Here Is Real Magic Read online

  “So this is new, then?”

  “Yes, this is new.”

  On tour everything felt the same: the airports, the airplanes, the hotels, the venues. For a while, the shows were the exception, but I had gotten used to them, too, and in the end, everything blurred together. I could sleep my way through a tour without ever really needing to pay attention. You could do that for a lifetime if you weren’t careful. Now on this trip everything was new again, but how long could that last? Surely the answer wasn’t simply to keep running away to something new. If searching for wonder was just a more interesting way to talk about novelty, all of this was a waste of time. The goal wasn’t to run away from home, but to find what I was looking for and bring it home with me.

  “When are you going to go home?” I asked.

  Andy looked out the window.

  “I am home.”

  When I woke it was still dark but someone was knocking on my door and I wanted it to stop. I climbed out of bed and crossed the black room—thinking about cobras—and cracked the door. Rashmi stood in the hall, dressed for the day, looking as if he had never once in his life needed sleep. He looked at me, surprised.

  “Ah, Nate. Are you okay?”

  “What? Yes. What time is it?”

  “Did you sleep?”

  “I mean—yeah, a little, Rashmi, but we just got in four hours ago.”

  He nodded. “Four hours is good. Now, dress and come outside. There is something you must see.”

  I had marveled over the past twenty-four hours at the way Rashmi’s orders were obeyed immediately by everyone he encountered—waiters, gas station attendants, the Escalade driver, the man behind the desk at the hotel last night—and now that I was on the receiving end I sort of understood. He looked at me as though the entire universe hinged on my ability to follow this one simple command—to dress and come outside so he could show me something. He had already moved down the hall and I heard him knocking on Andy’s door. “Andy. Andy. Are you awake? Come out, we must go.” I pulled on yesterday’s T-shirt and in five minutes we were all standing in the lobby of the hotel.

  Outside, the only real light came from the headlights of the Escalade, which dominated the street, incongruous here and maybe everywhere but Texas. Behind the wheel the driver sat, crumpled and harassed. We drove past the shapes of buildings visible only as gray silhouettes against the black and purple of the predawn sky, but you could tell the sun was coming up because as we drove east the sky looked lighter and you could see the buildings on the side of the road more clearly.

  We rode for twenty or thirty minutes and I dozed as we drove, muddling the drive with dreams and making both far stranger than maybe they really were. How long had I known Rashmi? A couple of days? I got the sense that he liked the idea behind our trip and wanted to share his country with us, and I imagined that in forty years or so I might feel the same about two young adventurers visiting the United States from India. Still, I barely knew him.

  The car slowed and parked at the side of the road. We got out and I looked around. A low sandstone wall ran along the street and behind it a row of two-story buildings blocked out most of the view. The air was heavy and already warm, and I was still mostly asleep as Rashmi led us through a gap in the wall and disappeared down a sidewalk running between the buildings.

  I didn’t know what we were doing or where we were going. I wondered mostly about breakfast, and when I could go back to sleep. Someone nearby was cooking something, and I hoped the sidewalk would lead to a tea stand or a restaurant that served those pancake rolls we’d had the other day. I was thinking of lying down on the worn-thin mattress of the hotel bed, or the backseat of the car, or even right here if we could just stop for a minute so I could get comfortable there on the ground by the wall. But we walked on between buildings, moving downward, and then abruptly the buildings ended and the sidewalk emptied onto a broad courtyard, and time stopped.

  The night before, we had driven north across what felt like a vast and unchanging plain and arrived late, unable to see anything beyond the closest streetlight. Now I looked out across the Ganges and saw the foothills of the Himalayas rise directly from the opposite riverbank and brighten as the sun peeked through a low valley in the hills. The sun caught the morning mist as it rose from the river and a thousand points of flashing light leapt and sparkled across the surface. It warmed the stones in the courtyard and the skin on my arms and face and turned the entire world a thick, heavy, incandescent gold. Everything was yellow, buttery, and radiant.

  Rashmi stood at the edge of the water, hands held together behind his back as he looked out over the valley. Andy had his camera out. An old monk in an orange robe was ascending the stairs from the river. He climbed slowly, deliberately, and when he reached me he bowed. I bowed in return.

  A gentle breeze was moving now, and I sat on the steps leading down to the river to watch the rest of the sunrise. Rashmi bent down by the river’s edge, cupping his hands and filling them with water. He stood and poured the water over his head. He did this several times and then sat down beside me.

  “Are you going to get in?”

  “In the river? Are you serious?”

  “Nate,” he said, “I am serious.”

  A man stood knee-deep in the river with his eyes closed, his hands open and upturned. Another crouched almost fully submerged with just his head above the surface.

  I don’t remember what I was thinking. It wasn’t a yearning for renewal or spiritual enlightenment so much as a realization that you don’t travel from Iowa to the other side of the world and then not get in the river. If you’re going to go, go all the way. So I stepped into the water—fully clothed—and began to walk forward. The water was cold but the sun was warming the air and still sparkling off the surface of the river, as if I were walking into a pool of light. I could feel the pull of the current. I was aware of my entire body, shivering and alive, and I wasn’t tired anymore. I was wide awake.

  It’s easy to go through a day without ever really waking up—to look without seeing, to listen without hearing, to live in the story you tell yourself about the world rather than the world itself. It sounds obvious when I say it but this is just because it’s so common. We assume an overfamiliarity with the world around us that maybe makes it easier to live from day to day but harder to see things as they are.

  I had seen sunrises before, of course, but that morning in the river it didn’t feel like the same familiar yellow disk hauling itself up once again for another day. I felt that I was seeing it for the first time, perhaps because I was such a long way from home. I was far, far away from the life I had learned to live and this forced me to pay attention all the time—to my surroundings, to the people around me, to everything. I was off balance, and in an effort to regain stability I was constantly looking, searching, taking it all in. I wondered if India felt more “magical” simply because I was paying closer attention. I had no patterns or routines whose familiarity could insulate me from the world. When you wade shivering into the frigid water of the Ganges as the sun arches up and over the foothills of the Himalayas and lights everything up in gold, you have no choice but to snap back to the present, and stay there. For a second, nothing else matters. Your mind focuses sharply on the immediate—here, now—and for a moment it’s impossible to think of anything else.

  This is worth remembering. On tour, and in life in general, distraction is the rule rather than the exception. I’m always doing one thing, thinking about another, and ignoring a long list of other projects, people, ideas, responsibilities, and obligations that need my attention. At home my mind is fractured, divided, running a few different problems at once, and when I do lock in and focus on one thing, it’s not long before I begin to worry that I really should be attending to something else.

  This makes it almost impossible to really see anything. There’s no time. And if there were time, it would come at the expense of something or someone else who also needs that time. The result is a fr
agmented, fractured life, where I could be surrounded by all the wonder in the world and not have any clue it’s there.

  I wondered how Katharine was getting along. How long had I been gone? Two weeks? Three weeks? Just over three weeks.

  I closed my notebook and put it back in my bag. Andy and I had found a restaurant in the middle of the city for a late lunch and I’d spent an hour writing, and now that the hottest part of the day had passed we crossed over a high pedestrian suspension bridge that united the two sides of Rishikesh, which straddled the river and climbed the hills on both sides of the Ganges. Andy had the camera out and we planned to shoot some footage for his documentary as we explored the city. Maybe I’d do some magic, maybe we’d just walk around. It’d be easy, I thought.

  As we walked I saw a cow—no, a bull—ahead, moving through the throngs of people who quickly cleared a path. He ambled along, clearly in no hurry, and Andy stopped to film the bull meandering down the sidewalk. I went ahead, keeping my eye out for a tea stand but mostly just enjoying the view of the river. The Ganges was stunning—wide and fast, the gold from that morning now replaced with a deep green and blue. The hills on either side rose abruptly from the water’s edge and stood high above the city. The sky was clear, the air was fresh, all was well.

  I’d been seeing monkeys all day, alone or in small groups, usually on the tops of buildings. Now I noticed one of them sitting on a fence on the edge of the sidewalk. This one sat alone, taking the world in, and when I walked by I sort of waved and said, “Hello, monkey.” He screamed—a deep, angry shriek, improbably loud, and then he puffed up his chest, bared his teeth, and let me have it again. I took a step back, thinking I could just slowly move away, but this emboldened him and he started after me. Three or four other monkeys heard the call from the other side of the street and joined the chase in a dead run. I took off.

  Andy was still with the bull, but because he intended to film some magic that day I wore a wireless radio microphone, and I knew that he could hear everything I said in his earpiece. The video recording sounds like this:

  “Andy! Fuck! Andy! I’m being chased down the street by a pack of monkeys. Holy fucking shit! I don’t know what I’m going to do!” There’s a pause here and the sound of heavy running. Then, more quietly, “Andy, I’m hiding in a doorway at the end of an alley and the monkeys have me cornered. One of them has only one arm. I know you can hear me, and I don’t know what to do.”

  A moment later from my vantage point in the doorway I saw a large, determined man enter the alley, making low grunting noises and banging a stick on the ground as he advanced. Behind him Andy was laughing uncontrollably, leaning against the wall for support, unable to move or speak. The monkeys dispersed, and I thanked the man for his help. For the rest of the afternoon, Andy would periodically stop whatever he was doing—talking, eating, filming—and dissolve again into laughter.

  The next afternoon I sat on the floor of a dimly lit room inside an ashram high in the hills above Rishikesh, waiting. Outside the door I could see the shade from the leaves of the massive Rudraksha tree at the center of the compound, and beyond the tree to the high stone walls that cloistered this place from the rest of the world. “He will be one moment more,” said Laksuri, a woman in her midfifties who studied here. I’d met her the day before when she saw me performing magic in town shortly after the monkey incident and she invited me to the compound so I could show an illusion to her teacher. “It’s marvelous,” she said. “He will be very interested to speak with you.”

  Laksuri looked like Joan Baez and spoke with such authority and conviction that I couldn’t imagine her as a student. She had left a successful career in law and moved to Rishikesh to study at this ashram, and even in a lifetime spent in the good company of cats I have never seen anyone more completely at peace with her lot in life. Laksuri divided her time between study, meditation, and contemplation of the Ganges, which she held in sacred adoration. “It is the lifeblood of all northern India,” she explained, “and in her swirls and eddies you can see deeply into the mysteries of the world.” She had been shocked, I think, and delighted to learn about my morning immersion in the river, and she spoke to me about the Ganges as if all the spiritual power of that body of water had instantly flooded and suffused every corner of my being. “You are never the same after you bathe in the Ganges,” she said, looking at me as if we shared this secret understanding. “You know. You can feel it.”

  Her teacher entered the room.

  He was younger than I expected—late forties, maybe, with a long black beard, gold-rimmed glasses, and eyes that sparkled behind them. He moved slowly and serenely but with an air of withheld power as if he carried some tremendous inner momentum, and I flinched when he sat down. He turned toward me and bowed slightly, closing his eyes, and I returned the bow. He spoke to Laksuri, and after he finished she translated.

  “Maharaji has just returned from the mountains where he has been alone for several days. He wants me to convey that you are welcome here.”

  I nodded. “Thank you.”

  “Now I will tell him why you have come to India,” she said, and as she spoke he studied me, seriously but not unkindly. Finally he began to speak, and I waited for the translation.

  “There are people in India—singhs, or holy men—who produce ‘holy ash’ by trickery and present it as a miracle,” he said. “Many people see this and find it unbelievable and amazing, but anyone with an education knows that if you put mercury and silver together the product of that chemical reaction will be this ‘blessed ash.’ ”

  “It’s a trick,” I clarified.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s a trick.”

  He told me that those who focus on miracles miss the point completely. “But,” he offered, “if there is virtue in that trick, it’s that it allows a moment of ‘wow’—of wonder, and if you go deeply into that moment of wonder you might for one moment look inward, and see the wonder of your true self.”

  Yes! I thought. This is it exactly! Here again was this thought of using magic to go within, of looking through a trick rather than simply at it, but he had added something. The wonder of your true self. What did he mean by that?

  “Why don’t you show him the magic,” Laksuri said.

  I took a five-rupee coin from my pocket. My hands went through their motions and the coin disappeared.

  The teacher leaned back and looked at me over the rims of his glasses. He said something to Laksuri.

  “He wants to see another,” she said.

  I took two rubber bands and held them on my fingers. Magic happened.

  Another half reaction—a tilt of the head, a slight widening of the eyes, but no break in his composure. He spoke to Laksuri again.

  “He wants to see one more, if you can.”

  One more. I went to my backpack and came back with a spool of thread. I unraveled an arm’s length and slowly, deliberately broke it into eight or nine pieces, holding each one up for his examination. He nodded throughout the process, following carefully, like a bank teller double-counting a handful of ones.

  I gathered all the broken pieces of thread, rolled them into a ball, and then slowly, slowly unraveled it. The thread wasn’t broken anymore.

  He smiled. Then he laughed. He took off his glasses, still smiling, and looked at me as he polished the lenses on his robes. He began speaking, but this time he faced me as Laksuri translated.

  “ ‘It’s very beautiful,’ the Maharaji says. ‘What you have done is very beautiful, but there is something you must understand.’ ”

  They spoke to each other again, as if clarifying a point. He praised me for the immense amount of work that must have gone into the practice of the tricks, and the concentration and care it must take to make them feel real for the audience. But he suggested that I was using those talents in the wrong way. He told me I was like a young child who had been given a dollar and wasted it on candy rather than buying something important. “At this stage, you are only using
your dollar for applause.” You shouldn’t use it for a performance, he said. “It should be utilized for something higher inside you.”

  He leaned toward me and once again removed his glasses. This time he spoke to me in halting, careful English—taking his time to choose the right words and turning to Laksuri for help only when he couldn’t find them.

  “Everything is magic,” he began, spreading his arms wide, “and magic happens everywhere, but we are not ready to see it. We don’t have the eyes to perceive it or the ears sensitive enough to hear it. What is more amazing than the fact that the tree outside this door began as a little seed and has grown into this huge tree which has millions of leaves and twigs, each one different and unique? Isn’t that magic? Isn’t that ‘wow’? It is a miracle that we are all sitting here and discussing this. It is a miracle you have come, and that we are all sitting together.” He said it again slowly. “This is a miracle.”

  He paused.

  “But we never speak about our life like this,” he said after a moment. “We want our miracles on the outside.” He raised his fingers and rubbed them together, mockingly, sprinkling imaginary holy ash on the floor.

  We want our miracles on the outside, he had said, as if this was ridiculous, misguided, missing the point.

  You may find wonder in the sunrise or the stars in the sky at night. You may find it on a mountaintop, or in the unexpected kindness of a stranger. You may find it in a book, or a film, or in that ecstatic, overpowering moment at a concert when the band blows the roof off the building. In each instance you become aware that the parts don’t quite add up to the majesty of the whole. So what’s the extra piece? Where does that come from?

  Clearly, it comes from you. If you can find wonder in all of these disparate places, the common denominator in all of those experiences is you. Inside. Within.

  I thought back to that night when my parents took me out into the middle of the cornfields to stare up at the Milky Way and watch the meteor shower. I remember marveling at the unimaginable vastness of the universe, certainly, but also recognizing in the face of that vastness the unique and even miraculous position we hold within it. There were the stars, the galaxies, and the gaping abyss of infinity rising up above us, reducing the earth and everyone on it to astronomical insignificance, and yet in all of that staggering distance we appeared to be the only ones who could think, act, hope, dream, or wonder. Think of that! Everything else in the universe is condemned to an eternity of reacting—of being pulled this way or that way according to the law of gravity and the other rules of physics. But here we are, living, loving, hoping, fearing, spurning, hating, thinking, reasoning—acting—all on our own. At that age I couldn’t articulate it like this, of course, but that night under the stars and the meteor shower the paradox of being inconsequentially small and yet also somehow essential to the whole was impossible to ignore.