help me, I would be grateful. Otherwise, we’ll go.”

  As I spoke I could see his hostility fading.

  “You are a choomantar,” he said. “A child’s magician doing tricks. And those are the things of a very”—he searched for a kind way to say it—“Those are things of a lower level. Those magics performed by a choomantar distract from the real journey.”

  “What is the real journey?” I asked.

  He leaned back and looked at the ceiling, trying to find a way to begin.

  “Sometimes you feel as if you have everything,” he said at last. “You have health, you have a good mind, you have money, you have prominence. You have all of this and still you are restless. This happens many times, does it not?”

  He looked at me pointedly and I nodded.

  “You came to my door and have come around the world to India because you are restless. Why? Why are you restless?”

  I started to say something but he held up his hand.

  “You are restless because you are looking for the truth and you cannot find it. You are restless because you cannot find the truth through your five senses alone. Your five senses show you the outside world, and you cannot find the truth in the outside world. And so you must go within.”

  I pointed out that the entire scientific process depended on our using the five senses to uncover truth in the ou
tside world, but he held up his hand again.

  “Our approach is also very scientific,” he said. “We accept nothing on belief alone. We do not have faith in anything. We have no dogma. Ours is a very practical tradition. We pursue the mysticism of the world through direct experience of our own consciousness, and our tradition approaches this mystery scientifically.”

  “Can you give me an example?” I asked.

  He nodded, and over the next five minutes he described the process of creating actual miracles. How to leave your body and explore the world as pure consciousness, how to make yourself appear in two or three different places at the same time, how to ask a tree to produce a particular kind of fruit for you to eat and how to project the sun’s rays through a glass of water and shine it on the tree so the fruit will materialize there on one of the branches. Calmly, deliberately, with the demeanor of a teacher trying to communicate a simple idea to a challenged student, he spoke about doing real magic.

  One of the techniques of the modern magician is the very real skill of splitting your attention in half during a performance and allowing one half to recite the script for the show while freeing the other half for the secret workings of the illusion. One of the pieces in my show, for example, requires that I perform two calculations in my head while talking to the audience, all without allowing them to realize that they don’t have my undivided attention. When I do it well it looks as if I’m just talking, but actually I’m crunching the numbers as quickly as I can with one half of my brain while allowing the other to run through the script on autopilot. Strangely, I can’t do this in day-to-day life. It’s a hard trick to practice because it relies on the adrenaline and power that you can access in the full flush of the moment in front of an audience but that is harder to find in the studio on a Tuesday morning when I’m rehearsing the show.

  I mention this because as I sat and listened I could feel my mind doing the dividing trick, with one half following his conversation so I didn’t miss anything and the other spinning as fast as possible, finding and rejecting ways of reconciling his claims with my own understanding of the world, trying to find some way to connect with his story.

  I’m sure the effort showed on my face—as I said, it’s hard to do when I’m not onstage—and my skepticism must have been obvious.

  “We ask nothing to be held on faith,” he clarified. “Suppose you came to me and said you had an elephant in your pocket. This sounds impossible. Your pocket is not large enough for an elephant and I should not believe you. I would have to see your pocket for myself, would I not?”

  I nodded and said, “For me, the elephant in the pocket sounds as impossible as leaving my own body and flitting through the world with my consciousness.”

  “Yes. And it will remain that way until you see it for yourself. You must go within. And I must tell you that doing so is not child’s play. Our tradition holds that most people use a very simple corner of the brain. Most of the power is not being utilized. Everybody has these hidden powers but they are sleeping—they are hidden. By our tradition we awaken those hidden powers. You have to unveil them, to realize them.”

  This was one of the strangest nights I’d had in a long time. I was a long way from making the coin disappear on the playground.

  “Go within,” he said. “There is a great magic within. Miraculous power is there.”

  “Go within.” I kept hearing him say it for the rest of the night. We returned to the hotel an hour later and I took my notebook out to the courtyard and began to write. The moon had risen high in the night sky and there by the river the sounds of traffic were distant and low and I felt I had the city all to myself. “Go within,” he had said, and on the ride back afterward, a few connections had come together and I wanted to write them down before I forgot.

  On tour I had recognized that a magician can’t actually create wonder. Granted, certain art forms are better than others at communicating different parts of the human experience—“Trying to write about music is like dancing about architecture,” the saying goes—and a good magician is arguably in a better position than, say, a painter for giving an audience the experience of wonder. But it’s not a direct cause-and-effect process. I can lead an audience down the hall to the doorway and open it for them, but the final step from “trick” to “magic” comes from them. And so while you put a lot of effort into creating the illusion in the first place, you spend as much effort guiding and shaping the audience’s interpretation of that illusion during the performance so it feels less like a deception and more like an actual magical event.

  And the connection I made on the way back to the hotel was that this is largely a matter of encouraging the audience to “go within.” After a coin disappears, you don’t want their attention to leap from one hand to the other hand, then to your sleeve—Maybe it went up there—then to your jacket, focused only on solving the problem of the missing coin. You want them to stay in that moment of astonishment as long as possible. You want them to dwell in it. You don’t want them searching externally for a solution—you want them to believe in their bones that there isn’t a solution, that it was magic they saw, and you want this conviction to resonate inside, deeper and deeper, so in the end the vanishing coin was nothing but a vessel for this inward experience of wonder, which was the real goal when you asked to borrow a quarter in the first place.

  It’s just like he said. You want them to go within.

  The difference was that the tantric yogi used this process of deliberately steering his consciousness inward to see miracles, and I’d only ever been able to use it in a magic act. What the hell was he talking about with the fruit on the tree, by the way? I was trying to keep an open mind, but I didn’t know what to make of his claims of actual magical powers. But his last thought resonated with me. Go within, there is great magic within, miraculous power is there. I had known this for years. I had known since age nine that the simple mechanics of a vanishing coin trick couldn’t account for the visceral, powerful responses of the people who saw it. Clearly the coin had tapped into something internal. And the tantric yogi said there was more there to find.

  The next morning I walked through the narrow section of street just before the open-air bazaar and a merchant stepped out from his doorway and raised his hand. “Magician, magician.” He beckoned me over.

  “Tell me, is your magic real? Are your powers genuine?”

  Careful, here.

  “I am a magician,” I said, “not a prophet. I do magic tricks to create the experience of magic, but I don’t have magical powers.”

  His face crumpled. “Magician, you have taken all of my hope. You have given it to me and then taken it all away.”

  It was time to go.

  This wasn’t the first time I had been recognized on the street as the magician visiting from America and I was worried about being too conspicuous. The other day by the river I had acquired a gaggle of hangers-on who had seen me do magic and wanted to see more, and I had a hard time convincing them I was done performing. I didn’t want to have to duck the police again. Also, I had been speaking with people about magic in India and had heard a common suggestion: “Go north.” Apparently the Himalayas were home to many who professed to have magical abilities, and if I wanted to learn more I should travel in that direction. Some recommended Nepal, some Assam to the northeast, and others suggested I go north of New Delhi.

  But how? The trains were booked for the next two days and we were looking for other options. We called Rashmi for advice.

  “I am going north on business, to Rishikesh,” he said, “and you are welcome to join me.” We looked at our map. Rishikesh was a few hours north of New Delhi—perfect. Rashmi gave us the name of a café. “Can you meet me there tomorrow afternoon at one o’clock?”

  When I’m on tour in America I like the simplicity of fitting everything I need to live into one bag—clothes, books, freeze-dried dinners, a few packets of instant coffee—with all of the extraneous clutter pared away out of
necessity. In India I had even less. As we left the hotel, everything I owned for twelve thousand miles in any direction fit into my green hiking pack and the little blue bag we used for camera gear. My bag contained an extra T-shirt, an extra pair of pants, a change of underwear, a few pairs of socks, a handful of books—Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars, Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation, the copy of Net of Magic that had started this whole adventure, and a few others. I had a toothbrush, toothpaste, a month’s supply of antibiotics, and a stick of deodorant. This last item was mostly useless as I hadn’t washed either of my T-shirts since arriving and both had suffered. Andy, who had been traveling like this for years, looked similarly run-down.

  We were both unprepared and wildly underdressed, then, for the pristine, oversized white Escalade that pulled up in front of the café the next afternoon. Rashmi rolled down the window. “Are you ready? Climb in.”

  GO NORTH

  Nine hours later we were still driving north and I stared out the window of the Escalade at India, which was just there on the other side of the glass. The sun had set an hour ago. The sky was open and the world was dark and the road felt like a bridge suspended above an abyss. Rashmi slept in the passenger seat in the front and Andy gazed out the window on his side of the car. This was his third year away from home.

  “Do you get used to all of this?” I asked.

  “You mean the sky?”

  “Yeah, the sky. And also driving across India through the night in a giant white Escalade with a stranger.”

  Andy sat for a moment and I wondered if he wasn’t going to answer. “Yes,” he said finally. “You get used to it.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “It makes it more comfortable. I think you can get used to anything.”

  “So how do you make your adventure feel like an adventure again?” I asked.

  “You go to India with a crazy American magician and travel across the country looking for magic.”