All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (4 page)

Several days after the miracle, I boarded the Darjeeling Mail for Calcutta. Truthfully, I hadn’t learned much. I’d seen something quirky here, but with nothing like the power to convince me of anything. What remained, though, was the view I’d gained of the generational split that was widening in India, the young more interested in economic development than the traditional faiths of the past. As in any small community in winter, I had quickly found myself greeted by familiar faces as I walked through town. In the stories which unfolded I saw the changing face of India: the bookshop assistant whose daughter yearned for New York, the momo cook who boasted to me about his activity in the Gurkha separatist movement: ‘It’s a question of identity,’ he told me gravely. ‘Our people have been working these landscapes for generations, but bad management has kept everyone poor. We want change now! If they don’t give it to us, we will simply take it by force.’

As the train whistled south, I reflected on the enormous challenges facing India. It was modernising at breakneck speed, that was undeniable. But could the rich, intricate belief systems at its heart – largely unbroken for 3,000 years – survive the process? Could modernity ever truly arrive without secularisation? Perhaps the Indians could find a middle path, between materialism and spirituality, that we had not.

Certainly, this ‘middle path’ was not the goal of the man I was next to meet. I was going to see Prabir Ghosh, India’s leading rationalist, for whom the country’s future depended on scouring away all traces of its spiritual past. Established in 1985, the Science and Rationalists’ Association of India works to oppose superstition, blind faith, the caste-system, spiritualism and other obscurantist beliefs. In plain terms this means coming up hard against some of India’s most respected gurus and holy men, and risking enormous antagonism in the process. Having just witnessed a miracle of sorts, I felt it was important to allow for the other point of view.

But before then, there was Calcutta to investigate. To arrive from a hill station in winter to the world’s fourteenth largest metropolitan area is a shock, by any standards, and yet it was a city I loved from the first. Frenetic, certainly, and not entirely undeserving of the sobriquet ‘Hustlefussabad’ given it by Edward Lear: But also intensely poetic, shot through by visual haikus: a barge loaded with flowers poling down the indolent Hooghly, tiny fishes fried in front of you at street stalls, dusted in primary-coloured spices.

For a few days I wandered its chaotic thoroughfares, taking in both the relics of empire and this new world bursting from the ashes. If Darjeeling had been teeth-chatteringly cold, this sea-level city sweated under a constant sunlight. Taking refuge from the elements, I found a covered vegetable market, which seemed a miniature universe in its own right. From raised platforms, cross-legged vendors traded fistfuls of
brinjal
and jackfruit and broke wagonloads of garlic bulbs into individual cloves to entice the more thrifty customer. Noticing me sneaking a photograph of him as he offered his takings to a faded print of the goddess Lakshmi, one old vendor quoted Tagore to me: ‘Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is dark!’, before casually lapsing back into trade.

On the appointed day, I ventured to Park Street (recently renamed Mother Teresa Sarani) to meet Prabir Ghosh and his assistant Sumitra. Wearing dark sunglasses and a red peaked cap, Prabir strolled into Flury’s on the dot of twelve. He seemed, possibly with good reason considering his minor celebrity, like a rock star afraid of being noticed. Sitting down before me, he effected a cursory handshake, left his sunglasses on and began to drum the linen tablecloth with his sausage fingers.

Flury’s is something of an institution in Calcutta. It was founded in 1927 by a Swiss expatriate and quickly became the tea venue of choice for both well-to-do British and Indians. A recent refurbishment, however, has scoured away all remnants of this illustrious past. Electric tea machines roared in the background; gleaming refrigerated cabinets brought the food to any icy crunch point. Mirrors and gold trim dazzled the tea drinkers. I found myself longing for a roadside chai stall.

‘I will lay it out for you quite simply, sir,’ Prabir began at last, ‘and perhaps save you some trouble in your quest. There is no such thing as the supernatural. There is no levitation, no yogic powers, no Reiki, no telekinesis, no astrology, no fortune telling. I could go on. They are relics of the past.’

‘You don’t believe in any of them?’ I asked. ‘Or you’re saying they can’t be proven?’

‘Both. I have personally offered twenty Lakh rupees (50,000 US dollars) to anyone in the world who can prove me otherwise. No one has even come close.’ He held his palms up, tilted his head quickly from side to side, intoxicated by his own logic.

I asked him about his background. How had he come to make it his life’s mission to expose miracle workers? It seemed an unusual vocation.

He sipped his Coke thirstily. ‘My life’s mission is to eradicate the superstition which has held our country back for so long,’ he said. ‘I grew up in the 1950s in small railway towns like Kharagpur. My parents were devout believers in God. And so very early on I had the opportunity to be around holy men and to observe the way they worked. And what I learned very quickly was that these so-called
siddhas
– or yogic powers – were little more than cheap conjuring tricks. I began to practise these tricks myself, so that when I saw a yogi or a
fakir
hoodwinking people out of their money, I could step forward and demonstrate exactly the same trick, to make them think twice. I did not like seeing my parents giving their money away to these people.

‘But as I grew older, I began to see that actually I could do some real good for our India. Faith healing, in particular, is responsible for many deaths. Most doctors move to towns, so in rural places, faith healers do excellent business. In those places, miles from civilisation, quacks pose as gods in human form and take thousands of rupees from our farmers and peasants. I set out to stop this, and to date we have exposed literally hundreds of people as pure charlatans. We are helping India change.’

‘I have to ask about Sai Baba,’ I said, mentioning India’s most famous guru, a frizzy-haired ‘messiah’ whose devotees number tens of millions, many of them leading politicians. ‘If he’s a charlatan, he must be one of the most successful in human history. People believe him to be a living god.’

‘Sathya Sai Baba is a complete fraud,’ said Prabir, his voice growing strident. ‘It is all cheap conjuring. Sleight of hand. Tricks. How can India expect to become a great economic power while we continue to worship such people? Your BBC has made a documentary confirming this. And we have made our own videos. Unfortunately, though – for reasons, I think, of cultural conditioning – many of our leading politicians take their religion quite seriously and believe Sai Baba to be the real thing. It is a kind of brainwashing. It will take generations to really eradicate all this.’

‘What about the Christian saints?’ I said. ‘Mother Teresa, for example.’

‘Also a fraud,’ he answered, ‘in that she performed no miracles. Certainly she was a very great woman – but she cured no one by divine miracle. Those claims are false. I offered to shut down my entire organisation and turn over two million rupees to the Catholic order if the sisters put the medallion with which one woman claims Mother Teresa cured her of a tumour to the test. Of course they refused. This was also reported in many papers worldwide. But the myths remain – people
want
to believe.’

‘And the Ganesh Milk Miracle?’

‘Oh no!’ he snorted. ‘One of the worst. I can demonstrate that trick to you with any statue, at any time. Stone has absorbent properties. Capillary action, we are calling this.’

‘
Sadhus
who walk on coals?’

He sighed impatiently, already tired of my line of thinking. ‘You could do that yourself. In fact, we show villagers how to do it as a method of exposing the god men. The soles of our feet are thick and conduct heat poorly. Similarly, the ash on top of the hot coals is a slow conductor of heat. So if you walk at a good pace, you will not be burned. Sometimes, however, the god men throw sugar or glass on to the fires, so that during our demonstrations we get hurt. We are now
very
careful when we set up our demonstrations to make sure that no one comes near the fire while it is heating. This rationalism is a risky business.’

I sipped my tea, aware of Prabir Ghosh’s steely gaze affixed on me from behind his lenses. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with most of his reasoning, so much as that his tone was so contemptuous of anyone who would even consider the possibility of a miracle that I found myself recoiling – as much as I might have from a fundamentalist of the other sort. Certainly, many of the people he exposed – if not all of them – were probably frauds – but could it be that every
single
miracle worker in all of human history was also fraudulent? Prabir Ghosh would have us believe that humanity, since the dawn of time, has been hoodwinked by a slew of stage magicians, for whom the manipulation of water into wine is no more than clever chicanery.

‘You must understand the
influence
of these people in India,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps you cannot? By exposing these god men we are shaking the very foundations of power. Many of them have political affiliations and entreat their devotees to vote one way or the other. Many crores change hands. Since I have been doing this, I have survived
many
attempts on my life. We instruct all our young rationalists, in fact, in the martial arts, for this reason.’

‘This is true,’ concurred Sumitra, gazing protectively at her employer. ‘Many people try to kill him. Most recently a
goondar
on a motorcycle tried to do a hit and run – and Prabir got four broken ribs. But there have been others. Prabir is fortunately a very tough cookie.’

‘Just now we are engaged in a big debate with Ramdev,’ continued Ghosh, pulling his peaked cap down tightly over his brow. ‘He claims to cure any illness through the use of
mudras
[symbolic, ritual gestures] – even serious problems, I should tell you. For example, for a cardiac problem, you press a special point on your big toe.’ He chuckled. ‘This man has millions and millions of devotees. He is on television every day. And he is recommending to press the big toe!’

‘Is he hostile towards you?’

‘Certainly. He is getting very angry with me. I said, Mr Ramdev, if you are such a powerful yogi, why do you not cure your own eye problem? After that he became absolutely furious, shaking his fists and so on. So I said, Mr Ramdev, if you are an enlightened man, why are you so angry with me? Where is your equanimity?’

After Prabir Ghosh and his assistant left, I watched them as they got into their car and sputtered away through the smog. At the lights, a young man on a motorbike pulled up alongside them. He wore mirrored sunglasses, had a mobile phone strapped to his waist in a vinyl pouch, and wore his hair tied back in a ponytail. On the far side of Mr Ghosh’s car, I saw the opposite end of the economic spectrum, a
tana
or hand-pulled rickshaw, now quite rare in India and pulled by an ivory-haired man in a simple checked
lungi
. He wore no shoes and was probably a daily wage labourer from Bihar or Jharkhand, who pulled a rickshaw during the summer, then returned to his land for the winter farming. His skin was pitch-dark; his face had a watchful dignity.

Like Janus, the new India has two faces, both looking in opposite directions. For the young man in the leather jacket, religion was perhaps less important than it had been for any of his forefathers; a cultural backdrop but with scant relevance to the struggle for prosperity. For the rickshaw wallah it was everything: a refuge and a code. The land was his ‘mother’ and the rains that swelled the rice paddies the gentle manifestation of God’s presence.

These issues – it was becoming increasingly clear – were not merely for the believers and the atheists or consigned to theological debate. They were impacting on all our lives for ever, changing the world in very concrete ways. For my part, I felt trapped between the same rejection of a miraculous God that I’d always had and a profound unease about the consequences of our post-enlightenment divorce from spiritual life. I understood that ‘reason’, by itself, could never provide me with the means to understand and appreciate my life on earth. And yet, at least not yet, neither could I turn away from a third possibility: that the holy men, the mystics, even the magicians, had something to teach us. . . .

In search of such characters, I was unlikely to find anywhere much better than my next destination, one of the great Mela festivals. Occurring every four years, with the largest and mother of all every dozen, the Melas are essentially mammoth religious fairs, in which tens of millions of pilgrims descend upon one of four sacred Indian cities. In only a few weeks, the Ardh Kumbh Mela was to begin in Allahabad, drawing
sadhus
, holy men and mystics from all over the subcontinent in one of the most colourful, bewildering spectacles of Hinduism.

‘You are
too
lucky to have this opportunity,’ said Uday, the doorman at my hotel in Calcutta, for whom a visit to one of the great Mela festivals was a constantly nurtured dream. ‘It is my belief that at this Mela you will see
genuine
wonders.’ He grinned. ‘In such a spiritual place, all wishes will be granted.’