All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (22 page)

The man named Ajit took the notes, licked his finger, and counted them carefully. I searched his face for signs of glee, but there were none.

‘
Acha
. We will start.’

Patiently, they began to remove the accoutrements of their trade from the wooden box. First, some garlands of marigolds, bright orange and unlikely amidst the dun earth tones of the hut. Then a lemon, a rusty blade with a wooden handle, some sheets of paper and finally a heavy object in a clean white cloth. I could feel my eye twitching again, faster now, as Baskar unwrapped it reverently. Inside there was a human skull.

I gave a barely concealed shudder. Years past in a science class I’d handled a human skull. But this was far from the polished, bone-white item I remembered. The occipital bone at the back was jagged and stained with blood. It looked only partially decomposed.

‘From the Kali Ghat in Calcutta,’ growled Baskar, as if reading my mind. ‘Kali Ghat is most important place for tantric magic. This object has great power. You should not touch it.’

That was plausible, I thought. As Doms they would have free access to the cremation grounds.

Baskar laid out three strings of marigolds on the ground, then slowly lifted the skull and placed it on top.

‘First mantra,’ he muttered. ‘We ask Kali to listen. She is the Black Goddess, source of all creation. She slays all demons. She creates and destroys worlds. If we give her worship, she can destroy for us.’

Chanting under his breath, he held his hands in the air theatrically, then in a quick motion sliced the lemon in half and squeezed out the juice on to the skull. Within seconds it began to smoke and an acrid reek permeated the hut. Some moments later, small flames appeared, engulfing the skull and the mound of orange flowers. Orange flames licked eerily from within the eye sockets.

The youngest of the three, the effeminate Ajit, looked at me expectantly, probably hoping to see my wonder at the materialisation of flames without the use of any matches. But I gave him nothing in return. The lemon juice, obviously, was the catalyst for some sort of chemical reaction. If I’d wanted to see such cheap conjuring tricks I could have gone to any street corner in the city.

As the marigolds charred and withered in the heat, Baskar began to sprinkle pinches of finely ground herbs on to the blaze, and add small shavings of wood. The flames leaped higher. Then he began to sing. His voice was low and ruined – a voice that had drunk and smoked away the harshness of life. The mantras were spoken quickly but I was able to jot down some of them.

Sat guru sat masan. Rabu chandal ban chandal – kam kamacha devig chu – Sat guru sat masan. Rabu chandal ban chandal – kam kamacha devig chu – Sat guru sat masan. Rabu chandal ban chandal – kam kamacha devig chu

When the mantra was finished he passed me a scrap of paper and a pencil.

‘Write the name of your enemy on this,’ he commanded. ‘Spell it correctly. Then close the paper and hand it back to me.’

I wrote down the name I’d prepared. It was a name at random – a name with no possible meaning for me. And yet, even as I scrawled it, I was worried. What if someone
did
exist with this name: was the spell transferable? At the same time, why was I worrying at all? I didn’t
believe
in this mumbo jumbo – it was superstition, a fascinating anthropological relic. And yet somehow it was impossible to discard entirely the possibility that some outcome would arise from what I was seeing here. That, I supposed, was the very premise upon which these men sold their services. No matter how rational we believe ourselves, these thoughts run very deep in the human psyche.

I handed Baskar the piece of paper. He took out a cigarette from his pocket and lit it, then blew smoke across the tightly folded square. He stubbed out the cigarette and put the paper in his mouth, chewing hard for several minutes. When he opened his mouth next, a dense stream of smoke, almost like dry ice, poured out, which he directed across the human skull, now resting in a circle of embers. Another conjuring trick, but the effect was impressive. The bloodstained skull, placed on glowing embers, was now veiled beneath a halo of smoke.

He began to chant once again. ‘Second mantra.’

Akas bani patal bani bani dilkikai dohai nona chamain kachoo – Akas bani patal bani bani dilkikai dohai nona chamain kachoo – Akas bani patal bani bani dilkikai dohai nona chamain kachoo

‘That is Ma Kali mantra,’ he explained when he had finished. ‘With this mantra your enemy will not be able to face you. He will
never
be able to come in front of you again. Even now he will be feeling some effects.’

Ma kamru kamacha devi jirya bangali non chamaiain kechyo – Parjare jarai kalki kai mai kamru kamacha kechoo adirat pichli pahar japoo karoo mai kamru kamacha devi taiaho jeeria bagale kechoo

‘This third mantra is most dangerous,’ he continued. ‘You take the ashes of the marigold flowers, keep them in your pocket, then follow your enemy in the market place, or as he leaves his house, and throw the powder in his face. Just as flowers burn to dust, so will your enemy.’

I nodded uneasily. The repeated mantras, the claustrophobia, the low light – all of it was filling me with a strong desire to get as far away from the place as possible. If only in the intimidation side of their business, they were good at their job. I gazed longingly at the door, willing this to be over.

Baskar stopped chanting suddenly and tapped the third man, Kanti, on the shoulder. The room was so full of smoke by now that I could hardly see them, but I saw Kanti move towards the hessian sack.

Ajit shuffled towards me with gleaming eyes. He rested a soft hand upon my shoulder. ‘Kali is goddess of destruction,’ he whispered. ‘She has strength of
shakti
– cosmic power. Even Shiva lies beneath her feet. It is her we have to ask for assistance.’

I shifted back a little. The energy in the room seemed to be reaching a crescendo and I was beginning to shake.

‘Kali, the black-skinned one, wears a necklace of
nagas
– serpents. Like Kali, snakes can bring death. But they are also creatures of great power. When we conduct a mantra with snakes, outcome is much stronger – Kali is listening.’

Snakes! I thought to myself. Please let there not be snakes. Peering through the smoke, I saw Kanti upending the hessian sack. He jiggled it slightly and, recoiling in disbelief, I made out the heavy, thick coils of a python unspooling into the hut. I felt mildly sick. It was sleepy – perhaps recently fed – but despite this I began to back up against the wall of the hut. This was madness; it was time to get the hell out of here.

‘Not dangerous, my friend,’ simpered Baskar. ‘Not dangerous to you. Only to your enemy, anger of snake will be coming.’ He laughed, a menacing chuckle, lifting the python around his head.

Composing himself, he began to chant the mantra again, a low intonation that seemed to rise up from his solar plexus and reverberate around the room. For a second I almost burst out into hysterical laughter. This was too absurd, too unlikely! I’ve been in some strange places in my life but truly none could outrank this for its sheer distance from the normal facets of my life. And yet even as this thought occurred to me, so too did the realisation that this was what I’d come looking for. In this room everything had significance. I should not complain now that I had found it.

If the first snake had made me uneasy, it was the second one, however, that really pushed me towards the edge. The litheness of it, its subtle reed-green hue. The flickering tongue that spoke of rare sub-tropical toxins and which, more even than the venom it might bring, seemed to tap into the deepest levels of the human psyche, to envelop me with unease, to send my heart rate spinning upwards so that sweat began to pour from my skin.

‘This snake from jungle,’ whispered Ajit, his voice now the faintest murmur. He was relishing the performance, I was sure of it. Surely there was no need to petrify the customer! ‘Small snake,’ he continued, ‘but very, very dangerous one. One bite is enough.’

In a second I got to my feet, edging towards the door, but Baskar grabbed my arm and pulled me down.

‘Do not be afraid, sir,’ he said, allowing himself a smile. ‘Poison is not there. Poison is gone. Only for Kali do we have snakes. She is enjoying them.’

With the greatest reluctance, I lowered myself back down to ground level. After checking to make sure that they were cool, Baskar swept the ashes from the fire into a small paper bag.

‘These,’ he said, ‘you keep. After they have touched him, within at least one month your enemy will be falling dead. Possibly he will be falling ill, or heart will be stopping. Death will be imminent.’

I nodded. The whole point of black magic, I’d thought, was to avoid such public confrontations. In a society which continues to fear the supernatural, running up to a known enemy and throwing a handful of dust in his face might be about the most obvious statement of intent one could think of. But then I considered the element of fear. For a believer in witchcraft, what could be more terrifying than to suppose oneself cursed? Even disallowing all the effects of the incantation, the weight of fear would be a powerful weapon in itself, perhaps even enough to make one ill.

With that it was over. All too quickly the snakes were coiled and replaced, the floor swept with a besom, the money recounted and I was out, sucking great gulps of air. Newly paid, the Mantriks were all smiles now, one of them fetching a sooty kettle from behind the hut and offering me chai. How quickly, I ruminated, had we gone from the business of calculated murder to social pleasantry. More than anything, this seemed evidence of just how normal they supposed their job to be. They didn’t seem to have the same ideas of good and evil that I was familiar with. Nothing was intrinsically positive or negative; there were merely these two forces at play in the universe, and through skill, technique and piety they could be manipulated.

Nevertheless, I refused the chai. To their knowledge, I was about to throw magical dust in the face of my enemy in order to put him in the ground, so I supposed I could find better people to drink tea with. I shook hands with the men, thanked them for their time and made my way slowly across the village. A chicken ran across my path. Some distance behind me I heard the voices of children, which told me that in one of the other huts the Mantriks’ families had been there all along, cooking, cleaning and surviving.

In the distance I could see Niraj’s rickshaw and I almost ran towards it.

For several days after the black magic ceremony I slept badly. It wasn’t the things I’d seen which left me uneasy, so much as feeling that I’d indulged an area of curiosity which should never have been part of this journey. If it was the macabre I was after, then there were innumerable avenues of exploration. In actual fact it was the very opposite I was seeking. Black magic, and the whole realm of superstition which fuels it, is a practice which draws upon the fears and uncertainties of human beings. Mystical knowledge, on the other hand, comes through hard-earned achievement, and springs from a mind unwavering in its search for truth.

It was almost time to leave Varanasi, but first I went to bid farewell to the elderly yoga teacher who’d been instructing me in the early mornings. He lived not far from my guesthouse, at the end of a narrow alley in which I’d twice found myself drenched from an overflow pipe, and once narrowly escaped a savaging from a pye-dog. On the morning of departure, I arrived to find Yogi Raj, as he called himself, already enacting some vigorous
asanas
on the stone flagons outside his house. He was about sixty, with a round barrel chest, a shock of hennaed hair and a style of instruction which brooked no excuses. He had a habit of quoting the scriptures to me one minute, then shattering my preconceptions by telling me of his ambitions to fly an Apache helicopter, or visit Las Vegas. In short, he was very much today’s Indian: steeped in the past, but by no means stuck there.

That morning we practised his inimitable style of yoga for an hour and then, as the morning sun took the chill from the courtyard at last, laid out some cushions in the light to take our tea. An arc of pigeons cut across the sky above us, as Yogi Raj’s neighbour set his flock out for their morning practice.

‘Ah, you are leaving our Benares,’ he lamented. ‘Just as we are making some progress. You a very restless young man.’

‘I’m trying not to be,’ I said.

‘When you come back,’ said Yogi Raj, ‘you will study with me again, and my wife will cook you some special vegetarian delicacies. Non veg is inappropriate for the study of yoga: it excites the mind too much. Also, please avoid onions, garlic and spicy foods.’

I said that I would.

‘Book writing is a worthy profession,’ continued Yogi Raj, extending an advisory digit, ‘but remember it will not bring the answers you seek. God does not come in the form of thoughts and ideas. He comes in the place that ideas end. For Westerners, this, what you might call, central difficulty.’

I sipped my tea thoughtfully. Yogi Raj had a habit of talking in riddles, but in this case I felt that he was speaking very sincerely. Increasingly, on this strange journey, it was becoming evident that mystical experience occurs entirely outside conceptual thought.