Here Is Real Magic

by Nate Staniforth

  Here is knowledge. The rest is mystery. There is so much yet to be discovered.

  When I returned to my car, the daytime benches had been converted to bunks and I climbed into the empty top berth. I had been trying to start Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation for the past few days and pulled out my flashlight to read. The bunk was remarkably comfortable and the train rocked gently on the tracks. It was very late. I was asleep before I even opened the book, and the flashlight stayed on all night.

  In the morning I woke to the sound of shouting. I pulled aside the curtain and saw a man—a very loud man—wearing a large vacuum-cleaner-shaped metal samovar on a strap across his back. He bellowed the words “chai wallah” over and over while dispensing tea through a hose into small terracotta cups for five rupees apiece. I ordered one.

  The tea was very hot and smelled delicious. I climbed down from the bunk and carried my cup of tea back between the cars and opened the door to the world from last night so I could sit and drink and watch India roll by.

  Outside the sky was bright, and the landscape—a rural stretch of fields lined with telephone poles and short scrub trees—looked so much like Iowa that if I had taken a picture and sent it home no one would have believed that it came from the other side of the world. A man walked with a small herd of goats across one of the fields. The occasional cow looked up as we passed but most of them ignored us. A cell phone tower stood on the horizon. I heard someone announce “Varanasi” from inside the car, and the outskirts of a town came into view a few miles ahead.

  I returned to my bunk for my bag and decided that my current shirt could survive another day. I could wash it that night at the hostel. I had a little water left in my bottle and used it to brush my teeth and wipe my face. Andy appeared with his bag already packed, and as the train slowed into the station everyone shuffled to the door. I turned around and saw the family from the night before. The son was attempting to read and walk down the aisle at the same time and the mom helped the daughter with her bag. The man waved and approached.

  “Good morning, Magician.” He seemed glad to see me. “Have you thought about our conversation from last night?”

  I said that I had.

  “I want you to remember what I said about tricks. This is the most important thing. You cannot call a thing fake unless you know the real, and you can’t call a thing real unless you know the fake. I have seen the real. I know it exists. There are people here who have power. And if you spend some time in India, you may find them.”

  His wife caught his attention and he raised his hand in farewell, but passengers moving in every direction crowded the platform so completely that for a moment forward progress was impossible and the man and I stood trapped together in that awkward silence that comes after saying goodbye and then discovering it’s impossible to leave. It couldn’t have been later than eight or nine in the morning but the heat was already oppressive. Last night in the dark, as the train rushed through the fields and all I could see was the light from the windows and the vast, open canopy of stars, the world felt new and I felt new in it. Now all of that was gone. Here in the heat and the crush of people departing the train I couldn’t focus beyond my immediate surroundings.

  A gap finally opened in the crowd of travelers and the man followed his family into it, nodding and bobbing in farewell and then vanishing forever. Andy and I ascended the main staircase into the station. At the other end of the room I saw an archway, and beyond, a mass of people, rickshaws, taxis, and noise. The noise was incredible—honking, shouting, bartering, engines firing, dogs barking, mothers calling to children, taxi drivers hustling for business. And the smell—the smell hit me right away: people, livestock, burning gasoline, dark exhaust. The vehicles had kicked up dust in the air that blew in through the archway, welcoming us to the city. My first impression of Varanasi was absolute chaos, and I tried to embrace it.

  THE SNAKE CHARMER

  Time was different here. On tour I was accustomed to rolling out of bed, already on the move, and immediately breaking the day down into a series of next steps, action items, bullet points on a list, crossing them off as I went. So far I hadn’t been able to shake my habit of early rising—I suppose this had something to do with the time zone, too—but I’d lie still in my room and listen to the wind coming up the river, or head out into the courtyard when the world was still dark and sit facing east, waiting for the sun to rise over the opposite shore. I could think, not about work but about the ideas behind the work, or maybe I’d just sit and not think, and this was a revelation. I had been working like a madman for years—when I found Houdini’s quote about working from seven A.M. to midnight I took him seriously. For some kids it’s football. For others it’s grades. For me it was always practice, and for the first time in years I didn’t feel busy yet didn’t feel as if I was wasting time, either. On tour I had been chasing something from venue to venue, room to room, moving across the country, and it had led me here. So I was here, and for the moment I was happy to figure the rest out as I went.

  A few days after arriving in Varanasi I woke just before sunrise and walked down the stairs through the open-air courtyard. I sat on a chair at the edge of the patio overlooking the Ganges, thinking about tea and something to eat and waiting for the restaurant to open. The air was already warm. The sky was pink and yellow. Below I could see a solitary flute player at the edge of the water, and the sound of his music joined the slap of wet clothes on stone as men did laundry by the banks of the river. A pack of monkeys ran the roofline of a building and disappeared into a tree. By midday the color on these buildings would look sun-worn and faded, but the early-morning light made them glow and the entire city shimmered—red, blue, yellow. On a balcony across from me a father carried a tray of teacups and a mother ushered her children to sit and drink. A goat wandered haphazardly down the long staircase to the river. Every road in the city leads eventually to the river. It’s the center of everything.

  As I watched the city begin its day I noticed Andy a hundred yards down, camera in hand. I didn’t know he was already up. Apparently he got what he wanted with the camera and began the long climb up the staircase to our hotel.

  “Is the restaurant open yet?” He sat down across from me.

  “Almost, I think. I heard them in there a minute ago.”

  “I wanted to get some good shots of the sunrise before we head over there.” He looked up and smiled. “Are you ready?”

  “Not before breakfast I’m not,” I said. “He won’t be there yet anyway.”

  “They said nine, so you have some time.” Andy was enjoying this too much. “But,” he added, “you don’t want to keep him waiting.”

  “I know they said nine,” I said. “I haven’t been able to think about anything else.”

  Yesterday I had done magic for a group of kids at an open plaza by the river and learned that the snake charmer came there most days around nine in the morning. Surely he will be there tomorrow, they said. You should come. We will meet you there and help you speak with him. Ha-ha! It is settled. We will see you then.

  I don’t want to dwell on this, but I’m a terrible coward when it comes to snakes. Even snakes on TV make me pick my feet up off the ground and sit cross-legged on the couch. I came to India to see traditional Indian magic, and I knew from the beginning that this would include snake charmers, but it didn’t really occur to me that this would mean coming so close to the snakes, too. Not just pictures of snakes. Real snakes. Cobras.

  All of this was on my mind as we walked along the river to the plaza a few minutes later. From water level Varanasi looked incomprehensible. Buildings had been stacked between and piled on top of other buildings, rising up from the riverbank to form an uneven wall of balconies, balustrades, plazas, and overlooks, all bound together by a great labyrinth of twisting staircases and narrow streets no wider than sidewalks. Andy had his camera out as we approached the plaza and I concentrated on acting brave in case his footage ever turned into
anything that other people might watch. The street children from yesterday were there, and by the looks of things many had brought their parents or older siblings who no doubt came to watch the silly American magician who is afraid of snakes. One of the children pretended to slither over toward me, hissing. I did not like this at all.

  The snake charmer sat in a corner of the plaza. He wore a gray beard and ancient sandals and struck me as someone who had crossed vast distances on foot. He sat back on his heels and held a long, double-barreled flute with both hands. Before him, two large lidded baskets rested on the ground, waiting.

  I crouched in front of him and raised a hand to say hello. He bowed his head and looked up, evaluating, I think, but kindly. When he finally spoke, one of the kids began to translate.

  “You are the magician?”

  I nodded. He thought about this for a moment, then raised the flute to his mouth and began to play.

  The sound was thin and jangly—a hypnotic, pentatonic melody that raised the hair on the back of my neck. He looped it over and over, two melodies trading places and then weaving together to create a third. The music was shrill and haunting, part warning, part enchantment, and it put me on edge. Somehow it sounded like both a car alarm and a lullaby.

  Deliberately, carefully, the snake charmer took one hand from the flute and lifted the lid from each basket. At first, nothing. He continued to play. The baskets sat, open and dreadful, and I stared, waiting. Then, with the unhurried confidence possessed only by the truly powerful, the cobras rose up to take stock of their surroundings.

  They were enormous—two cobras each as thick as my arm, uncoiling themselves impossibly high until they stood two feet in the air, their heavy heads swaying almost imperceptibly to the music, like sunflowers in a failing breeze. One flicked her tongue and then slowly, deliberately turned her gaze in my direction. She saw me.

  I was transfixed with fear.

  Fear, I think, is very close to wonder. Even then as I tried to keep my composure I was aware in some distant corner of my consciousness that this was one of the most amazing experiences I’d ever had. I thought back to the reactions I’ve seen at some of my performances—people jumping back, running away, shouting “No! No! No!” over and over. At that moment I knew how they felt.

  For years I had wondered if the powerful reactions to even simple magic tricks could be explained by humanity’s fear of death. I wondered, for instance, if the teacher on the playground had responded with such force because—having just seen what looked like a miracle—she was forced to reconsider the possibility of all miracles, including the possibility that death is only provisional. This theory disintegrated for me the first time I performed magic for young children. When I was just out of college a preschool nearby asked if I could come in to do magic for the kids. There, three- and four-year-old children who were far too young to have any sense of their own mortality responded with the same wild, tremulous joy as the adults.

  My next theory was that a magician is tapping into humanity’s inherent fear of the unknown. We like order and structure. Even when we tell ourselves otherwise, we like a domesticated worldview that fits comfortably within the limits of our own knowledge and understanding. Usually a magic trick doesn’t threaten this at all. We see it as a trick and know it is a trick, and we are comfortable with things that we can classify as tricks. But once in a while—when the magic is so good that it doesn’t feel like a trick but instead feels real—then the carefully ordered story that we tell ourselves about our understanding of the universe is overturned and upset. I don’t believe in magic, but I have just seen magic. The result is fear, and joy, in varying degrees according to the individual, but any mixture of the two is almost indistinguishable from wonder.

  In the face of the cobra I had another idea. Wonder and fear are similar in the way they both temporarily defeat the ego and allow you the extraordinary experience of seeing the world outside the confines of your own identity. Every day we wake up and choose the clothes we wear, the words we say, the actions we take, and the demeanor we carry at least in part as an effort to communicate something about ourselves to the rest of the world. There’s a kind of performance that goes on when you choose the Ramones T-shirt instead of the polo or the thick-rimmed glasses instead of the contact lenses—we want the world to consider us in a certain light, and we go to great lengths to make this happen. A moment of genuine astonishment or fear makes this all fall away. You are not concerned with your identity, desires, or motivations. You just exist, a part of everything. When the cobra looked at me I wasn’t thinking about myself or the way I was perceived by others. All of that was gone. For a moment everything was simple and clear. I was awake and alive. The snake’s tongue flitted out, tasting the air, and she fanned her hood wide. Our eyes met.

  I was in awe of this creature.

  I had read as much as I could about snake charming before coming to India but none of it had prepared me for the eye contact. You couldn’t capture it in any photograph. She stared at me, personally, directly, and in that moment I discovered the primal and hopeless fear that comes from the open, welcoming gaze of a cobra who knows you are within striking distance. It turned me liquid and powerless. I understood immediately why the cobra is holy in this part of the world—an angel of death, maybe, but an angel for certain. Her head moved so slightly from one side to the other, rocking gently, gracefully, and if you were mystically inclined you might feel she was hypnotizing you before the fatal bite to ease your passage from the world of the living to the world of the dead. This cobra did not look charmed or domesticated. She looked wild and fierce, and wide, wide awake.

  At this point I was maybe four feet from the baskets. I had been even closer but retreated—scooted—backward when the cobras appeared. This delighted the peanut gallery, who kept up a running commentary consisting mostly of laughter and the occasional English phrase such as “He is very scared!” and “Look! Look! He jumps!” Annoyance, along with an unsteady resolve to see this through to the end, was enough to start me forward again to get as close as I could.

  The Internet is full of theories about snake charming, and as I crawled forward I ran through as many as I could remember. First, apparently snakes don’t have ears, so the music must be more for me than for the snakes. What keeps the snakes upright? The prevailing theory is that the snakes are afraid of the tip of the flute and sway back and forth to keep it in sight. The snake charmer did keep the end of his flute in constant motion, but I noticed that neither of the cobras paid any attention to him. One stared out at the crowd, unfazed. The other was still looking directly at me.

  The allegation of animal abuse prompted the Indian government to pass the Wildlife Protection Act in 1972, effectively outlawing the practice of snake charming by making it illegal to domesticate a wild animal. Though the law covers a much broader list of species, in part this legislation came as a response to the growing outcry against snake charmers who were thought to break the fangs off their snakes and cauterize their poison glands to eradicate the danger. Some apparently went so far as to sew the mouths of the cobras shut and drug them into lethargy. This sounded bad when I read about it, but there in front of that majestic animal it felt like an unpardonable crime. These snakes didn’t look drugged, but I needed to get closer if I was going to see their fangs.

  I moved to the side of the basket and began my approach, crawling carefully forward at the rate of about one foot a minute. One of the cobras continued to look out at the world—passive, content, uninterested. The other kept an eye on me. I was on all fours now, crouching low, trying to look brave but fooling no one. The spectators kept talking and one of the children lunged forward, clapping his hands together to frighten the snake, who reared back and up, impossibly high, fanning her hood out wide. She arched her back and hissed—defensive and hostile, putting us all on notice. She looked magnificent. I wanted her to slip out of the basket and flee to the river, but she lowered herself back down and resumed her deat
h stare in my direction as if all of this was my fault.

  We were both on edge now—the snake and I—and when I started to move forward again she decided she had put up with us for long enough. I watched, frozen and unbelieving, as she spilled over the side of her basket, fluid and unstoppable, like water through a broken dam. She lifted her head from the ground and towered before us, hissing and flashing her eyes, and then dropped to the ground and spun her coils in a smooth, muscular, endless arc. She turned away from the crowd and darted toward the river.

  Unfortunately, this set me directly in her path, and I quickly lost all interest in theories about snake charming and any desire to see her fangs. I was the only thing between her life in the basket and the freedom of the river, and she shot forward. I fell backward over myself and shouted “Holy goddamned motherfucking shit!” as I tripped out of the way. Then I ran. When I turned back after fifteen or twenty feet I saw the snake dangling by the tail as the snake charmer gently fed her back into her wicker basket. He spoke to her softly, saying “It’s okay, it’s okay.” I wondered how close to me she had actually come.

  The peanut gallery thought this was the funniest thing they had ever seen. They pointed at me and laughed. “He hops! He hops!” “Look! Look! He runs away! He is afraid!”