All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (2 page)

Finally, it was a strange series of events that set me on the path to recovery. I went to work on a farm in Italy, and spent several months learning how to keep bees. This experience had a profound effect on me. As well as quietening a troubled mind, it allowed a renewed sense of wonder to take root. Peering into the teeming ecosystems of the hive, I found myself falling in love with life again. Back in England, I conceived of the journey that I would later record in a book entitled
Honey and Dust 
: a search for wild honey and the tribes who still hunted it. For a year I travelled in search of sweetness, finding, in each spoonful, a new lease of life.

But if
Honey and Dust
began with a search for the simple product of the honey bee, it ended with a different question in mind. As my mind began to heal itself and I weaned myself off the deadening antidepressants, I wondered what it was that had brought me so close to the edge. The accident provided a convenient excuse but it seemed clear that all of this had been building for a long time. Neither did I suppose that I was alone in my existential dilemmas. Amongst my friends in London, a huge proportion seemed to be battling demons of one kind or another, taking pills to bring them up or down, for sleep or wakefulness. With the Office for National Statistics now suggesting one in four British adults will experience a mental health problem in any given year, it seems that many of us are leading lives of quiet desperation.

But why
are
so many of us struggling to lead happy, fulfilled lives? Despite all the advances of our civilisation, something elemental seems to have fallen through the cracks: a simple contentment. Environmental writer Gregg Easterbrook phrased it perfectly when he wrote: ‘capitalism renders its chosen covetous, insecure, unfulfilled, constantly twitching . . . Materialist obsession has performed the amazing feat of making unprecedented abundance unsatisfactory to its beneficiaries.’

It was in India – a country that has yet to reap many of the benefits of twenty-first-century materialism – that I was struck by a revelation of sorts. En route for the Annapurna foothills, I had my first experience of a country which seemed, to use an unavoidable word, ‘magical’. Despite enormous poverty and social problems, the Indians seemed to have an awareness of their place in the scheme of things very different from our own. Although anxious neither to idealise the East nor demonise the West, I couldn’t help but see a thread of
meaning
in Indian life, long since exorcised from my own culture. It was the meaning provided by religion, and it was evident in a thousand sparkling details on any given day: a rickshaw wallah touching his statue of Ganesh before a journey, a smouldering incense stick or the Muslim call to prayer, echoing through the dawn. Despite having been an atheist for as long as I can remember, I found this intensely moving.

Clearly, when one describes India as ‘magical’, it means something other than any reference to the supernatural. Perhaps closer to what was meant by German theologian Rudolf Otto when he coined the word ‘numinous’. For Otto, the word suggested divine majesty, the intense feeling of unknowingly knowing that there is something which cannot be seen; it alludes to the holy and the transcendent. More than any specific religious connotation, it was
this
which made me feel so alive in India. Inside my rational, empirically driven culture nothing was allowed a significance beyond itself. But in India, the opposite felt true.
Everything
, both animate and inanimate, was filled with a living spirit.

When I returned to London, this memory of the numinous stayed with me. Like nowhere I’d ever been, India seemed to shine in my mind’s eye as somewhere alive with possibility. It was, in many ways, the very feeling I’d had as a child, believing in a more literal kind of magic. It was what I felt peering into the seamless unity of the beehive, or in the long wailing tones of a jazz solo. It was what I felt standing on the banks of the Ganges, the water lit up by devotional oil lamps, each one of them glinting with light.

That feeling, it seemed clear, was one of the richest, most compelling in all human experience. And yet to actively seek it out seemed close to impossible. Was it magic I was interested in finding, or mystical experience? What was it about these moments of heightened awareness which seemed to give my life a significance beyond itself?

Despite these uncertainties, a journey was already plotting itself on the maps within me. I would return to India, to seek out in its burning ghats (cremation grounds) and mountain villages, some understanding of what the numinous really was. I would look for mystics, who hold there to be a fundamental unity beneath the surface of day-to-day phenomena. I would find oracles, shamans and the itinerant
sadhus
for whom the material world is nothing more than an illusion. Perhaps I would even find the supernatural itself, that most ancient lure for Westerners heading East. Despite the much vaunted economic miracles of the new India, could it be possible that a different kind of magic remained?

This rather unconventional journey, I was forced to admit, was as much in revolt against something as in search of something else. I wished to leave behind me the reductive materialism that now governs Western life. For Francis Crick, the molecular biologist who co-discovered the DNA molecule, ‘ “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’ This seemed to me to be the kind of notion that
was not only pushing our society to the brink but was sending so many others, like myself, to yoga classes and t’ai chi centres, in the hope of uncovering some essential meaning.

Perhaps, too, it was pushing others elsewhere: towards fundamentalism, with its own remedies against the fear and uncertainty of the modern world; towards the cult of personality in which we idealise ‘celebrities’ whose lives seem to have some importance denied our own. At the heart of our alienation lurks a deep yearning for fulfilment, a basic human need for coherence. In my own life that coherence had generally eluded me, but now I was going out to find it.

It was approaching autumn when I packed my small bag for departure. Sodden ochre leaves clogged the gutters along the Caledonian Road. En route for the train, I passed two women carrying yoga bags beneath their arms and I wondered how many other people, even now, were stretched out on yoga mats across Britain, and whether, if enough of us reached for these states of consciousness, we might begin to turn the tide against the spiritual vacuum which seemed to lie at the heart of Western life.

My own small journey would be to follow this river to its source. It would be a journey concerned less with facts than with feelings, less with proof than wonder. I would follow the clues wherever they took me, seek out anyone who might help me draw the veil aside. But for now I was at the journey’s beginning: standing outside the old wardrobe, a child again, willing it to let me in.

The Miracle of the Buddha Tree

Just after dawn, the first passengers on the train began to wake. Beneath me, Mr Gulparna, retired auditor, stretched out first one pyjama-covered leg from his lower bunk, then a second. I watched him blearily through a half-closed eye as he enacted five half-hearted attempts to touch his toes, then five slightly more spirited knee bends. Stretches completed, and just a little out of breath, he gathered his metal beaker, Neem powder for the gums, an enormous crimson comb and a tall bottle of cologne. Tucking all this beneath his arms, he pushed the curtain aside and went to queue for the bathroom.

I drifted back into sleep, coming awake again as the familiar refrain ‘Chai, chai’ echoed down the corridor. The morning’s first tea seller had boarded the train, and grateful passengers were sitting up in their bunks, reaching into trouser pockets for three rupees, then tilting back the first important chai to jostle away the cobwebs of sleep.

Someone opened a window and a blast of cold air testified that we had come north.

I was on my way to Darjeeling, where, so the rumour had it, a miracle was under way. On the top of a blustery hill a tree had assumed the perfect form of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha himself. As if from the pages of some dime-store novel, a drunk had been sleeping it off in the bushes when he opened his eyes, stared in disbelief at the form of the pine tree in front of him, then ran into town proclaiming that he had witnessed a true miracle. Whether he had thrown away his grog wasn’t mentioned but it had, in any case, reached the pages of several newspapers.

Like the thousands of seekers before me, a miracle seemed to me entirely in keeping with my expectations of India. Even now, as the country reached the height of an economic boom begun in the early 1990s, we arrived in our droves seeking some antidote to the pressures of Western life. Despite the protests of a slew of Orientalist scholars who claim that we have fashioned the East to our own liking, the image seemed impossible to shrug off. Even the latest slogan of the tourist board, ‘Incredible India’, seemed designed to emphasise the notion that here we would find things too extraordinary and improbable to be believed.

Last night, during a round of gin rummy, I’d discussed my own motives with Mr Gulparna. With the night gathering around us, we were drinking Bagpiper whisky and whiling away the journey with a round of cards. The third hand was taken up by the man in bunk 12c, who merely referred to himself as ‘Wing Commander’, former helicopter pilot for the Indian navy.

‘Miracles,’ said Mr Gulparna wistfully. ‘They do not happen like they used to. When I was a boy they occurred weekly. For us they were nothing special.’

‘Do you remember the Ganesh Milk Miracle?’ said the Wing Commander in his plummy voice, dealing the cards. ‘It was 1994, when all over India, icons of the elephant god began accepting offerings of milk. I myself took a saucer of milk to my local temple and Ganapati reached out his trunk and slurped it up. I am not making this up, dear fellow. It was clear as day.’

‘I also saw this,’ said Mr Gulparna. ‘I am a rational man, not inclined to believe in such things. But my wife’s Ganesh was drinking milk
thirstily
. Scientists tried to claim it was capillary action, the natural absorbent properties of stone, but I don’t believe it. This was a true miracle! My wife’s Ganesh is made of bronze. How could it absorb milk?’

As the night progressed, I wondered whether my interest in the miraculous would have been received so lightly by someone of the younger generation. Many young people I spoke to seemed to resent the continual string of Western seekers following the well-trodden path to the East. And who could blame them? They were lifting themselves up by the bootstraps, finding economic freedom their parents could never have dreamed of. That all these Westerners should come here asserting the need to leave the material world behind was both patronising and faintly hilarious. They wanted what we had, we wanted what they had. The twain, it was now undeniable, were meeting head on and sparks were flying.

Mr Gulparna’s generation, however, seemed receptive to my questions. For them faith was the mortar which held India together, and the miraculous merely evidence of what was already known. As we played cards, grew mildly drunk and munched piquant samosas from a Tupperware box, he told me of great saints who could fly through the air, how the distinctly polluted seawater outside Mahim Creek in Mumbai had recently turned sweet, thousands coming to drink it. Outside, the train rocked and lurched over the tracks in 4/4 time.

‘Only a few months back,’ said the Wing Commander, flicking a morsel of pastry from his RAF-style moustache, ‘a Hindu family was cooking their morning chapatti when they turned it over in the pan to receive a nasty shock.’

‘What was it?’ Mr Gulparna and I asked.

The Wing Commander looked grave. ‘In block capitals, the world ALLAH was written on the chapatti!’

Almost two days later, 500 rupees down and with a sawdust taste in the mouth, I departed at Siliguri, the largest city in north Bengal and the jump-off for the Himalayan foothills. The seasons had changed overnight; the palm trees replaced by cold-weather pines. After a few rounds of haggling, I found a shared Tata jeep heading north to Darjeeling, checked that the tyre treads were at least vaguely in evidence and crammed myself in with a family of eight for the winding route upwards. It was mid-morning by this stage, on a misty, inclement Sunday. The sky was patterned with grey-tipped clouds.

The eldest member of our retinue, a snowy-haired matriarch in a resplendent purple sari, was the first to prepare me for the weather ahead. ‘
Tanda lege jabey
,’ she said in nasal Bengali: ‘You’ll catch cold.’ This was accurate, for as the jeep ascended, the mercury seemed to go into freefall. By the time we’d made it halfway, at about 4,000 feet, a brittle sleet was drumming the windscreen. Outside, amidst the chest-high bushes of emerald tea, plantation workers drew their shawls more tightly around their shoulders, plumes of cold breath issuing from their mouths.

Despite the weather, I felt a surge of excitement as we travelled up into the hills. As the road steepened, the villages grew further apart, the hillsides a deeper shade of green, and the air so pure it smarted in the nostrils. In the shadow of a tea bush I saw a pheasant – strangely reminiscent of home – and later the famous ‘toy train’, one of the last working steam locomotives in India, chugging past us, its ‘coal wallah’ offering a sooty thumbs up.