Here Is Real Magic Read online

  I sat on the steps and closed my eyes. Though it must have happened, I have no memory of finding Andy or making it back to the hotel. For me, the night ended there on the steps by the river, listening.

  THE POET

  The next morning, I woke up early and went out to find breakfast. I’d noticed a noodle shop doing brisk business just down the block and thought I could probably get something and bring it back to the room. The sights and sounds of the night before by the river had bled through into my dreams and I was having a hard time deciding where the one ended and the other began, which made the whole thing feel all the more surreal and magical. I wondered how I could share that experience when I got home, and whether I could use any of it in my work as a magician—not overtly so the audience could see it, but under the surface, as subtext, so it looked like a magic show but felt like a night on the Ganges with the Himalayas just out of sight beyond the foothills. At the moment this all felt nebulous and vague but I thought I could make it work.

  I’d also been thinking about the teacher’s comment that I was using magic for the wrong reasons. He was right; I had been. I remembered the disgust I had felt during the show in Milwaukee—when all of my original intentions had fallen away during the grind of touring and I’d realized it all at once in front of everyone in the audience. But I thought my original intentions were pretty good. I had discovered early on that you could use magic to say something valuable and share it with the audience rather than simply putting the tricks up on display, and that morning I started thinking about new ways I could make that work on a practical and technical level during a performance.

  This was the first time I had really thought about my work since leaving home. I’d done magic for people I’d met, of course, but this was always informal—more of a way for me to get people talking about magic than any desire on my part to put on a show. A show is a different thing entirely. But this was a Thursday, and if I’d been home I almost certainly would have been working. With the time difference it would have been mid- to late evening in the States, so I probably would have been onstage at that very moment. I tried to decide whether I missed it, but in the end I just got the noodles and went back to the room.

  Rashmi had to drive to New Delhi and I didn’t know what else to do in Rishikesh, so later that morning we all piled into the oversized Escalade one last time. Before leaving for India, I had envisioned my transformation into one of those worldwise vagabonds with a well-worn backpack, a sheaf of train tickets jammed into the outer pocket, and shoes tattered from miles and miles of walking, hoping for a ride from a stranger. Much of this had come true. My shoes were dusty and both of my T-shirts looked exhausted, but I had spent more time in a luxury SUV than I’d anticipated.

  A few hours later we arrived in New Delhi and said goodbye to Rashmi. He climbed back into the giant white Escalade and vanished into the swirling, rushing torrent of New Delhi traffic. We checked in to a guesthouse and Andy went to his room to make a phone call. An hour later this same river of traffic deposited a blue-and-tan minivan in front of the guesthouse and I met his friend Amit for the first time. “Andy!” he bellowed, sliding from the front seat and stomping across the median like a large, friendly bear. He grabbed Andy’s shoulders and looked him squarely in the face. “I am glad to see you again.” Amit looked like a Prussian Hussar, spoke like a military commander, and wore a large handlebar mustache without a trace of irony. He turned to me and snapped out a greeting.

  “You must be the magician.” I nodded.

  “I have a great fondness for magicians,” he said. “They’re the only people crazier than poets. Welcome to New Delhi.”

  Amit, I knew, was a poet. A famous poet. In fact, the poet laureate of New Delhi. He and Andy had become friends during Andy’s previous time in India and he had agreed to show me around. He was bright, forceful, fierce, and welcoming. I liked Amit immediately.

  “We must eat,” he said, ushering us toward his van. “Get in.”

  One of the joys of traveling so far from home and work is that midday on a Thursday carries as few responsibilities as a Saturday or a Sunday at home, so after a large, late lunch we went to the park to sit on a bench and talk. The sprawling turf of the Lodhi Gardens carves out a green and quiet haven in the middle of the city, much like Central Park in New York, I suppose, but filled with monkeys, which I eyed with suspicion. They roamed, sometimes alone, sometimes in great galloping packs, and had grown so numerous and so aggressive in their relentless search for food that they had become a problem. Homes were robbed, businesses interrupted, and even New Delhi’s police headquarters was targeted for raids by these marauding packs of Rhesus macaques, who descended on buildings like locusts on a crop of wheat and quickly exploited any open windows or balconies. The solution, I learned, was for home and business owners to employ larger monkeys, posted and chained at vulnerable entry points to intimidate and frighten away the smaller ones, like scarecrows who could throw their own shit.

  We walked through the park and I told Amit that I was trying to reconcile two different perspectives of magic I had encountered in India.

  The first was that magic is nonsense—things of a very low level—and that everything has a rational, scientific explanation. I heard this everywhere. But then, and sometimes from the same people, I would hear firsthand accounts of feats that could only be described as magical: spells cast on sisters, tantric yogis flitting through the air as pure consciousness, fruit miraculously appearing on trees. India is known around the world as a Land of Mystery. Now that I was here I understood why many people were trying to shed this image, but then why was there so much talk about magic?

  Amit listened and then offered another interpretation of magic in India. He spoke about magic as a way of honorably and ethically interacting with the unknown—in the world, in ourselves, in those around us.

  “To me, magic is all about understanding how human beings bridge the gaps in the human condition. We are all born with a great emptiness within us that needs to be filled, and we spend all our time trying to fill that hole in ourselves. This is exhausting, and it is a work we never finish. And so we will always have gaps between who we are and who we want to become.”

  At lunch Amit had ordered course after course for the entire table like a king, summoning the waiter again and again, sending dishes back when they weren’t right, effusing praise and appreciation when they were. There he had been gregarious, commanding, a bon vivant, larger than life, like a character from a movie. Now he chose his words slowly and deliberately and the world around us faded away.

  “How do we bridge those gaps?” he asked. “We bridge them with compassion, for ourselves and for others. We bridge them with faith, that all will be well in this world and maybe in the next. And we bridge them with magic.”

  Amit suggested that India truly was a Land of Mystery because it needed to be. “Here we have such extraordinary diversity—different languages, different religions, different peoples, divided in almost every way people can be divided—all jammed together and united under the Indian flag,” he said. He explained that a sense of magic and a view of the world that allowed for the possibility of magic acted as a societal cushion to ease the tensions that come from such differences. “The more magic we have in our encounters with one another, the more we’re able to deal with the differences between us,” he said. “It’s okay to be different, it’s cool to be different. We don’t have to understand each other to honor one another.”

  Amit also explained that this might be hard for an American to understand. In India, food shortages are frequent and the poverty rate is much higher than it is in America. “There were bread shortages in Moscow and the Soviet Union collapsed. You’ve heard the stories of the food shortages in India, but where are the riots? Where are the massacres? It doesn’t happen here because of the magic of belief and the magic of faith.”

  I asked how he felt about the spiritual leaders who used magic tricks to reinforce their tea
chings, like the gurus who use sleight of hand to produce “holy ash.” Again he suggested that America’s prosperity might make it hard for me to understand the issue clearly. “Even the most knowledgeable people in India have spiritual leaders, or gurus. The production of ‘holy ash’ you mentioned is very common. Let me ask you—does it matter whether it’s a miracle or just sleight of hand? Does it matter? If it delivers relief to a person who has very little income, very little savings, does it matter if it’s actually a magic trick? If a magic trick reduces a man’s suffering in a real and tangible way, who are you to tell him it’s wrong, or that it’s not true, or that it’s just a trick? Who are you to decide what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’? He prays and hopes for his burdens to be lifted or made a little lighter and then—by magic—they are. Where’s the trick in that?”

  The insinuation here was clear—Take your righteous indignation and shove it. I didn’t know what to say. I’m not alone in thinking that the Godmen are inexcusable—again, the Indian Rationalist Association has been fighting a long-running war against them for years. But it occurred to me for the first time that the issue was maybe more complicated than I first assumed.

  Amit’s voice was still soft, but it had an edge now. “Come down to the level of the street, Nate—the level at which our billion-man society lives and survives in an orderly fashion here in the heat and the dust. America has plenty of food and air conditioning. Here you have people who are living much closer to the earth and closer to the reality of shortage, and suffering.

  “But despite all of the challenges of life in this country, look at the success of our democracy. There are nations right around the corner from us, next door in fact, that have no such success with democracy, and they have only one people and one language. In India we have a thousand faiths, a thousand tongues, and yet our democracy thrives. What else besides an awareness of magic could achieve this? I do not believe that there is a science or a wisdom alone that can take the credit.”

  Amit’s assertion that belief in magic acted as a kind of cultural anesthetic didn’t sit easily with me. But I recognized that this didn’t make it wrong, either. I was coming to distrust my own ability to judge anything so far from my own understanding, and in India almost everything was far from my own understanding.

  Just before we got up to leave, Amit added one last thought.

  “Magic—your magic, the magic of magicians—delights us because it gives us a moment of not knowing, an island moment of wonderment, and joy, and innocence. It reminds us that it’s okay not to have all the answers or all the information—that we can move on with our lives anyway. And that we should, because we will never have enough information.”

  THE STREET MAGICIANS OF SHADIPUR DEPOT

  A boy sits on the ground at the crossroads of a small village. Everyone has come to watch, and fifty people are gathered in a circle. The boy is at the center, blindfolded. Behind him, his father is sharpening a sword with a stone.

  The father looks down the blade and then places the stone on the ground. The boy hears the sword on the stone, the stone on the ground, and the footsteps as his father approaches.

  “Father?”

  The father whispers into his son’s ear. The boy lowers his head.

  The villagers watch hesitantly, unmoving.

  The father raises the sword and massacres the boy.

  The butchery takes less than a minute and is done methodically and deliberately, completely without anger, as if slaughtering a lamb for the table. By the end the broken, bleeding body of the boy lies in the center of the road. Blood runs through the dust and the villagers step to the side to let the rivulets pass.

  The father places the sword on the ground and tenderly picks up the body of his son. He places the boy on a large cloth and folds the edges of the cloth over the body. It is a small bundle. Blood begins to seep through the fabric.

  The father begins to pace in a circle around the body. He whispers again, this time with force and urgency, as if casting a spell. He walks faster, speaking louder. He is shouting now; shouting in an unknown language with his hand outstretched toward his son. He cries out and falls to his knees. Then he is silent.

  The cloth begins to move.

  At first the villagers aren’t even sure that it happened. Maybe the wind caught the cloth and made it shift. But there is no wind, and again it moved. Clearly it moved.

  The cloth begins to unfold. The villagers are shocked to see that it is no longer soaked with blood. Then it falls away and the boy stands, miraculously unharmed, back from the dead. The blood is gone, the wounds are gone. The father raises his hands in triumph. The boy takes a bow.

  An hour later—after the chaos and congratulations, after the end of the performance and the farewells of the villagers—the boy and his father walk down a road that disappears into the country. They are talking about magic.

  The father learned the secrets from his father, who learned them from his father, stretching back in time for a thousand years, long before anyone can remember. Now he is passing them on to his son. No one knows where the secrets began—maybe they have always existed. Where did you learn this? My father taught me. That is all.

  The secrets reveal the magic, and the magic is extraordinary—how to produce water from an empty bowl, how to breathe fire, how to cut your arm with a knife without showing pain, how to miraculously heal the wound. These feats are gritty and brutal, far removed from the sterile card tricks and stage illusions of the modern American magician. This is magic with mud on its boots, less a form of entertainment than an expression of the inescapable, everyday struggles of poverty, thirst, hunger, violence, and death. The massacre is the last illusion in the show, and its unflinching barbarity is a carefully constructed allegory of loss, overturned in the end by the power of the magician. It’s Abraham and Isaac without the divine intervention—here, the boy just dies. Only after the weight of this tragedy has fully descended over the audience does the magician bring the boy back to life, and the miracle is not an expression of divine grace but rather a demonstration of the magician’s own power—his ability to defy the rules of the universe and his victory over mortality, fear, frailty, and suffering, even if just for a moment.

  This is how the illusions look to the audience—full of glory, tragedy, and triumph—but as they walk the father does not talk to his son about glory. When he speaks to his son he talks about the craft, the tools of the trade, the work. The tricks are a way to make a living. He speaks as if they are fishermen and he is teaching his boy to catch a fish—this is how you bait the hook, this is how you throw the line. But instead of catching fish they are creating magic, and step by step the boy learns to perform miracles.

  In this way the boy and his father cross the country, performing in one village and then traveling to the next, moving along the ancient routes of their ancestors. Tomorrow they will come to another village and stage another performance, and soon they will rejoin their family and share the money they have earned.

  Years later, when he has become a father, the boy passes the secrets on to his son, who in turn passes them to his son, and he to his, and this over and over for two thousand years until the father’s name is Ishamudin and the son’s name is Altamas and I am sitting on the floor of their home in a slum known as Shadipur Depot outside New Delhi.

  Their family has become legendary in the world of magic—a nomadic tribe of Indian street magicians who have passed their secrets from father to son in an unbroken chain for more than three thousand years. I have traveled halfway around the world to meet them and I am watching a private performance of their ancient illusions. I have seen extraordinary things: fire breathing, needle swallowing, water produced from an empty bowl; and now they are about to perform one final illusion.

  The father is sharpening a sword. His son stands before him, blindfolded. I have no idea what is coming.

  Before leaving the U.S., I had sent a message to Lee Siegel, the author who inspired my trip
to India. I wanted to know if he had kept in touch with any of the magicians from Net of Magic and if he could facilitate an introduction so I could meet them when I traveled to New Delhi. He responded with an offer to put me in touch with the leader of the tribe, and also a warning: Shadipur Depot is a slum, and you can’t just walk in and say hello.

  Amit had given me the same warning the day before when we sat on the bench in the park.

  “There’s this fine American phrase,” he said. “It’s pithy, it’s to the point—the expression ‘Oh shit.’ Shadipur Depot adds a whole new meaning to that expression. When you go there, suddenly you know what it means. It’s a complete invasion of your entire aesthetic sensibility. There’s no way you can come out of that without—”

  He trailed off and thought for a moment.

  “It’s like going through one of Dante’s books. In Shadipur Depot you come to a place where a child is studying right next to the lavatory, and is going to school, and getting grades. And on the other side of the lavatory a mother is cooking food. And it is a life. That’s where they have their life. What a paradox the human condition is, because despite all that deprivation and poverty people still have a life.”

  The day had started ordinarily enough. That morning I lay in bed at the guesthouse, not sleeping, watching through the window as the sky turned from dark to light and thinking about the day to come. Soon Amit would arrive with his van and we would go to Shadipur Depot to meet the magicians, but for a moment I lay there, listening to the city as the roads filled with traffic, the sun rose, and the day began.