All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (3 page)

By early evening I was in Darjeeling. It was sub-zero, a dense mist obscuring the valley floor, the town all but boarded up for the winter. Straggled along the ridge, the shops and cafés were silent and forlorn, the faded grandeur of the Raj disappearing beneath a patina of orange rust. Globalisation has not been kind to the tea industry here, with plummeting commodity prices causing unemployment and social unrest in these hills. In the winter, tourism dwindles to almost nothing, and the streets return again to a mixture of tea merchants, Tibetan refugees and the red-robed monks drawing worn prayer beads through their hands. I was glad I’d come.

That night the temperature dropped so low I couldn’t sleep. Cocooned in musty blankets in one of the few guesthouses still open for winter trade, I sat and read by candlelight, frost vapour pooling in the glow. My room was an ice-box of unpainted concrete, its window permanently glued shut. Shivering, I finally ventured downstairs to persuade the caretaker to fill my hiking flask with boiling water. Wrapped in a wool sock, this impromptu source of warmth has allowed me a few hours’ sleep on a number of occasions. Outside, the great mountain cold seemed to crush the valley in its hands. Lines from Mary Oliver’s poem, which seems to speak of cold so emotively, ran over and over in my dreams.

Cold now.

Close to the edge. Almost

unbearable. Clouds

bunch up and boil down

from the north of the white bear.

Bone-weary, I arose next morning. There was a thin film of ice on the water glass beside my bed, which I cracked, spitefully, with my fingertip. Nevertheless, despite my exhaustion, I reminded myself that I was in the Himalayas, after all, and the day was ice-clear, exposing a line of jagged mountains on the horizon. Things could be worse indeed.

As I stepped out into the street I took a deep, life-affirming breath. Everything was pristine. Beyond the perimeter of the town, I could see Kanchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world. From Darjeeling, one gains the finest view of it anywhere, and I had long wanted to see this legendary mountain, literally, ‘the five treasures of snows’. According to the indigenous Kirant religion, the treasures represent the five repositories of God, which are gold, silver, gems, grain and holy books. It was first climbed on May 25, 1955 by Joe Brown and George Band, on a British expedition, who honoured the beliefs of the Sikkimese by stopping a few feet short of the actual summit.

Down at the Mall, once home to the social clubs and villas of the nineteenth-century British, I found a more bustling atmosphere. Bundled up in scarves and puffer jackets, the citizens of Darjeeling took the air, shopped, gossiped and waited for the spring thaws. I stopped for a while to watch a street magician who had a huge crowd enthralled. From within a small reed basket, but covered beneath a strip of canvas, he was taunting what looked like the head of a cobra. It bobbed to and fro, raising the canopy aggressively, and then dropping in retreat. What was most peculiar about the snake was that it seemed to respond to his every command, rising then falling as if it were preternaturally attuned to the sound of its master’s voice. The
jaduwala
(magician) was a seasoned professional, keeping up a running commentary in his gravelled though surprisingly musical voice, goading the crowd to new heights of wonder and anticipation, and invoking the gods of multiple faiths to strike him down if he was deceiving anyone with simply trickery.

The pièce de résistance came when the magician threw a live chicken beneath the canopy, then stood back while a veritable thrashing took place beneath. When all went silent, the magician peered furtively underneath, tilted his head gravely and then held up the bloodied, still twitching, body of a headless fowl. The crowd wailed in horror and delight, only quietening down when the magician, by dint of a
bansuri
(bamboo flute), stilled the snake and sealed the lid with a padlock. To a round of applause, he passed round a copper bowl which rattled with falling rupees like a tin roof in a hailstorm.

Out of curiosity, and because the role of street magic in India seemed to bear a good deal of relevance to my own reasons for being here, I sequestered myself in a doorway to watch the magician clearing up once the trick was complete. Slowly, the crowds dispersed, the money was poured into a spotless handkerchief and tied with a firm knot, and the magician began to collect his belongings together. Finally, after a glance to either side to check that no one was watching, he gave a double click with his tongue, and unlocked the basket. A small boy – of perhaps no more than six or seven – climbed out. His string vest was stained crimson with the blood of the chicken, but he was grinning broadly. Patting his assistant on the back, the magician hefted the basket on to his shoulders and the two performers walked off down the street, no doubt for a celebratory breakfast.

In a Raj-era tea room, I ordered steaming porridge and honey against the cold, and a pot of golden flowery orange pekoe, one of the highest grades of Darjeeling tea. It came in a silver-plated teapot that I fancied might once have served army officers and their wives 150 years before. As I sipped the delicate brew, I asked one of the Tibetan waiters, Sonu, if he’d heard of the miracle. I was sitting before a glass window, views of rolling hills speckled with snow in the distance. Behind me an elderly German couple riffled through their Lonely Planet guide, occasionally circling things in red ink.

‘Hindu miracles are happening often,’ Sonu explained, clearly amused by my interest in such things. ‘But this is the first Buddhist miracle I can remember. People have been coming from miles away to see it, and even some lamas from Sikkim.’

‘What did the lamas think?’

He shrugged. ‘They had tea in here afterwards, so I heard them talking about it. They were laughing very hard, actually. I don’t think they took it very seriously.’

Had he seen it himself?

‘I am not having much time for miracles,’ Sonu scoffed. ‘I want to get out of Darjeeling as soon as possible and move to Delhi. This place is too small – I want to live the city life. So I’m working double shifts right now to save up for a motorbike. Do you know the Bajaj Pulsar? – that’s the one I want. Man, that’s a cool bike.’

‘What if it’s a real miracle?’ I said. ‘You’ll have missed your chance.’

He thought for a time. ‘Perhaps you’re right, bro. It will make my grandmother happy at least. If you come back at six, we can go up there together.’

I spent the day wandering the hills and terraces, glad to be alone. I visited Sampten Choling, a Buddhist monastery of the Yellow Hat sect, where I watched a monk making prostrations before the fifteen-foot statue of the Maitreya Buddha. ‘He will do 100,000 of these,’ whispered a young, large-eared monk, standing beside me. ‘We call this
ngondro
.’

I asked him why they did it. Was it merely devotion?

‘It is a method of purifying karma more quickly,’ the monk told me. ‘All of us are burdened by the actions of past lives. With
ngondro
we are letting go of what has been, and embracing Buddha-nature.’ He grinned. ‘Actually, it is a good practice but it is making the back too sore.’

‘Have you done it?’

‘Oh yes. Before I had some problems with pride.
Ngondro
helped me quite a lot in this respect. All my family have done these prostrations. My grandfather actually did them from our home in Eastern Tibet all the way to the statue of Jowo Rinpoche in Lhasa.’

‘I’m on something of a pilgrimage myself,’ I said. ‘But I’m not sure I have the strength for that.’

The young monk smiled. ‘Towards the end of the practice, your body is becoming very light. Mind is quiet. Great love is there for all beings.’

As evening fell, I returned to meet Sonu, who led me briskly up the steep path towards the miracle site. Within a few minutes we could see the town lit up below us, dotted with light. My heartbeat was racing now, partly from the climb, but partly from the fact of being here, high in the Shiwalik hills, en route for a glimpse of something that fell through the cracks in everything I’d held true until now. Already I was beginning to break free of the familiar, with a new vitality coursing through me.

Sonu, like many young Tibetans in Darjeeling, had been born in north India yet retained a longing for his homeland. Tibet was the country of his heart, he said, and his only dream in life was to return. No matter how often conversation strayed to other things – rock music, the movies of Jean-Claude van Damme – it always returned to Tibet. The struggle defined him.

‘We will organise a huge protest when the Olympics come,’ he told me, his face a mask of resolve. ‘Our aim is to shame people into an economic boycott. We will say “every product you buy from the Chinese is tainted with Tibetan blood. If you support president Hu Jintao, then your hands, too, are red.” ’

It was fighting talk. Sonu, like many young Tibetans, revered the Dalai Lama above all others, but also felt frustrated with his Holiness’s refusal to take a more combative stance. The Dalai Lama’s ‘middle way’, essentially a conciliatory approach in which he accepts the possibility of a Tibetan autonomous zone (rather than total independence), has saddened a great many of his followers. For Sonu, and the thousands like him, the past thirty years of struggle have achieved nothing. As the possibility of ever seeing their country free becomes narrower, their frustrations – and their willingness to commit to armed struggle – become greater.

For tonight, however, the mood was very much one of piety and respect for the great wheel of Buddhism. Reaching the top of the hill, we gathered with several hundred pink-cheeked Tibetans to view the miracle. People of all ages were present, swathed in woolly hats and scarves, some of the women wearing the distinctive striped aprons called
bangdians
. It was a bleak and lonely place, far above Chowrasta hill, and surrounded by the enveloping ridges of the Himalayas. From here the overdevelopment of the town gave way to a forest of evergreen pines. I could smell the resin in their needles, and for a second was transported back to the forest where I’d played as a child.

Above us, the moon hung fatly in the sky. As it broke through the clouds, we knelt down and prayed to the Enlightened one, while others merely set their mobile phones to camera mode in preparation for the event. (Miracles, as everything else in the new India, seem to link the most ancient needs of the human spirit with the vanguard of technology.)

‘Watch that tree on the end of the ridge,’ advised Sonu, after conferring with one of his friends. ‘You will see the Buddha only when the moon shines.’

We watched and waited, and then, as the clouds parted, we saw it! Whether a trick of the eye or a play of shadows, the tree – it was suddenly very clear – began to look like a Buddha. More precisely, it looked like a seated Buddha, the tiny leaves forming an uncanny silhouette of a figure in the lotus position, complete with the pointed head, visible in a series of swirls rising sharply to the crown. It was pointillism at its most bizarre, as if some preternaturally skilled topiarist had enacted a masterpiece.

An old woman to my left began to chant as we saw it: ‘
Om Mani Peme Hung, Om Mani Peme Hung
,’ her voice worn and smooth and resounding over the hills. Soon even the most sceptical youngsters put down their mobile phones to view the spectacle. One man prostrated himself, his face buried in the dust.

I stared at it confusedly. If it was a trick it was superbly done. And yet, as a miracle it was almost too random to be credible. What an unlikely way for the divine to become manifest! Why this? Why now? What could possibly be the point of it all? Coincidence seemed equally unlikely, however – how could a tree form itself, so perfectly, into such a shape?

‘What do you think?’ I asked Sonu, when people began to disperse at last. ‘Is it a miracle or coincidence? It certainly
looks
real enough.’

He grinned. ‘For me, Mr Piers, it is a strange-looking tree. But’ – he pointed to the old lady chanting – ‘for her it is a message from Lord Buddha. I suppose both are true.’

‘The Buddha didn’t believe in miracles,’ I pointed out. ‘He said that we should find our way to the truth.’

‘Then for you it is also a tree,’ said Sonu. ‘But for the old people, these things are important. For me, a real miracle would be if the Chinese announced immediate withdrawal from our country.’ He shrugged. ‘But one cannot expect such a thing. In the meantime we will work at the problem ourselves, as the Buddha taught.’

So saying he clicked a picture on his Nokia phone and began the descent back down into town. He had a shift to begin in the restaurant and, miracle or not, there were practical concerns to attend to. For myself, I wished to stay a while and observe. In the sky, the moon was almost full and its yellow light washed the tree with a pale fire. On the hilltop, the crowd had dwindled to a small group of the most ardent believers, none of whom – it seemed – were ready to give up on the belief that the great Shakyamuni had entered their lives with a palpable message. With the placid chanting still softly filling the night air, I leaned against a tree and looked down at the scene. In my mind sang a phrase I’d once read: ‘He who believes all these tales is a fool, but anyone who cannot believe them is a heretic.’