Three Essays

by Tahir Shah

Another case that caused great shock more recently was the fate of the Uruguayan rugby team, whose small aircraft crashed in the Andes during the winter of 1972. Of the initial forty-five passengers and crew, only sixteen survived – and most of those only did so by consuming the meat cut from their dead friends. They cooked strips of it in the sun, then forced it down. The story based on Piers Paul Read’s book, Alive, went on to become a Hollywood film staring Ethan Hawke.

  Inspired by Hans Staden’s account, I have myself always been intrigued by the idea of how human meat would taste. An experience a few years ago introduced me, I think, to a flavour very similar if not precisely the same.

  I had travelled to the headwaters of the Upper Amazon in Peru, researching a book about the flora-based hallucinogen ayahuasca, and the tribe of the Shuar who take it. Until a century ago the Shuar were infamous for the way they would shrink the heads of their foes to about the size of a grapefruit, by crushing the skull and then reducing the envelope of skin with hot sand.

  For many weeks I pushed upriver in a derelict boat that I had hired downstream in Iquitos. She was rather like the African Queen, and I was her wayward skipper, with a crew of degenerates. The most reprobate of all was a Vietnam vet who had promised to keep me alive in the jungle. He spent most of his time lying stoned on the decks.

  From the moment we approached the Shuar’s hunting grounds, the crew began trembling with fear. They had all heard the stories, the tales of the savage tribe who gorged themselves on intruders.

  Night after night we feasted on giant capybara rodents and on tapir. Their meat was tough, very gamy, and was usually barbecued over termite nests. It was the only way to kill the worms.

  Finally, early one evening, we reached a Shuar village. One of the tribesmen came down to the boat and brought an offering. In the half-light of dusk it looked curiously human.

  It was a large roasted monkey.

  The Vietnam vet, who lived in the Peruvian jungle (he could never bring himself to leave), ripped off the left arm and presented it to me.

  ‘Eat it,’ he said coldly, ‘or the tribe will be unhappy.’

  Not wanting to make anyone sad, I ate the whole thing – the biceps and the triceps, the meat of the forearm and the wrist. I remember my teeth reaching the hand. It was small and curled up, the fingers ending in prim little nails. There wasn’t much flesh on it, not like the arm. As for the taste, it was delicious, succulent and strangely aromatic.

  During my own travels in Africa, I have time and again struggled to pick up a trail that would bring me face to face with real-life cannibals. I was inspired by the late eighteenth century explorer Mungo Park, who was in search of the distant kingdom of Timbuctoo. In his Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, he described coming across slaves being prepared for shipment to plantations in the New World. Park noted that they were absolutely petrified because they believed they were destined for their captors’ cooking pot.

  The thought of cannibals dancing around a proverbial cauldron has fascinated me since childhood. In my late teens I was preoccupied with East Africa and used to visit Uganda during the civil war of the mid-1980s. Up in the so-called ‘Luwero Triangle’, I was shown far too many human skulls to count, each of them with a bullet hole in its rear. And, I was told stories about Idi Amin, the former President, who was said by all to have indulged in plenty of cannibalism during his reign.

  For decades I have tried to get to the bottom of the Idi Amin myth. I even wrote a book once for a man who was acquainted with him. The fee I negotiated was to have breakfast with the disgraced dictator in Saudi Arabia, where he was seeking refuge. Alas, though, the Last King of Scotland died of natural causes before we could share a meal together. It was a pity because I had always wondered what he’d have served.

  The reports of Idi Amin’s years as leader make for gruesome reading. There’s an account that at State House he kept the heads of his enemies in his fridges, and that he garnished the platters at a banquet with human body parts. My favourite is a quote that I understand is reliable. When asked if he ate human flesh, Amin retorted curtly,

  ‘No, I don’t like it. I find it too salty.’

  At the same time that Amin was subjecting his countrymen to terror, Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa was doing the same, over in the Central African Republic.

  Bokassa hit new heights on the ‘deranged African dictator’ scale. He thought he was a reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte – that is, Bonaparte with a cannibalistic edge. By all accounts he had a taste for the tender meat of human babies, and would have them served up at dinners – satisfying his taste-buds, and horrifying his guests. When he was toppled in 1979, his freezers were supposedly found to be overflowing with gutted babies, their little bodies frozen hard as rock.

  Whatever the truth of Amin or Bokassa, I am sure the cannibalism that would have appealed to them was a kind of shock-horror form – it certainly wasn’t done as a solution to a shortage of food. My own experiences in the Dark Continent have borne out the idea of cannibalism as a kind of method of control, rather than as a source of nourishment. I have travelled in Ethiopia a great deal during famines, and have never once heard of a case of cannibalism there. Even though ordinary people were wasting away – dying in front of me – they didn’t seem to be at all tempted by the thought of eating a fellow human’s flesh.

  But cannibalism certainly does continue in Africa today. Trawl the wire services and there are reports every so often, filtering through from local news sources. Almost without exception, they revolve around a kind of magico-spiritualism. It’s all about expunging the memory of the deceased or, more importantly, about gaining something intangible from them – not protein, but power.

  In the West African land of Sierra Leone, I once met a member of a fraternity who supposedly killed children and ate them. He was incarcerated in a small prison outside Freetown, having been caught with a human leg in his home. The jail was a ramshackle concrete hellhole, which stank of sewage and death. There must have been hundreds of men locked up there – charged with everything from petty theft to cannibalism.

  The moment the gate was opened for me, I wished I had never had the bright idea of paying a visit. The prisoner I had come to see was called Milton and he had been sentenced to life. By the time I arrived, he had spent four years in solitary. There was such fear of him, that he was permitted his own concrete box – in a jail where most of the inmates were crammed by the dozen into tiny cells.

  Milton must have been in his fifties. He had unremarkable features, but a composure that instilled real fear into everyone around him. Even the jailer confessed he was terrified of him. When I asked if he had ever eaten human meat, Milton looked right through me. Then, very slowly, his mouth opened, and he said:

  ‘And what is wrong with that?’

  Call me old-fashioned, but the way I see it, it’s surely far worse to actually kill someone than to eat them. But our society doesn’t seem to agree with me. Every year there are so many homicides world-wide that only the grizzliest ones – or those involving celebrities – make a big splash. Yet any case involving cannibalism is instantly swept up by the press, with acres of column space devoted to it.

  The crème de la crème of such a line in stories are those involving serial cannibals. That’s where Hannibal Lecter fitted in. Real-life studies of cannibalistic serial killers are rare needless to say, but they do crop up. And, oh, how the public devours them when they come along. Serial cases differ from other forms of cannibalism in that they’re usually performed for as a kind of psychotic perversion.

  The most celebrated case in recent times was the American serial killer and all-round sex-offender Jeffrey Dahmer. His other crimes involved homosexual necrophilia and a catalogue of other peculiar atrocities. Eventually found guilty of seventeen murders in the Milwaukee area, Dahmer was thought to have been murdering about one victim a week at his peak. It was only in the months after his apprehension that the true story of his orgy of death and
cannibalism emerged.

  Preying on gay men, he would pick out lonely individuals, invite them home for a beer, and have sex with them before killing them. At first he buried the bodies in the back yard, but, as he began to enjoy the process of killing all the more, there were too many bodies. And so, he changed tack.

  He would photograph the naked corpses, have sex with them, then cut them open and sense the warmth emanating from them. Little by little he dismembered them, removing key organs or prime cuts of flesh, wrapping them in plastic, and freezing them. He boiled down the skulls and bleached them, before spray-painting them for his macabre collection. He chopped off the sexual organs, too, and pickled them in formaldehyde. The odds and ends of bone, sinew and meat were thrown in an oil drum filled with acid, and reduced to an unctuous sludge that could be flushed away with the household sewage.

  Jeffrey Dahmer shocked America, but delighted it in a strange way as well. After all, he was the real-life incarnation of Hannibal the Cannibal. As for Dahmer himself, he didn’t manage to serve his fifteen life sentences. He was bludgeoned to death by a fellow inmate in November 1994.

  In terms of pure weirdness, Dahmer has only been eclipsed by Armin Meiwes, a German from the small town of Rotenburg.

  Meiwes placed an advert online on a site called the Cannibal Café. He said he was looking for ‘a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed’. A surprisingly large number of people contacted him, showing an interest in his request, before turning him down once they realized what he had in store for them. Meiwes selected a man named Bernd Jürgen Brandes, and outlined his plan at their first meeting in March 2001.

  Brandes agreed, and they repaired to Meiwes’s little home in Rotenburg. The next thing Brandes knew was that his penis was cooking in garlic and a dash of wine on the stove. He had asked Meiwes to bite the organ off, a feat that proved too tricky, and so it was cut off with a knife. Brandes attempted to eat some of it himself but found it too tough and chewy.

  Having videoed the ordeal, Meiwes went off to read a Star Trek book for some three hours, while his victim – plied with painkillers and schnapps – was left to bleed in the bath. Brandes having been weakened by the tremendous blood loss, Meiwes killed him and began the process of dismemberment.

  In the months that followed, he is said to have consumed about twenty kilos of Brandes’s flesh, keeping specific organs and cuts in the freezer until he was ready for them. He had even planned to grind his bones into flour as well.

  Towards the end of the following year Meiwes was arrested, having placed advertisements online in the hope of attracting another victim. His initial sentence of manslaughter was extended to life imprisonment. While in prison, Meiwes has apparently repented his sins and become a vegetarian. He’s even followed Hannibal Lecter’s example and assisted German police in the analysis of two other suspected cannibal cases.

  As for the protagonist in my novel, Eye Spy, the one that so horrified my wife, he shares Dahmer’s and Meiwes’s delight in eating people. I have heard it said that some firefighters find it hard to stomach bacon because it reminds them of the smell of roasting human flesh. I often turn that thought around in my head. You see, the monkey’s arm I ate in the Amazon tasted of flame-grilled bacon. I sometimes wonder if my fascination for the subject would make me a good cannibal.

  But I’m hoping that I’ll never find out.

  The End

  THE KUMBH MELA: GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

  An Essay

  TAHIR SHAH

  SECRETUM MUNDI PUBLISHING

  MMXIII

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  The Kumbh Mela: Greatest Show On Earth

  TAHIR SHAH

  Secretum Mundi Publishing

  3rd Floor, 36 Langham Street, London W1W 7AP, United Kingdom

  http://www.secretum-mundi.com/

  info@secretum-mundi.com

  Cover design by www.designbliss.nl

  First published

  Secretum Mundi edition, 2013

  978-1-78301-132-2

  © TAHIR SHAH

  Tahir Shah asserts the right to be identified as the Author of the Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalog record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Visit the author’s website at: http://www.tahirshah.com/

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The Kumbh Mela: Greatest Show On Earth

  There’s a blur of feet hurrying through ankle-deep mud.

  Millions and millions of them. Some in plastic sandals, others in rubber boots, many others in cheap city shoes, or trainers, or flip-flops, or brogues. Tens of thousands more are barefoot, some limping, others running.

  This sea of humanity is surging forward, relentless and unstoppable. Most of them have bundles on their heads. Each one is stuffed with rice and flour, pots and pans, blankets and bedrolls. Many have babies bundled on their backs or toddlers clutched tight to their chests. Eyes squinting into the bright winter sunlight, they are streaming in from all points of the compass towards the vast encampment.

  A sense of frantic anticipation and complete exhilaration unites them. As it does so, the unending torrent of pilgrims sets eyes on the glinting waters. It is the point where their journey ends just as it begins.

  This is the greatest gathering in human history, a multitude of one hundred million souls. They’ve come to the Sangam, the confluence point where the Subcontinent’s two holiest rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna, converge, at Prayag, outside Allahabad in northern India.

  Once every 144 years a Maha Kumbh Mela takes place, Hinduism’s vast ritualistic cleansing of souls. Translating as ‘The Great Festival of the Urn’, the last time it took place, Queen Victoria was on the British throne.

  The India that usually makes the headlines is the one abundant with call centres and Rolls-Royce dealerships, and with skyscrapers that reach high above the landscapes of interminable urban sprawl. It’s the India of Bollywood Bling and of ubiquitous shopping malls, of ritzy brand names, and of the super-rich who can’t get enough of all the über-kitsch.

  Dedicated to wealth creation, this newfangled India of the twenty-first century defies logic just as it exceeds expectation. It may be a realm that makes the Occidental world drool with envy, but it’s only a small fragment of what’s really going on.

  Travel through the Indian Subcontinent and you quickly grasp that this is a land with its feet rooted firmly on the ground. The heads of the jet-set oligarchs may be in the clouds, but the majority of rank-and-file Indians have no doubt who they are, and where they’ve come from. Hailing from villages and small towns, the silent majority may aspire to gaining wealth, too, but what’s central to their lives is something that runs far deeper.

  Faith.

  And to most of them there’s almost nothing in the ancient spiritual machinery of Mother India quite so auspicious as the Kumbh Mela. An immense cosmic counterbalance, an Indian Woodstock devoted to peace and love, it’s the distilled essence of the subcontinent.

  Pass a few days at the Mela’s world within a world and you can’t help but be sucked into it and swept along. As you learn to block out the ubiquitous hum of background noise, you begin to piece together the fragments that form the grand mosaic that is the Kumbh.

  I first heard of it as a student backpacking around West Bengal twenty-five yea
rs ago. I was taking refuge from the monsoon under a railway bridge. Already sheltering there was a sadhu, who was travelling by foot. He was naked, covered in ash, with wizened limbs and an intense stare that has stuck in my mind ever since.

  As the rain began to fall all the harder, he suddenly grabbed my arm.

  ‘I will not get there in time!’ he exclaimed anxiously.

  ‘Get where?’

  ‘To the Kumbh Mela!’

  I asked him what it was.

  ‘It is the union of the sky, the sun and the moon,’ he said.

  Unable to forget the holy man’s words, I’ve often wondered if he did make it in time. Had he missed it, there would have been a lengthy wait for the next one, not to mention a long walk home to West Bengal.

  Entangled in the astrological sequence of auspicious timings, the Kumbh Mela is held in one of four cities in strict rotation once every three years – at Nasik, Haridwar, Ujjain, and Prayag, where this year’s festival was held. The locations of the melas are said to be points at which droplets of Amrit, the Elixir of Immortality, were spilt in antiquity by the celestial Garuda bird.

  Once every twelve years a great Kumbh Mela takes place, when the propitious timing is amplified many thousands of times over. And, in keeping with the lunar cycles, every twelfth great Kumbh Mela is the ‘Maha’ – held ever 144 years.

  Remembering the naked sadhu taking refuge with me under the railway bridge, and quite certain I wouldn’t be here for the next one, I pledged to journey to Allahabad myself, to attend the Maha Kumbh Mela.

  As someone well-used to the grand scale of India, I assumed deep down that the festival would be nothing more than a whole lot of people whipped up into a spiritual frenzy. But the days and nights I spent there changed the way I view the Subcontinent, and even the way I regard my fellow Man. A primal human experience, it defied the complexities of contemporary life, while holding up a mirror to our collective souls.