Here Is Real Magic

by Nate Staniforth

  I had left my bag on the patio, and after the meal Ishamudin walked with me to the roof to find it.

  “What do you think of India?” he asked.

  “I think that any answer I give will be inadequate. I love it here, but I don’t understand it.”

  “This is essential for love, is it not?” he replied.

  “To not understand?”

  “No,” he said. “To not assume you understand.”

  We sat.

  “Do you believe in real magic?” It took me a full minute to work up the courage to ask the question.

  He looked at me sharply, and then, realizing I was serious, his face softened. He looked at the ground, and when he finally spoke, the words came out slowly and carefully.

  “I believe in the magic of knowledge. The magic of experience. The magic of learning. The magic of meeting different people. Everything is magic.”

  He paused for a moment.

  “The real magic is your hard work. If you do hard work, that will show you magic. If you are lazy, there will be no magic.”

  “What’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen?” I asked.

  “Once in my life I looked at the sky with a telescope. And I felt the air come out of my breath as I saw the stars—the constellations and the Milky Way. I looked at the sky and I thought, ‘That is magic.’ ”

  THE TRAIN TO JODHPUR

  The night we returned from Shadipur Depot I stayed up late, stretched out on my bed in the guesthouse with the notebook writing everything I could remember about that day. I wrote about the fear, the poverty, the open sewers and the smell of filth. I wrote about Ishamudin and his family. I wrote about the fire breathing. For a few hours I did nothing but write—trying to preserve everything so I could take it home with me. When I was done I flipped through the notebook all the way back to the beginning in Kolkata. I had almost filled it. On the first page I found the question I had written in the train station: Where do you find wonder?

  Here in India, every moment brought the possibility of discovery, and even as I lay there in the guesthouse I could hear the sounds of the city coming in through the window and the warmth of a breeze that did not feel anything like Iowa. I was awake, and alive, and I didn’t want to stop searching. I had come to India to find magic and I had found it, but I realized that it wasn’t any one particular moment; it was the process of seeking it that gave these days their sense of impending revelation. It’s one thing to find wonder on the other side of the world. But how do you bring it home?

  I lay there for a while and then opened the notebook again.

  Life in the world is hard. For some more than others, but for all of us more than we admit, and we deploy different strategies to protect ourselves from this hardness. We make our world smaller so we can control it. We make our world simpler so we can understand it. And we reduce ourselves to this diminished scale so we don’t accidentally stray outside this fictionalized world and see the danger—but also the majesty—lurking just beyond the borders of our certainty. The result is a world and a life largely free from surprise and uncertainty, but also free from seeing things the way they really are. This, at least, is how it is for me. But the danger is that over time we come to see this pale, anemic version of life as the real thing. We feel the weight of the world but not the wonder, and in time we resign ourselves to one and forget the other.

  Once in a while, we remember.

  Once in a while something happens—and I have become convinced that it absolutely does not matter what—and we see the cracks in our convictions, and through them a sliver of that larger, wider world outside the one we have constructed. The vision we see there either assaults our sense of control and sovereignty and drives us cowering backward to the world of our making, or it exposes that world for the illusion it really is and invites us upward and onward toward the real thing.

  So if your goal is to bring wonder back into your ordinary daily life, start by recognizing that it’s not ordinary if you don’t want it to be, that it never has been ordinary even if you do want it to be, and that the whole world waits for you to open your eyes and look around you and really see it.

  But knowing this theoretically and feeling the vitality of it in your bones are two very different things. Everyone is different, and what strikes one person as awesome and wonderful can be obvious and dull for someone else—magicians learn this very early, unfortunately—so consider the following nothing more than a set of starting points that have been useful for me.

  First, think for a moment about the plain fact of the universe’s existence. It’s a mystery that turns you inside out if you let it. We’ve learned an enormous amount about how the universe exploded into being from an infinitesimally small point, but nothing at all about how that point came to be in the first place. The jump from nothing to something just before everything exploded into being is unfathomable. Resist the temptation to leave the big questions to other people. They belong to you, too.

  Next, follow the Big Bang in your imagination from the time of the explosion all the way to the present moment and see if you can figure out where in that process the particles and atoms bouncing around and sticking to each other according to the laws of the universe acquired the ability to act on their own. For most of that time they were only reacting—hurtling through space, joining with other bits of matter—all in accordance to the governing limitations of physics and chemistry. And then at some point you arrived, capable of making your own decisions and living a life of action rather than reaction. How did you jump off the rails? In his Baroque Cycle, author Neal Stephenson described the issue of free will as one of the great labyrinths into which the human mind can lose itself, and even twenty minutes of trying to wrap your mind around the problem is enough to get you thoroughly lost.

  Find a sunset, or a sunrise. Go to the ocean, or the Grand Canyon, or a field outside your small town in Iowa at night when the stars are out. Find a way to shift your perspective from the immediate to the infinite, from the very small to the very large. Or go the other way. Watch a raindrop slide down a windowpane and realize this drop of water contains more atoms than there are stars in the universe, and that each of those atoms contains enough power to run a city, or destroy it. Everywhere, all around us, just beneath the surface, hide a complexity and a depth that stagger the imagination. Nothing dissolves the ridiculous assumption that we are at the center of the universe like exposure to the actual universe.

  There’s a fundamental link between wonder and humility. Many of the places people often find wonder—thunderstorms, oceans, the night sky—are also described as “humbling,” and though this word has come to have a negative connotation, it shouldn’t. Recognizing that we are very small is nothing more than acknowledging the obvious, and any attempt at posturing or pretending we are not is just another part of that fictional, self-created world we’re trying so hard to take down.

  Now, look at the next person you meet. Recall that even the people who know you the best are aware of only a small fraction of the world within you and that most of your inner life—hopes, fears, anxieties, the midnight walk through a snowy winter forest you imagine each night to lull your racing, anxious brain to sleep—most of this is totally unknown to the people in your life. Recognize in the stranger before you this same unknowable universe, and try to find in the awareness of this universe the same sense of infinity and eternity you see in the sky at night.

  If you can, do something unexpectedly kind for this stranger. The dinner prepared by Ishamudin’s family during my visit to Shadipur Depot and the overflowing hospitality they showed me created one of the most staggering moments of the trip. That evening absolutely knocked me down, but it shouldn’t have. Magicians have known for ages that one of the best ways to feel wonder yourself is to give it to someone else. It’s like love in that way. You don’t sneak into your child’s room late at night and secretly swap the hard-won tooth under their pillow for a coin because you want your children t
o believe in the Tooth Fairy—you do it to give them the experience of magic. It’s about enchanting them rather than deceiving them, and you can do that anywhere. Once on tour I was in a diner and saw a woman leave an extraordinarily large tip for one of the waitresses. I never found out how much, but when the waitress went to clear the table she looked at the receipt, stopped, slowly put the plates back down, and covered her face with her hands. “Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god!!!” It was like watching someone at a magic show. The waitress grabbed the receipt and ran into the kitchen, laughing and crying. If there is such a thing as real, actual magic in this world, surely this is how it works—us, here, creating it for one another.

  Finally, consider yourself. Lie on the ground alone at night and look up at the sky and reflect that everyone you’ve ever known and everywhere you’ve ever been is somewhere behind you; that between your spot there on the edge of the world and the depths of the universe before you, you are the only one who can think, learn, hope, dream, and wonder. That power—greater than all of the astronomical distance above—exists in you. “Go within,” the tantric yogi in Varanasi had said. “Magical things await.”

  I got up and left the room. The guesthouse had a courtyard filled with plants and a gorgeous square of Indian sky. The stars were washed away by the city light, but you could still see the moon.

  I had brought a pay-by-the-minute international cell phone on the trip for emergencies—before leaving I had visions of getting bitten by a cobra and calling Katharine in my last minutes on earth to apologize for everything. Short of that, I was reluctant to use it, as if this trip wouldn’t count as a real adventure if I could just call home. Sometimes the world feels too small, and you want it to be bigger.

  I punched Katharine’s number into the phone and then canceled it and sat there for a minute. Then I called.

  “Hello?”

  I’m sure the number on her phone had come up as unlisted.

  “Hi, Katharine.”

  My own voice echoed back to me half a second after speaking. The connection was strained and distant, like speaking down a laundry chute.

  “Oh my god,” she whispered. “How are you? I mean, I’m so glad to hear from you. Are you okay?”

  And then, all I wanted to do was go home. “Yes, I am okay. I’m glad to hear your voice.”

  “You, too, Nate.”

  Where do I begin?

  “Katharine, I met the most remarkable people this afternoon,” I said, after about two dollars’ worth of silence, and tried to tell her about the street magicians of Shadipur Depot—their life in the slum, their magic, the feast they had cooked for us and the stories they told. I told her about the aarti ceremony in Haridwar and the afternoon in the ashram, and the one-armed monkey who chased me down the alley.

  “Are they mean?” she asked.

  “Monkeys? Oh god, yes. They’re awful.”

  Another long silence. An entire conversation of pauses and silence.

  “Nate, I don’t know how to respond. I’m so glad to hear you’re okay.”

  We spoke about her days at home. She told me about our friends and our families, but mostly I was just glad to hear her talk. I wanted to be there immediately.

  “When are you coming home?” she asked. “Are you, I mean, are you finished?”

  This was a good question.

  What are you doing here? I thought. What do you want?

  It’s a terrible question to answer honestly. In a moment of autodidactic ambition I had brought Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing on the trip and had fallen out with it almost immediately. I want, distinctly, two things. Ever since meeting Katharine I have harbored a hope of someday moving with her to the country, buying a farm, and leaving it only to restock the cellar with wine and good food, and even then only rarely. Or forget the farm and the wine. A cheap apartment, a hovel, a box—I want to be home with my family.

  The other is to be a magician—a great magician—and to chase the experience of wonder and magic through the theaters and venues of America, Europe, the distant mountains of India, or anywhere else the hunt might lead, hurling myself forward from plane to plane and show to show, driving through the night, always searching. I am Captain Ahab. I am Don Quixote. On one window in my studio I have a picture of the raven in flight—an ancient symbol of the magician and a recognition of the necessity of leaving home and going out into the world. On the other I have a picture of a flower. It looks like the rose window from a cathedral. Katharine drew it, and it’s a reminder of home and family and all I leave behind when I go on tour. The rose and the raven. The home and the hunt. To hell with Kierkegaard. I want two things.

  “I don’t know, Katharine. I can’t wait to come home. I just—I want to see this through to the end.”

  “I miss you, Nate.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  Andy knew the owner of a hostel in Jodhpur with a rooftop patio and a stock of good Irish whiskey, and this was as good a reason as any to leave New Delhi and spend a few days in the middle of the Rajasthan desert.

  The train station in New Delhi is both brighter and better organized than the inhuman citadel in Kolkata and the next night we found our platform with five minutes to spare. Even at ten o’clock the station was filled with people coming and going, and all around our train, passengers hurried to find their cars, load their baggage, and get on board.

  An announcement called for us to board the train, and I moved toward the door.

  “Nate,” Andy said, looking around, “stay here. I’ll be right back.” He dropped his backpack at my feet, crossed the platform, and disappeared.

  I couldn’t believe it. I stood there as everyone else filed onto the train. After a moment, I was the only one remaining. I looked at the clock on the wall. Three minutes since Andy left. Less than one minute until our train’s departure. At the other end of the platform I could hear the sound of the engine change. The door behind me stood open, but I could see a railway official walking down the platform checking the others.

  Andy came racing down the platform at a flat-out run, holding a paper bag. “Pepsi and fried chicken!” he said as he picked up his pack and we boarded the train. We sat on the bench as the train pulled from the station and I watched out the window as the lights of New Delhi and the outlying suburbs slid away into the night.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Shadipur Depot. Those children have faced hardships I have never even dreamed. They will face them again and again. Their lives will be difficult, and some of them will be short, and by their very existence those children expose my whining about jet lag and the challenges of flying around the world to live out my dream as the crass sort of privileged navel-gazing it is. There’s no doubt at all—they have it bad, and I do not.

  But I thought about the toddler carrying the baby down the narrow alley and lifting him over the running sewer. He had looked at me as he approached, but it was not a look of suffering. It was a look of pride: Here, stranger—look at my wonderful baby brother. See how carefully I carry him? See how big I have become, to take on such an awesome task as this? See how my mother trusts me? I remembered how the children of Shadipur Depot gathered at Ishamudin’s home to learn and grow beyond the world of their birth. They felt hope and pride despite their circumstances. It would be easy to pity them, but I had only been there for an afternoon and knew nothing of their inner lives. I didn’t want to label them as victims without their participation. It is a kind of arrogance to assume you know more about someone—or something, or everything—than you do. It leads you to act in ways you wouldn’t if you better understood your own ignorance.

  Earlier I wrote about the way a moment of wonder forces you to expand your understanding of the world, and I think Shadipur Depot stretched mine so completely that it may never return to its former shape. The young boy carrying his brother, the old man who could breathe fire, the family of magicians making a life in the worst neighborhood I’d ever seen—all were so far remove
d from my previous experience that I couldn’t hold them together without letting go of everything else. If a new perspective is wide enough it reduces the scope of your existing knowledge to essentially nothing, and the perspective I gained that day was far wider, and far greater, than anything I had known before. I understood more about everything before I went to Shadipur Depot. Now I don’t know.

  Amit had spoken about magic tricks as a way to encounter—and then reconcile one’s self with—the unknown. He had dropped us off at the train station that evening, and as a parting gift he gave me a copy of a poem he had written about magic—“A rough draft,” he had said. “Just a sketch of a poem, really.” I opened my notebook and unfolded the paper he’d given me. Three lines stood out.

  Bless the magician for knowing something I don’t.

  The appearance and disappearance of the artifacts of this material world give me an island moment of unknowing,

  A mystery that gives me relief from the consuming need to question everything, and then to answer it.

  I read it over and over before folding the poem and tucking it back into the notebook. Our train car was brightly lit, and the window reflected the interior of the car, and all I could see was myself sitting there, trying to look outside.

  A day later Andy and I were installed in red plastic lawn chairs on the roof of a hostel in Jodhpur watching as the setting sun turned the brown, orange, and blue of the city below into gold.