The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  About three hundred people were already in attendance at the north end of the square. Bunched up together like sheep in a pen, they formed a crude semi-circle. Most were standing. Mothers and their children, old men and gangling youths. All were concentrating on the figure standing before them.

  We took our places on the extreme left of the audience.

  I whispered to Feroze:

  “Who’s that man?”

  “That …” he replied grandly, “that is a psychic surgeon.”

  “But I didn’t think Indian godmen did actual surgery.”

  “They don’t,” said Feroze.

  “But look, he’s Indian …”

  “This is one of the only psychic surgeons on the subcontinent,” declared Feroze. “He was taught by a Filipino in Madras. He’s trying to make a name for himself in Calcutta … speaks Bengali quite well.”

  Before the magician could disclose further details, the show began.

  The surgeon was a tall, balding man with an expansive forehead and a flaccid complexion. His hands were broad as cymbals, his body was cloaked in a lavish aquamarine robe, belted at the waist with a fraying red sash. A distance of about twenty-five feet separated him from the crowd. Before him stood a large dining table, covered by a plastic sheet. In front of that was a rug.

  “Pay close attention,” Feroze hissed, as the ritual got under way.

  One of the surgeon’s assistants scuttled forward carrying a brass incense burner. Copious amounts of gargoyle-gray smoke poured from its latticed top. The burner was positioned at the right-hand corner of the carpet. As the surgeon sat cross-legged at the center of the rug, the attendant returned with a second, identical burner. This was placed at the rug’s top left corner. The physician closed his eyes, lolled his neck back like a loggerhead turtle, and started to chant mantras. A light southerly breeze conveyed the two plumes of dense sandalwood smoke into the audience.

  When the prolonged session of chanting was at an end, the surgeon thrust his arms in the air and addressed the villagers.

  “He’s telling them that God has sent him here,” said Feroze softly. “He is saying his hands have the power to restore the sick. No illness, he says, is too severe. There’s hope for everyone.”

  A wave of expectation gripped the audience. An old man cheered; a young boy shouted praise. The three hundred villagers inched forward in anticipation. As they did so, the surgeon commanded them to stay back.

  “Now,” said the Master, “he’s saying his powers only work if everyone stands perfectly still. If anyone moves, even an inch, his magic will vanish and no one will be healed.”

  The doctor appealed to the crowd. Which of them had an illness? Virtually everyone stuck up their hands.

  The first patient selected by the surgeon was an elderly, anemic looking woman. She claimed to have an ulcer in her stomach. When she was asked to point to the pain, she motioned to her chest. Nonetheless, she was lifted up on to the doctor’s examination table, to the delight of the audience. The table had been placed on a raised bank of ground, with the onlookers standing lower, at the very edge of the square. The table’s height – which was obviously intended – made it impossible for the audience to get a good view of the tabletop.

  The physician performed a superficial examination on his patient. From where I was standing, it appeared as if he was probing specific lymph nodes at points on her abdomen. He took care to obstruct the view by standing on the outer side of the operating table. With the external scrutiny over, the doctor pressed his palms together and touched them to his mouth. The villagers stretched forward for a better look. Some were straight-faced. Others chattered away, giggling to their friends in anticipation.

  They watched in awe as the doctor drew a grubby scalpel from his belt, flailing it to and fro like a cavalry officer signaling the charge. Inhaling all at once, the villagers inched forward. The assistant poured ghee on to the incense burners. The operating table was veiled in an impenetrable cloud of greasy smoke.

  As the surgeon motioned wild, slicing movements with the scalpel, one of the helpers tapped out a rhythm on a tambourine. The drumming, the asphyxiating smoke, the perfume of sandalwood, and the glint of the blade mesmerized the audience. The beat grew faster. And faster. Another assistant bounded in front of the table and twirled round and around like a ballerina. As the drumming reached a climax, the dancer leapt towards the crowd, emitting a terrible scream. The surgeon thrust a chunk of meat into the air. Caught expertly by the aide, the trophy was exhibited to the villagers. The meat was said to be the woman’s ulcer. It was white and bore an uncanny resemblance to a lump of mutton fat. I asked the assistant if I could inspect the ulcer at closer quarters. But as I made my petition, he threw the flesh to a ravenous pye dog. A second later and the evidence had been gobbled up.

  The surgeon wiped his bloodied hands on a cloth and helped the woman from the operating table. The villagers watched as he sponged away a patch of blood from her stomach. The wound and all scars had vanished, healed by the psychic surgeon’s magical powers. The grandmother thanked her benefactor and confessed that she felt much better.

  When the audience had finished cheering, the surgeon called for a second patient. A boy of about seven was pushed forward by his friends. He conferred with the physician, who made an announcement.

  “He says that the child has tonsillitis,” explained Feroze. “He’s going to chop out the tonsils. Again, watch how the smoke and the drumming distract the audience.”

  As before, the patient lay still on the operating couch. The scalpel flashed in the sunlight like the eye of a demon as it was lunged towards the boy’s mouth. A ladle of ghee was poured on each incense burner, creating a riot of billowing smoke. The tambourine’s sound echoed like a clap of thunder. The assistant shrieked and the child’s tonsils were hurled into the air. The pye dog had another snack. A moment later, the boy stood up, spat out a mouthful of blood, and returned to his friends – miraculously healed.

  Psychic surgeons have had an uneasy honeymoon with the Indian public. When they first appeared during the early 1980s, they were discredited largely because of a single foreign “surgeon-priest.” Professing to have the ability to heal through mind-power, the self-taught surgeon arrived in India and started holding regular sessions. But then he himself fell sick after eating some local food. He called for an ambulance and was rushed to hospital. Rather than being pleased that the mystic was being cared for in hospital, people turned against him. “If he’s a miracle-maker,” they asked, “why doesn’t he cure himself?”

  Manila, capital of the Philippines, is the world center for psychic surgery. As at the village in the marshes, Filipino surgeons generally feign the operation – pretending to excise a morsel of cancerous flesh. In some cases, a “doctor” performs actual minor operations without anesthetic. The patient’s surges of adrenaline as the audience cheers them on, and their natural endorphins, mask the discomfort. In Latin America, genuine cataract surgery and tonsillectomies are often carried out by so-called psychic surgeons. Yet there’s very little one could call “psychic” about their work at all.

  Feroze nudged me to pay attention. The next patient was on the table. A woman of about forty, she had been complaining of severe abdominal pains. When the physician pressed his fingers to her appendix area, the lady screeched wildly. The doctor felt certain she had appendicitis. Immediate surgery was necessary to save her life.

  This time, the operation was longer and more involved. A blindfold was placed over the woman’s face to keep her from seeing her own intestines. A fresh scalpel was passed to the surgeon. Its blade was tested on a strand of hair. It was as sharp as a sickle. Ghee was applied to the burners. The drum beat out a mysterious rhythm. The pye dog licked its lips expectantly. The villagers stood on tiptoe to get the best view possible.

  Pulling me to his own vantage point, Feroze gestured to the surgeon.

  “Watch the front fold of his robe,” he whispered. “Don’t be dist
racted by all the song and dance.”

  Locking my eyes on the surgeon’s hands, I watched in astonishment as he slipped a large lump of meat from the lining of his garment. The costume’s bright color was well-suited to concealing raw mutton. As one of the surgeon’s hands slashed about with the blade, the other squeezed blood from a sponge across the woman’s abdomen. None of the villagers queried that a human appendix could so resemble a chunk of meat carved from a sheep’s thigh. They were too enthused with the presentation to voice questions.

  “All right,” said Feroze as the fourth patient was getting ready to have a tumor excised, “that’s enough. Let’s go back to Calcutta.”

  We tramped back across the mud flats to where the boatman was waiting. Spreading the fingers of his left hand in a crude salute, he helped us into his waterlogged craft.

  Against all the odds, the taxi driver had remembered to fetch us from the embankment. It was good to be on dry land again. Soaked through below the waist, I tugged off my shoes to check for trench foot.

  “How did you enjoy the surgeries?” Feroze asked in a clement tone.

  “Not bad at all … especially the appendectomy.”

  “I’m glad the display met with your approval,” mused the magician.

  “You’ll be able to think about it when you go away …”

  “Go away?” I said. “Go away where?”

  “Oh,” he exclaimed with a phony blank expression. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “You’re going on a journey.”

  “Am I? What sort of journey?”

  The Master wound down the taxi’s window and drew in a sharp breath of Chinatown’s turbid air.

  “A journey of observation!”

  “Tell me more …” I said, recoiling from the sudden announcement.

  “The journey is the next phase in your course,” Feroze declared, picking his teeth with his tongue. “You’re to spend time watching people.”

  “People? Only people? What of the scenery? What about landscapes?”

  “Rubbish,” said the magician. “Don’t give a damn bit of notice to the scenery. People change, they’re changing all the time … they’re doing things … the bloody scenery will be there forever. No – people are the thing you’re to observe!”

  “What kind of people?”

  “All kinds. But I want you to search out godmen, sadhus, astrologers, and anyone who’s out of the ordinary. Remember Houdini’s principle: everyone, however unlikely, has something from which one can learn. You are to make notes on all that you observe – they’re to be sent back regularly for my attention.”

  “But where am I to go, on this journey?”

  The Master prodded me in the chest.

  “Anywhere you like!”

  “How long is the trip supposed to go on?”

  “A day … a month … a year … a lifetime: however long it takes!”

  The lack of guidelines was galling. Feroze knew how I liked basic, straightforward questions to be answered. He had clearly dreamt up the scheme to harass me. Or, more likely still, to get rid of me.

  “If you won’t tell me where to go, or how long to go for … will you at least tell me when I am to leave?”

  Handing a rupee coin to a beggar as the taxi paused at a stop sign, Feroze pivoted to regard me straight on.

  “You are to leave at sunrise,” he said.

  PART THREE

  Much travel is needed before the raw man is ripened

  Proverb

  THIRTEEN

  Dick Whittington and the Black Hole

  Gokul slipped into my room in the middle of the night and packed my bags, as stealthily as a secret agent on assignment. At five-thirty a.m. he tweaked the little finger of my left hand.

  “Time for shower,” he sniffed, as I woke from a nightmare.

  “Gokul …” I yawned. “I’ve been having the most unpleasant dreams.”

  “What you dream?” he asked sensitively.

  “I dreamt that Feroze was sending me away …”

  Gokul did not reply. He was too busy stuffing my shaving kit into a side pocket of my case.

  “Must waste no time,” he said a few moments later. “Master say you must go by six. Twenty-five minute time.”

  My stomach knotted like a bullwhip. The future was suddenly so uncertain. Where was I to go? How was I to get there? Was I being expelled from the course?

  Ordering the elderly valet to unpack my things, I charged downstairs to confront the Master. I was tired of being used as a pawn in his grand scheme. As always he was merely toying with me; abusing my pledge of unequivocal obedience. I searched the study, laboratory, sitting-room, and even the kitchen. The magician was not to be found.

  Gokul, who had ignored my instructions, was dragging my case to the foot of the stairs.

  “Do you know where the Master is?”

  “He gone out,” said the servant. “He wish you luck and say he see you when you return in few months.”

  “A few months?” I swallowed hard. “Is that how long I'm supposed to be gone?”

  Gokul hunched one shoulder. Then the other.

  “Yes,” he replied innocently, “I am thinking so.”

  “Didn’t he want too see me off himself?”

  “Oh, no, he too busy. He having business across town.”

  “What, at six in the morning?”

  Fumbling, Gokul dislodged a packet from the inner depths of his lungi. It was wrapped in green sugar paper.

  “Master ask me to give you this. Almost forgot.”

  “Ah, excellent!” I said. “This must have all the directions in it for my trip.”

  I tore the sheets of sugar paper apart. Inside was a map and a note written in the magician’s hand. I read the message aloud:

  “Have a productive journey. All the best, Feroze.”

  The valet smiled through the right corner of his mouth. He continued to haul my case out into the yard.

  “Is that it?”

  Gokul nodded.

  I unfolded the cloth-backed map, which was rather like unfurling a starched ship’s sail. It depicted the entire Indian subcontinent. Scanning it gingerly, I searched for random pencil lines, an arrow, an “X”. Anything. Despite its great age, the chart – manufactured by Sifton, Praed and Co. of St James’s – was unblemished. The only mark was a Chinagraph circle around Hyderabad.

  “Hyderabad … What’s in Hyderabad?”

  “Gowd family asthma cure,” said Gokul.

  “But … that’s not until the first week of June.”

  I looked at the date on my watch.

  “Today’s the third of March.”

  Gokul warned me that it was one minute to six. The Master, he exhorted, would be incensed if I were there when he returned. We hurried through the courtyard.

  “Good journey …” exclaimed Gokul abruptly, pulling back the gate for me to leave, “and watch out!”

  “What for?”

  The manservant raised his right palm to his brow in a crude salute.

  “You will be knowing … soon you will be knowing,” he said.

  * * * *

  With no one else to turn to for advice, I sallied down to the other end of Alipore, in the hope of finding Venky at his usual bar. The rickshawalla would probably be passed out on the floor after a wild night of carousing. It was time to rouse my secret weapon.

  The sudden proclamation that I was to hasten away on an epic journey of observation worried me deeply. Feroze was an expert at destabilizing those around him. He must have noticed that I had begun to actually relish his intolerably sadistic regime. Despite being savaged by the unbearable pressures of the course, I had developed dour masochistic tendencies. Doubtless an instinctual tactic of survival. The very prospect of digging trenches with a teaspoon, memorizing formulae, or selected works of Plato, raising my temperature to suicidal levels, even swallowing pebbles now filled me with ominous delight. Suddenly, the magician was
swiping all these indulgences away. He was revoking the outlandish lifestyle of the past two months. In doing so he was sentencing me to the most sadistic ordeal so far – an existence without routine oppression. Cast back into the world like an ex-con who had done his time, I had become dependent on incarceration.

  I considered the journey. My neck stooped downwards with despondency. What was I going to do? As I stumbled ahead I sensed an invisible force clutching my shoulders. I stopped in my tracks. The sensation was still there. Although forceful, it was warm and pleasing. “Don’t be beaten by this!” growled a familiar voice. “Remember your ancestor Nawab Jan Fishan … Even when his own sons were slaughtered in battle, he continued fighting until victory!” An instant later Hafiz Jan’s embrace had disappeared. But his words had stirred me. He was right. Why be conquered by uncertainty? Why not roam about India for a while, searching for godmen and illusions? I hadn’t spent much money while staying with Feroze. Living on the cheap I could afford to survive for months.

  All right, I mused, I will fulfill the sorcerer’s orders. I’ll go on a trip – and not some pathetic little jaunt, but a great journey.

  Venky was not, as I had expected to find him, unconscious at his Alipore drinking den. Instead, he was dressed in a fine new lungi and poly-cotton shirt, with a large tikka on his forehead. He was in the street washing his rickshaw.

  “Venky … is that you?” I asked, aghast he was even fit to stand.

  “What’s going on?

  The rickshawalla probed the spokes of the cartwheel with an oily rag. They had not been cleaned for a very long time. He greeted me with namaskar, and offered me his clay cup of cold, milky tea. When I refused it, he gulped it down and dropped the cup in the gutter, breaking it.

  Everything in Calcutta – from tea leaves to sticking plasters – is reused. Nothing is ever thrown away after one use … nothing, that is, except for bharh, the minuscule bisque cups. Little bigger than thimbles, they fill every gutter. Calcuttans laugh hysterically when the mad foreigner suggests reusing them. To me, the cups were dainty objects of art. To Venky, and everyone else, they were the most worthless things around.