All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (13 page)

After an unusual juice made from sea buckthorn and a few momos, I paid my bill and walked to Norbu’s travel agency. He was waiting outside, smoking as usual, and talking with a lanky German man of about forty. The man looked gaunt and his skin was stretched tight over his cheekbones. He had red hair, shaved almost to the scalp, and a depleted smile.

‘Stefan,’ he said, proffering his hand. ‘You are coming to see this oracle too?’

I said that I was.

‘You too have some problems?’

‘Just interested.’

‘I have rheumatoid arthritis,’ he said. ‘My body is failing me. Doctors tell me I have the limbs of a seventy-year-old man already. So, everywhere I go, I visit healers. In India, I did a
pancha karma
– a three-month Ayurvedic cleanse.
Scheibe
, the things they made me eat! This has actually helped a good deal. But the problem is still bad.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He shrugged. ‘Nevertheless, this journey has changed my life. Even healed, I could never get back to the work I was doing. Not after this!’

I asked him what he did back at home.

‘I was doing a PhD in robotics. And I worked for a small artificial intelligence company, doing research.’ He looked awkward. ‘I am kind of a nerd, actually. Good with numbers. Or at least, I was. It seems numbers have failed me.’

I asked him how he’d found out about Norbu.

‘Two years ago, Norbu took my sister trekking. She met the oracle with him too. She is quite a cynical person also, but was quite convinced. She suggested I come here and see whether it could help.’

‘I’m surprised
you’re
not more sceptical. You’re a scientist after all.’

‘I do not know if this will work, my friend,’ said Stefan, massaging his swollen knuckles. ‘But I am quite desperate now, and when that is the case you will try anything,
ya
. Soon, I am worried that I will have to walk with sticks or be in a wheelchair. My movement is increasingly restricted. Arthritis, you may know, is an auto-immune disorder, which means that the body is falsely sending an immune response where none is needed. In my case, that may end up killing me. So what have I got to lose?’

Crammed together in Norbu’s weather-beaten hatchback, we left Leh. Quickly, the patina of development that has changed Ladakh so quickly petered out. Asphalt returned to dust, concrete to mud, and the twenty-first century, despite a few subtle flourishes, retreated to a time in which Ladakh had neither reason nor desire to seek self-definition from America or Europe. It felt stirring and somehow appropriate to this adventure to be leaving the modern world behind us.

Outside Leh, the looming mountainscape appeared through the morning light. At a military checkpost, primary-coloured Tibetan prayer flags trembled in the breeze. ‘This is a desperately hard landscape; without solace,’ I wrote in my notebook. ‘The rocks seem remaindered from some primordial conflict, the fauna reclusive.’ Norbu, displaying some of the human warmth which seems to bloom so brightly here, leaned back with one hand on the steering wheel and offered us some bitter apricot seeds, said to be a cure for all ills. In the spring, he said, the hills of the Leh valley explode with white blossom. ‘There are more than forty different varieties of apricots here,’ he says. ‘After the snow – no colour anywhere! – it is so beautiful.’

We came at last to a small hamlet. Perhaps fifty people lived here, along with the usual pye-dogs,
dozos
(half cow, half yak), sinewy chickens: those animals which can survive up here, providing sustenance or protection. Tibetan Buddhism, unlike other schools, does not interpret the Buddha’s statements on non-violence to mean vegetarianism. In any case, it would be impossible at this altitude, with the Ladakhi diet already restricted to largely
tsampa
(roasted barley meal), wheat noodles and dried vegetables. Religion – like much else in this world – adapts to the geography of place.

Stepping out, we saw that ours was the only car in evidence. Wisps of yellow roof straw drifted from the new thatching; cow pats were drying in the sun for winter fuel. Outside the ramshackle building, there were three local women all in black, their necks covered with scarves. One of them held a young girl in her arms who was sobbing. There was not a bird in the sky.

Following Norbu, we ascended some uneven wooden steps, pausing to add our shoes to the mound of sandals and cheap trainers already there. It was dim inside, and thick with juniper smoke. I felt my breath quickening a little. Here I was at last!

Perhaps thirty people were seated before a somewhat rotund Ladakhi woman, wearing an ornate crown and a flowing black robe, and beside her a younger girl, similarly attired but without the crown. They were chanting softly. The room was small, with a low ceiling of twigs and a concrete floor. The light from a single dirty window was muted.

‘My sister,’ whispered Norbu. ‘Come, we will sit at the back and watch. I will translate.’

As we shuffled to the back, several of the villagers looked round, including a young man, lean and dark from the fields, and an old woman, yellow-eyed; both projecting that interested but non-judgemental stare that I’ve found all over India. I sat down cross-legged against the wall, trying to keep as low a profile as possible. Already, a current of energy was filling the room. Although I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly, it was enough to send prickles of unease down my spine.

When the chanting stopped, the oracle moved slowly to her altar and knelt down before it. There were several brass pots containing offerings of barley grains, oil, yak butter, incense sticks. Beside those, there was a pot of juniper. She picked it up and waved it around so that the room filled with the intoxicating smoke.

I could see little of her behind the crown, just the raven-black hair, the small mouth above a round chin. She began chanting again,
sotto voce
, her pudgy hands clasped together before a picture of the Buddha and an image of the Panchen Lama – the young
tulku
(an enlightened Tibetan Buddhist lama) kidnapped by the Chinese. Her voice was strange, growing higher and more other-worldly by the minute. She turned round to the young girl and gave her a hand bell.

‘That is a new oracle,’ whispered Norbu, close to my ear. ‘My sister is training her. Her parents have brought her here to help bring out the bad spirit from her.’

With her eyes half closed, the young girl took the ritual hand bell (known as
dril bu
in Tibetan), and began to shake it rhythmically, so that its sound cut out harshly into the cramped room. Now the oracle, already swaying in time, picked up a drum and joined the beat. The hollow drum rumbled behind the high monotony of the bell to create an eerie harmony. Together, they moved in time, the oracle’s heavy frame jerking sharply, involuntarily.

‘She is going into trance,’ murmured Norbu. ‘Oracle is coming!’

Now, the oracle picked up the smoking vessel again, so that one hand continued to beat the drum, the other to wave the smoke. Along with the drumbeats, the ringing of the bell, the swirling smoke, both heads were shaking, both women chanting louder, unintelligible words, but which Norbu later told me are of no language anyone but they can understand. It is a language which comes upon them when the spirit does, he explained: a god-given language, beyond human speech or comprehension. I could make out repeated phrases, however, each one sending them deeper into the trance.

What happened next was bizarre, even terrifying. Abruptly, as if the spirit had suddenly gained entrance to her consciousness, the oracle stiffened and her eyes seemed to blaze with energy. There was little I could relate it to, save for horror movies involving spirit possession. Norbu’s sister, to all intents and purposes, had vanished, and in her place was a far more powerful energy: a wild, unruly madness that subsumed the personality beneath it. With her eyes flashing, the oracle began to speak in tongues again, shaking her head so that the enormously heavy gilt crown swayed violently this way and that.

With my heart pounding, I leaned as far back against the wall as I could manage. Whatever was going on, there was palpable force coming out of this woman now. Whether it was a state of self-induced psychosis or a genuine case of spirit possession as the Tibetans believed, this village woman seemed no longer on our plane of consciousness. Can this be real, I thought to myself?

When the oracle spoke at last her voice was booming. Startlingly deeper, more forceful, it sent a jolt of fear running through me. Throughout the room, no one moved a muscle. The villagers looked on gravely, both dread and reverence on their faces. One small girl began to whimper quietly. Suddenly, the drum ceased and all fell silent.

‘Now it begins,’ said Norbu gravely.

A mother began to speak. Perhaps thirty, she breastfed a baby within a muslin sling. Beside her was another child – pink-cheeked, with fearful, angry eyes.

‘My seven-year-old is constantly angry,’ she told the oracle. ‘He won’t go to school. He’s always making trouble with the other children. He won’t help in the fields.’

Hearing this, the oracle tensed, invisible currents moving through her body. She held out her hand and the young mother urged her son to the front. Terrified myself, I felt for the poor child as he nervously shuffled forward, his cheeks taut with apprehension.

What happened next was almost too much to take in. Getting to her knees, the oracle lifted up the child’s shirt and began to probe his stomach with her hands. Her hands were small and thick-fingered, the hands of a woman who works the fields. Finally, she located the spot she was looking for and bent her head. At first I assumed she was examining the spot closer, but before I knew what was occurring, she put her lips forward and sucked, much in the manner of a man drawing out the poison from a snake bite.

‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh,’ she roared. Then, leaning forward, she spat a quite stupendous amount of liquid into a bucket.

It was hard to stop myself from recoiling. She put her lips to the spot again, and repeated the process. The child’s eyes began to well. Again, what seemed like half a litre of dirty water spilled into the bucket! The third time, the liquid flowed almost black, and I turned to the side, fearful that I was going to vomit. Never had I seen anything so revolting!

‘She is taking out the bad,’ whispers Norbu. ‘Boy has some evil spirit inside him.’

Finishing her healing, the oracle wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and began to speak.

‘This boy must wear some protection from a
rinpoche
,’ she advised. ‘Take an amulet, or a slip of paper upon which the prayers of a trusted
rinpoche
are written, and give them to the boy to wear around his neck. He will be protected.’

Before I’d even recovered, the next healing began. An old lady had stomach troubles – one of the most common complaints, according to Norbu, because of the extremely high consumption of grain amongst Ladakhis. The matriarch had a burnished copper, deeply lined face and the tight traditional braids of Ladakhi women. With little compunction she pulled her robe aside to show her rounded stomach, lined with age, while the oracle leaned forward and puckered her lips to suck out the poison.

In this case the oracle herself flinched, as if encountering some particularly bitter liquid, before spitting heavily into the bucket. More of the liquid sloshed from her lips – faintly yellow this time. Where the
hell
is it coming from, I wondered. If this was a hoax, as I imagined most scientists would postulate, it must be coming from the oracle’s own stomach . . . regurgitated in some manner? With this thought in mind, I scrutinised her throat as she sucked from the old woman’s belly, searching for the telltale constrictions of the oesophagus which might signify such trickery. I could find nothing. The throat appeared still.

Over the next hour, the healings continued. All of it was shocking, vaguely repulsive, but also astounding, continually prompting me to consider how extraordinary this was, how fortunate I was to be seeing this before it vanishes for good. Later, in an attempt to understand what I had seen, I read numerous scientific papers: psychotherapic interpretations of spirit possession, anthropological treatises on ‘emotive healing’. One theory suggested that becoming an oracle was
a pre-industrial method of dealing with schizophrenia, allowing the individual to reconcile twin personalities; another that it was caused by epilepsy. The Indian psychologist Sudhir Kakar concludes that trance healing provides ‘a cultural container for a psychic state that threatened to become chaotic’.

But while all of these theories were, in their way, plausible, none of them really explained the subtlety or the sheer power of what I was seeing. Clearly, on a purely psychosomatic level, there was a level of reassurance to be gained from visiting a trusted healer. But that alone didn’t account for what was happening here. I wasn’t sure if this
was
just ‘transcultural psychiatry’, to use Emile Kraepelin’s term. Nor was I satisfied, as Emile Durkheim suggested at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the notion that the source of ecstatic religious experience was society itself, a group coming together in ‘collective effervescence’. To stand in front of an oracle in trance is to feel an other-worldly force that seems far beyond the human realm. Later, I would hear that the Tibetan state oracle has been known to bend an iron sword in half as if it were paper. Where does it come from, this supernatural strength? Do higher levels of consciousness bring the power of healing?