Here Is Real Magic Page 9

  When I was a freshman in college I would practice new material by going down to the Ped Mall—eight square blocks in downtown Iowa City blocked off from car traffic—to do street magic for people: students, construction workers, homeless people, anyone. One afternoon, after watching for a while, a guy maybe two or three years older than I handed me a business card and said, “You do good work. We would like to help. Drop us an email and we’ll find a time to sit down and talk about how we can work together.”

  Then he walked away.

  I looked down at the business card, which was printed on thick, translucent vellum. One side was blank except for an email address in small black letters along one edge. The other side simply read THE JAMES GANG.

  Since that day I have collaborated with Andy on every major project I have ever done. That initial contact led to a run of shows in a performance venue that the James Gang had recently opened above a bar downtown. This weekly show—and the new material I had to generate each week to fill it—effectively put an end to any chance of success I had as a student but taught me almost everything I needed to know about being a magician. A few years later we produced a DVD of my first college tour.

  Everyone assumed that after college Andy would go to Hollywood and become a film director or to Washington to get into politics: he had been accepted to the USC film school and already had a job offer from someone on the Hill. But Andy didn’t go to Hollywood and he didn’t go to Washington. “I want to change the world,” he explained just before selling all of his possessions, breaking his lease, and disappearing for four years, “but I have never seen it. I have to go see it first.”

  Over the next four years Andy traveled the world and embarked on a series of increasingly incredible adventures. He taught English in a small village in China, appeared in three Bollywood films, and worked for a nonprofit NGO in Burma. He collaborated on documentaries for ESPN and National Geographic and hosted a cooking special on Armenian National Television about the American Thanksgiving holiday in which he roasted a turkey, cooked stuffing, and baked pumpkin pie in the kitchen of the American embassy on live TV. He lived in a Buddhist monastery in Korea, a mud hut in rural South Africa, and a tiny fishing village in India. And he has the photos—and in the case of the Bollywood films, the DVDs—to prove it. It’s amazing.

  Along the way, Andy had been making no-budget documentaries about the people he met. When I wrote to tell him about my trip, he was working as a line cook at a truck stop in the middle of the Australian outback. I laid out the plan of traveling across India and he said he’d like to come along for the adventure. “We’ll make a documentary about your search for magic in another culture,” he said. “Like Anthony Bourdain traveling the world to explore the cuisine of other countries, but with magic.”

  We had a few rules. First, the trip would always come before the filming. I would go to India and do what I intended to do, and Andy would come along and film whatever he wanted. There would be no staging scenes for the camera, and if the camera ever got in the way of the adventure, we’d put it away and forget about it.

  However, there were concessions. I agreed to wear a little radio mic sometimes so Andy’s camera could hear whatever I said, and some of the places I wanted to go required permission to film, which would have to be worked out along the way.

  Andy walked into the room. In one hand he held a paper bag. “Breakfast,” he said, and held it toward me. In the other hand he was balancing two shot-glass-sized terracotta cups, steaming and filling the room with the scent of anise and cloves. It smelled like actual salvation. “This is chai,” Andy said, “and it’s one of the greatest beverages in the world.” He handed one to me and raised his cup in a toast. “Welcome to India.”

  KOLKATA

  The heat came early in the day and by lunchtime the air was heavy and hot. I was losing my battle with jet lag and thinking mostly of coffee. The booksellers lining Bankrim Chatterjee Street looked up distractedly from their own reading to hawk new textbooks and old paperback novels from their open-air stalls as we passed. The street was filled with students in collared shirts from the nearby college and older women in yellow-and-orange saris holding umbrellas to block out the sun. Motorcycles wove between the pedestrians and an all-white 1940s-era Studebaker made a path through the crowd by sounding its horn until people gave way. Everywhere, something smelled delicious.

  Ten minutes later we were installed at a table in the Indian Coffee House in the old Albert Hall building. The room was as large as a school gymnasium and looked as if it was built at the height of the British raj, with molded plaster ceilings stretching forty feet above us and a battalion of ornate wrought-iron fans suspended overhead, spinning silently but struggling to circulate the air. Waiters in crisp white uniforms and white caps hurried drinks on silver trays from the kitchen to the tables. One of them brought a small glass of water and a cup of thick, perfect, life-giving coffee—dark, potent, and syrupy with sugar—and I was so relieved to see the coffee that I thanked him with what must have been alarming fervor. “Is okay, sir,” he said with his hands up as he backed slowly away. Inside I could feel my humanity creeping back from the brink. Arteries dilated, blood rushed to my brain, my heart swelled with love for everything. I sat for a moment to drink the water and sip the coffee and the world settled back down again.

  The room was full. I think we found the last unoccupied table, and most were crowded with middle-aged men and women leaning in and speaking intently, deep in conversation. I wondered if we had interrupted them—most of the tables had ceased their conversations and turned to look in our direction. I suspected this place didn’t get tourists very often. I leaned back in my chair and drank my coffee. I liked it here tremendously.

  “Hey, I have a picture to show you,” Andy said. He swung his backpack to the ground and pulled a photo from between the pages of a book. He handed it to me. “It’s from Zambia.”

  A woman, her mouth open, eyes wide and bright, beamed out at me from beneath a yellow headscarf. She was sitting cross-legged on the ground in a mud-hut village and maybe a dozen other women sat around her, staring at a rubber band stretched between her two index fingers. Everyone was laughing. I knew that look.

  “That’s the rubber band trick,” I said. Before Andy left on his trip around the world I taught him one of my very first magic tricks, a simple illusion with two rubber bands in which one appears to melt seamlessly through the other. It’s beginner’s-level magic but the visual moment of the illusion is so perfect that you don’t even need to say anything, you just do it. I thought it would be a good way to communicate if you didn’t speak the local language, a useful tool for a traveler headed out into the world. You never know when you’ll need to be amazing.

  “I have done that trick so many times,” Andy said. “I’ve performed it for a group of sheepherders in Tibet, a biker gang in Australia, a group of students who were trying to climb Mount Kilimanjaro—everywhere. I was sitting on a bench at a bus stop in Korea and this old man sat down next to me and began to read a newspaper. I started doing the rubber band trick over and over, and after a minute he put down the newspaper and said ‘Again!’ So I did it again, and he just looked at me without saying anything for fifteen seconds. Then he asked if I had been traveling for long, and where I had been, and then he asked if I wanted to join him for tea.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “It would not have happened without the rubber band trick. It’s the most extraordinary way to connect with people. Speaking of connecting with people, we should talk about the trip.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you said in your email that you were on a quest for wonder. Who talks like that, by the way? You’re the only person on the planet who still talks about going on quests. So—we’re looking for wonder.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what do you mean?’ We’re looking for magic.”

  “You
came to India to find magic shows and watch them?”

  “Yes. Well, kind of. I want to feel like that lady in your picture.”

  Andy took the two rubber bands off his wrist and began to perform the rubber band trick.

  “Shut up,” I said. “You know what I mean.”

  We ordered lunch and made a plan to move west by train, first to Varanasi that night, and we would figure the rest out as we went.

  Varanasi appealed to me for two reasons. First, I had heard it was famous for its snake charmers and I wanted to find one. Snake charming stood at the crossroads of my lifelong love of magic and lifelong aversion to snakes, and just the thought of it held a sort of power over me. Second, Varanasi was a convenient stop-off on an east-to-west crossing of India by train, and an overnight train meant we didn’t have to pay for a hotel.

  “I’d really like to find these guys,” I said, and slid my copy of Net of Magic across the table. Andy picked up the book and flipped through the pages, stopping at the photo section in the middle.

  “That’s incredible,” he said.

  “I know. They’re a tribe of street magicians who live in a slum outside New Delhi. I sent an email to the author before I left to see if he could set up an introduction.”

  After we ate, I absentmindedly took a deck of cards from my bag and began flipping them back and forth between my hands. The instinct to practice at any possible moment is deeply ingrained in most magicians and few leave home without a deck of cards in case a few spare moments open up during the day. A friend of mine was working on a coin trick and got into the habit of hiding a coin in his hand all day long—while driving, showering, eating, everywhere—so during a performance he could conceal it behind his fingers in a natural manner.

  I flicked the cards off the top of the deck from one hand to another.

  “Excuse me, sir!” Our waiter was back, flanked by two others. “Gambling is strictly prohibited in our coffeehouse. Please to put the cards back in your knapsack.”

  “Oh, what? Sorry. I’m not gambling. I’m doing magic.”

  This didn’t impress them, and he told me again to put the cards away.

  “Even if I’m not gambling?” A few of the other tables turned to look at us again, disapproving and irritated.

  “Sir, please to put them away.”

  We got up to leave, but as we approached the door a group of students turned to get our attention and a young man of about twenty raised his hand. “Excuse me, please.” We walked over.

  “You are American?” the young man asked. He wore an Adidas track jacket and dark-rimmed glasses. They all had notebooks out on the table but when we approached they cleared them to the side to make room and invited us to sit.

  “They are very sensitive about playing cards here,” he explained. “A few years ago there was a great deal of gambling here and they have worked hard to make this a place of discussion and debate once again.”

  I thanked him for the explanation. “I just assumed they didn’t want visitors.”

  He waggled his head from side to side. Later I would learn that this uniquely Indian gesture translates loosely to “I recognize what you are saying and am responding without agreeing or disagreeing with you,” but at the moment I didn’t know how to respond. One of the students asked why I had come to India and I told him I was there to learn about magic. They hadn’t expected this.

  “In this country we believe everything has a scientific explanation,” a young woman said. “If we see a magician, we know there is a specific method he is using to make his tricks.”

  “Do you believe in magic?” I asked. I’m not sure what I mean when I ask people this question, but it’s a way to get them to start talking about a subject that would otherwise require a great deal of conversational buildup.

  “No,” said the woman. “Yes,” said the man in the track jacket. “We don’t see the ghosts, but we believe. When we hear ghost stories, we get the goose bumps.”

  “Yes, we do believe in mysteries,” added another student, this one wearing a green Megadeth T-shirt.

  “Everything has a scientific explanation,” insisted the woman, “even if we don’t understand the science.”

  I am not the first magician from the Western world to travel to India in search of magic. India has long had a reputation for being a place where magic might actually be real. The travel poster promoting Indian tourism in O’Hare airport featured a picture of the Taj Mahal and the words INDIA: A LAND OF MYSTERY.

  The country’s ancient tradition of magic is well known but little understood in the world of magicians. I knew, for instance, that one of the pieces in my own show had its roots in the work of these traditional magicians—that it had originated in India, made its way to Europe, then to America, and was then picked up by Houdini and made famous. I liked the idea of tracing my own art back to its beginnings, and I imagine that other magicians have had the same idea. In general, magicians love to be amazed. After years of perfecting the craft, the experience of being genuinely astonished by another magician’s work is so rare that if someone is doing something that can’t be explained, other magicians will go to great lengths and travel great distances to see it for themselves.

  In 1899, at the height of the British Empire, Charles Bertram left behind a successful career as the favorite magician of England’s King Edward VII to explore the magic of the Indian subcontinent. “There comes a time in the life of every man when he wishes to enlarge the field of his operations,” he wrote afterward, “and having decided that this was desirable in my own case, my thoughts naturally turned to the East, which from time immemorial has been steeped in the fascinating tradition of the Black Art.” In his memoirs he makes the curiously specific claim that he witnessed 106 performances during his time in India, and he described many of the illusions that have become synonymous with traditional Indian street magic.

  Around this same time, the famous American illusionist Harry Kellar traveled through India and sought out performances by as many traditional Indian magicians as he could find. Before I left for India I came across the account of his adventures, A Magician’s Tour Up and Down and Round About the Earth, and read about magic too impossible to believe. One afternoon a snake charmer visited Kellar in his hotel room. When the snake charmer played his flute—on the opposite side of the room—Kellar “saw the sheet on the bed rise up till it looked like a small tent, and then an enormous cobra crawled out and coiled itself on the floor.” Later, he described a bloody street performance in which the magician massacred a young boy with a sword and then brought him back to life.

  In the years to come, dozens of magicians from the West descended on India in search of the infamous Indian Rope Trick. The accounts of this illusion varied in certain specifics, but the general premise was the same. A magician walked to the center of an open field, placed a basket on the ground, and began to play a flute. As he played, a rope rose from the basket and continued into the air, unsupported, until it stretched into the sky. The magician’s young assistant would then climb the rope, and either he would disappear into thin air at the top or, in some more violent versions of the story, the magician would climb after the young boy carrying a sword clenched between his teeth and the illusion would end as the severed and bleeding limbs, head, and broken body of the boy fell from the sky back to the earth. In some versions of the story the magician would then magically restore the boy to life.

  The Indian Rope Trick was a sensation, and magicians around the world launched a campaign to find someone who could perform it. None of them succeeded, of course, and in his extraordinary book The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, Peter Lamont pulls back the curtain on this long-standing hoax. In 1890 the Chicago Tribune published an anonymous account of the illusion, complete with a photograph of the Indian magician purported to have accomplished the impossible feat. The story was a runaway hit and the illusion became legendary, but there was a problem—the reporter had invented the entire article. The illusion wa
s never performed. Four months later the paper printed a retraction of the story, but by then it had spread throughout the Western world and has been repeated for more than a hundred years.

  None of this prevented the grand stage illusionists of America and Europe from inventing their own versions of the famous Indian Rope Trick. Thurston staged the illusion every night in his live theater show. So did Blackstone. The illusion had captured the imagination of the West, and India has been known ever since as a land of magic and mystery.

  Kolkata’s Howrah train station towered above the surrounding neighborhood like a prison, with stout brick walls and blockhouse towers defending every corner. Inside the gloomy, cavernous interior an entire village of destitute children begged the travelers for coins and an army of bustling station attendants in blue uniforms hurried past and pretended not to see them. We began our search for tickets and waited for an hour at the Computerized Reservation Office only to meet a man whose job appeared to be to tell people that they have waited in the wrong line. It took another hour and a progression of offices and service windows, but finally we had what we wanted—two tickets on the overnight train to Varanasi.

  The train didn’t leave until later that evening, so Andy and I had the rest of the day to explore the city. Fortified by the coffee and the successful navigation of the ticket office, I was beginning to feel as if I had a grip on this new place, but we found an outdoor market that reminded me how far I was from home. Vendors stretched down both sides of the road and sold cloth, jewelry, flowers, fruit, cell phones, candles, everything—some stacked neatly on stands or carts and others piled haphazardly on the ground. One merchant used a machete to hack open fresh green coconuts so you could drink the milk before scooping the soft meat out from inside. Another squatted on the road behind a metal pail filled with eggs and held a cardboard sign announcing PICO’S EGG SHOP. Dogs and goats wandered freely, children slept under carts as their parents worked above, and everywhere the scent of dust, gasoline, incense, spice, roasting meat, and humanity mixed together into a smell I would come to associate closely with India as the trip went on but struck me in that moment as new and overpowering. A man about my age pushed a bicycle covered with living chickens through the market, their feet gathered and bound together in two unhappy bunches—one at the front of the bike and one at the back—all clucking and screeching as he offered them up for sale. Andy saw my revulsion at this. “Nate, look around you. How else are you going to keep them fresh?”