Shamanka (35 page)

“How dare you? Lola is a respectable married lardy. Now hand me the cheese!”

The man nurses his sore cheek. “I am not selling cheese, I am hiring tuk-tuks.”

Sam points to the truck keys hanging from his belt. He dangles them nervously at Lola.

“A thousand apologies for pinching your bottom, lovely lady. In order that you do not tell your husband, I insist that you hire this tuk-tuk for free. Please, take it!”

They climb into the truck and head for Kathmandu. At noon, they stop for lunch in the village and notice that a crowd has gathered between the spice stall and the snake charmer. As Sam works her way to the front, she sees a magician in flowing robes standing next to a rope. It appears to be standing up all by itself in a wicker basket.

A small boy standing next to the magician is commanded to climb the rope. As he climbs, the rope sways a little. He climbs higher and higher, then suddenly, he vanishes. The crowd shield their eyes from the sun, trying to see beyond the rope – but the boy has gone! The magician looks up and shouts.

“Come down, boy. Or
I
will come up!”

There's no reply, so he takes out a sword, flourishes it and invites Sam to examine the blade; it's razor sharp. He grips it between his teeth and, with a scowl, he climbs the rope in hot pursuit. The crowd gasps – now the magician has vanished! High above, beyond the end of the rope, an argument breaks out. There's a boyish scream – severed limbs and bloody rags fall from the sky. The boy has been murdered!

Now here comes the magician, feet first down the rope, shaking his fist at anyone who dares to boo and hiss. He folds his arms and waits for silence. He claps his hands and commands the rope to coil back into its basket, which it does obediently. All eyes are upon it. Does the rope have a mind of its own? Might it spring back out and attack them like a cobra?

The magician slams the lid on the basket to prevent the rope escaping, but he can't – something is pushing against it. The crowd draws back, ready to run to safety … and out bursts the boy!

He is smiling and bowing. There's a collective sigh of relief, applause and whistles. The magician bows, removes his hat and passes it round. Kitty, not willing to part with her money, gets back into the tuk-tuk quickly with Lola.

Sam stays in the crowd; she wants to find out how the illusion was done. As soon as the magician has his back to her, she examines the rope. There's a tiny hook pushed into the end. As she looks up, she can just make out a very fine thread stretched between two trees. The magician must have thrown the rope up in the air so that the hook caught on the—

Just then, the magician turns round and catches her fiddling with the rope. Alarm flickers across his face; how much has she seen? He smiles a false smile and tries to shoo her away.

“Nothing to see, dear. Magic show over.”

Sam refuses to move.

“It's a great illusion,” she says. “I'm a fellow magician, I know how you make the rope stay upright – you throw it in the air and hook it over that wire. But what I can't work out is how you make the boy disap—”

His expression changes. He hisses at her to shut up, but it's too late; someone in the audience has overheard.

“Wire? What hook?”

The rumour spreads fast. The rope isn't really magic – the audience has been duped and they don't like it.

“We want our money back. Fraud! Fraud!”

Mad with rage at the prospect of losing his livelihood, the magician tries to grab Sam and throw her into his basket. Luckily, she does her best ever vertical jump, lands in the waiting tuk-tuk and Kitty drives her off at top speed.

If it hadn't been for qi gong, I fear she'd have ended up in that basket and met a very sticky end with a sword.

Bahut – the man they're supposed to visit next – lives at the foot of the Himalayas by a banyan tree. They don't have his exact address but it seems that the witch doctor leaves nothing to chance: it may have been his will that the tuk-tuk broke down by a well where an old woman happened to be drawing water. She fills a bottle with a bucket and waves it at Sam.

“Would you kindly take this to Mr Bahut? No water has passed his worshipful lips for a week and I am worried that he will shrivel. I'd take it myself, but I only have one leg.”

This is an outrageous lie: the woman has two perfectly good legs, but for some reason she's hooked the right one up behind her back and insists on hopping about as if to make the illusion more convincing.

Sam stifles a laugh. “You're not related to a lady called Effie Ray, by any chance?”

“No, no. I am born and bred in India. It is a far more pressing matter that you take this water to Mr Bahut. He is over that hill in a sandy place, under the sacred banyan.”

Sure enough, there he is with his legs in the air and his head in the sand, wearing nothing but a loincloth decorated with tulsi beads.

The man is a sadhu – a living idol who spends his days in devotion, in the hope of reaching a state of enlightenment through suffering and denial.

Sam taps him on the shoulder to get his attention. “How do you do, Mr Bahut?”

There's a muffled shriek. His legs collapse and he pulls his head out of the hole, spitting sand and spluttering. “How do I
do
? What in the name of Shiva are you doing, sneaking up on me like that?”

His hip-length hair is twisted into a knot on top of his head and dressed with paste made from ashes and cow dung. Sam hands him the bottle of water.

“Why do you bury your head in the sand? Are you hiding from someone?”

He blows his nose on his loincloth, which has rucked up around his hips like a nappy. “Not hiding,” he protests. “Burying one's head frees the mind for
spiritual
concerns. When my head is down the hole, I can slow my heart rate to two beats per minute, simply by altering my breathing – that's practically dead, isn't it!”

Sam is impressed but not altogether surprised. She's already seen what the shaolin monks can achieve with qi gong. She tells Mr Bahut about it, but he just scoffs.

“Qi gong? Ping-pong! All that leaping about and showing off. My way is pranayama; breathing techniques that allow one to endure the impossible… Watch! This is uddiyana bhanda – observe my tummy.”

With a sound like a punctured tyre, Bahut expels all the air from his stomach until his internal organs touch his spine. He then fills himself back up with air and asks for a bucket. Kitty moves to one side.

“Why? Do you want to be sick? I know I do.”

“No, no, if I had a bucket of water, I could show you the breathing technique of jalandhara bhanda in which I am able to draw a pint of water up my botty.”

“We don't have a bucket,” says Kitty hastily.

“Didn't the woman by the well have a buck—?” Sam doesn't get chance to finish.

“No!” Kitty reckons this is a trick too far. “Mr Bahut! Why would you
want
to do a thing like that?”

The answer is surprisingly sensible, although the scenario is unlikely to happen.

“If my lips were sewn together and I could not drink, I could absorb enough water through my nether region to prevent me dying of thirst.”

It has its practical uses, then. More than that, Bahut says it's just one of a series of techniques that a sadhu must perfect in order to release his body from the restraints of the human condition. Having mastered it, he would then have godlike control over all his organs.

“Does that mean that you can heal yourself?” asks Sam. “Say you lost a leg, could you grow a new one, like a lizard grows a new tail?”

Bahut doesn't answer. Instead he stands up, tucks his right foot behind his ear and balances on his left foot. “Once, I stood on one leg for two years,” he boasts.

Fascinated, Lola copies him.

“Didn't you get bored?” asks Sam.

“Not at all. I visited more places in my head than I ever could on my legs. A man who balances on one leg is never lonely; people visit out of curiosity. I have met all sorts. But none more interesting than a magician who turned up a few months ago.”

Sam leaps up. “Was his name John Tabuh? Was he with my mother?”

Bahut nods, causing himself to wobble and tip to the left, so Lola kindly props him up again.

“Mr Tabuh and his lady wife were most agitated,” continued the sadhu. “There had been a hoo-ha in the village. He had recklessly challenged the resident magician to perform the Indian Rope Trick at dawn, rather than noon.”

John Tabuh had watched the trick and worked out how it was done. I will now pass on his observations to you, in case you ever wish to perform it.

1. The glare of the midday sun created a blind spot at the top of the rope, making the boy invisible.

2. The “bloody limbs” were bits of monkey meat wrapped in cloth, which the magician had secreted in his pocket.

3. As for how the boy reappeared – simple! He was hidden under his master's robes and carried down the rope. The audience was misdirected to watch the
top
of the rope, whereupon the boy slipped unnoticed into the basket.

4. Yes, the rope was supported by a hook caught on a fine thread between two trees.

The magician insisted that the Dark Prince was wrong: the rope trick was no illusion – it was
magic
. But when John asked him to prove it by performing the same trick when the sun was down, he refused. He said he had to visit his aunt. Noon was the only time of day he was free.

“How about tonight then?” John had asked, at which point the magician punched him on the nose for fear that he'd steal his trick and expose it.

“My father would never expose a trick,” Sam protests. “It goes against the magician's oath. He was only trying to find out what's real, what's magic and what's illusion.”

“I know that to my cost,” harumphs Bahut. “Your mother was exhausted and your father asked if I had a bed she could borrow. But my bed is most uncomfortable – ooh … ow … cramp!”

He unhooks his leg from behind his ear, rubs it, then hops into a cave. He returns with a begging bowl and a bed studded with nails, which he throws down, pointy side up.

“I explained to your mother that she was most welcome to borrow this, but unless she mastered pranayama, she would have a most painful night. Only a sadhu in a state of religious ecstasy can endure such torture.”

“Nonsense!” John Tabuh had said. “If you distribute your weight evenly, it doesn't hurt.”

Unfortunately, Bahut had found this remark more painful than any amount of nails.

“Is it true though?” asks Sam. “Was my father right?”

Lola is about to test the mattress, but Bahut won't allow it. “Don't! You are not a holy, thus you will become holey and a most excruciating experience that will be!” He lies down on the nails and shuts his eyes. “I am not feeling a thing, but that is because my faith is so very strong.”

Sam crouches down to see if the nails are penetrating his flesh; they aren't. “Your faith in what, Mr Bahut?”

“That when I die, I will not be reincarnated as a dung beetle. Thanks to my extreme devotion, I can jump the queue and assume a permanent, godlike status in Nirvana, thus breaking the tedious cycle of life and death. Please leave! You are coming between me and my cosmic consciousness.”

“Just one more thing,” says Sam. “Do you know where my father went?”

The sadhu opens one eye. “Not telling!”

They're about to walk off when he sits up again. “It is the custom to give the sadhu a donation. When you behold him, you receive a spark of his spiritual energy.”

He stares pointedly at Sam's ringmaster's hat and presses his palms together. “I'm
supposed
to renounce worldly goods but I wouldn't mind coming back as a slimy slug if you gave me your hat.”

Sam hates to part with it but she needs it for a bribe. “You can have it if you can tell me where my father went.”

Bahut doesn't hesitate. “Australia. Katoomba – to meet a medicine man in the shadow of the Three Sisters. He said it was a matter of life or death – hat, please!”

Sam gives him her hat. He puts it on and smiles as if he's reached Nirvana already.

“Does it suit me? This hat is something magical, isn't it!”

Magical? Is he using the word loosely or is he wiser than he seems? Sam isn't sure.

“What
is
magic, Mr Bahut? Is it the hat? Or is it something much larger?”

“If the hat fits,
that
is magic,” he replies. It could be a very shallow answer or it could be a very deep one, so Sam asks him another question.

“What is real?”

“Dreams are real. I've always dreamt of a hat like this, and here it is in all reality.”

“Then what is illusion?”

“Ah,” he says. “It is an illusion to think that I will ever give you back your hat.”

“Goodbye, Mr Bahut.”

They leave him studying his reflection in his begging bowl, under the shade of the banyan tree. As they head back to the tuk-tuk, Sam notices that Kitty is lagging behind.

“You're very quiet today, Kitty.”

She's hardly said a word.

“Jet log.”

They've done a lot of flying, but is it really jet lag that's bothering her?

Or does she know something we don't?

Curses have been practised in many cultures for thousands of years, their main use being to protect the home, treasures and gravesites and, of course, for revenge. Different countries have different ways of cursing:

• Point a kangaroo bone and recite the curse (
Australia
).

• Inscribe the curse on a piece of lead, bury it or throw it down a well (
Ancient Rome
).

• Make a wax effigy of the monster Apep, write his name on it in green ink, wrap him in papyrus and throw him in the fire (
Ancient Egypt
).