All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (23 page)

‘Thought is necessary, yes. But let the mind be the servant! Beyond thought, you will find that there is something capable of watching thought arise!’ He chuckled. ‘This is the Witness, the one who sees. This Witness is eternal and without form. When this body dies,’ he patted his arms and chest forcefully, ‘it will continue on.’

Feeling rather like the lectured novice in some martial arts epic, I nodded once more, and the conversation soon turned to other things. But what he’d said stayed with me. At the heart of mystical experience was a state of consciousness which, though the different faiths call it by different names, was the highest goal of a human life. Albert Einstein, that most mystically inclined of modern scientists, seemed to capture it precisely in a letter he wrote to the Queen of Belgium in 1939:

‘There are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable. Life and earth flow into one and there is neither evolution nor destiny, only being.’

From Varanasi, I took a night train to Delhi, where I intended to begin my investigations into the ways India’s second largest faith approaches mystical experience. In the heart of Nizammudin, Delhi’s Muslim quarter, a Sufi shrine attracts thousands of devotees daily. A photographer friend of mine who lives in Delhi, Hindu himself, had extolled its virtues as one of the most spiritually vibrant places in India. It would be one more glimpse into the magical; one more strand of a web which seemed, at its heart, to go beyond religion entirely.

Over the last months I’d had brief moments of euphoria, but more frequent moments of despair. I’d been piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of infinite complexity, scrabbling around in the dust for pieces which would break off, forming several more, before succumbing to any grand design. And yet at last I had begun to see the true object of my quest. Everything I’d done had been necessary to get this far, the mistakes as well as the successes. Every small conversation in India, every wrong turn, was pointing me, subtly, in the direction of something which lay not in the puzzle at all, but beneath the puzzle, a thing without form and yet which linked all the forms, a sub-surface unity. As the train rocked along its tracks, I turned over in my bunk and my mind, if only for a moment, fell absolutely silent.

Amongst the Sufis

If the modern world is experiencing a collective re-enchantment, then there can be few things more illustrative of that fact than the astonishing renaissance of interest in the poet Rumi. During the 1990s a number of articles proclaimed him the most popular poet in the world, and a translation of his works in America sold half a million copies: extraordinary figures for any poet, placing him second only to Shakespeare.

But who was Mawl
ā
n
ā
Jal
ā
l al-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī (or Rumi, because of the many years he lived in the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm, in Asia Minor)? And why should a Muslim poet of the thirteenth century continue to speak with such intelligibility to the world seven centuries after his death? Donna Karan has used recitations of his poetry as a soundtrack to her catwalk shows, while Hollywood director Oliver Stone is reputedly keen to make a biopic of the mystic’s life.

All of this would be extraordinary in the best of times. But that Rumi’s popularity should soar in a post-9/11 world says more still. He was born in Afghanistan, then in the eastern territories of ancient Persia, and his poems are almost exclusively focused on our human relationship with God. On the face of it this should make him almost unsellable, and yet, if anything, his poetry became more popular
after
the destruction of the Twin Towers. Something in the verses transcends all creeds, but more than that, it offers a path to understanding mystical experience, with its clear metaphors of transcendence. I loved them from the first.

My own introduction to Rumi came during my university years, when I discovered a translation by Coleman Barks in a second-hand bookshop. The poem that caught my eye flipped my expectations like a kind of judo hold. I may even have checked the back cover again, just to confirm that this was indeed an Islamic mystic writing the better part of a millennium ago. It sounded absolutely contemporary, speaking directly of my own life. Beyond the aesthetic experience, there were gleaming insights into the spiritual process: how to see things as they really
are
.

Soul drunk, body ruined, these two

sit helpless in a wrecked wagon.

Neither knows how to fix it.

And my heart, I’d say it was more

like a donkey sunk in a mudhole,

struggling and miring deeper.

But listen to me: for one moment,

quit being sad. Hear blessings

dropping their blossoms

around you. God.

I bought the book and soon learned that Rumi was a Sufi and that Sufism was the mystical branch of Islam. Again this confounded my expectations: I hadn’t known that Islam, with its emphasis on the words of the Prophet, allowed for mysticism. ‘Sufi’, I discovered, was the word given to the early Muslim ascetics, because of the simple cloaks they wore, made of
şūf
or wool. Like the Hindu yogis, they felt that paradise could be experienced in the midst of life, by entering a divine state. They sought to experience
fitra
– meaning ‘innate human nature’ – a state of complete unity with the world around them, and therefore with Allah. It all sounded remarkably like ‘Buddha nature’ or
moksha
, as well as suggesting parallels to the Quaker belief in the ‘inner light’ of the soul.

Rumi quickly became a part of my life, and his books frequent stowaways in my backpack. His mystical journey, above all, was expressed in the form of love. Where Buddha talked of embracing emptiness, Rumi talked of ‘the beloved’ or ‘the friend’. Whereas Buddhism can occasionally appear daunting to an outsider, Sufism is readily accessible to all. Rumi’s poems often compare the relationship of the seeker to God with that of a lover, and are concerned, above all, with opening the heart.

Inside this new love, die

Your way begins on the other side

Become the sky

Take an axe to the prison wall

Escape

En route through modern Delhi by rickshaw, I saw the signs of the new India everywhere. On the edge of Khan market, a gleaming Barista coffee shop, India’s answer to Starbucks, offered frothy cappuccino to Delhi’s middle classes for approximately fifteen times the price of a roadside chai. Four-hundred-year-old minarets protruded above serpentine flyovers, polished SUVs roared past men on juddering bicycles. In the papers that week had been news that Delhi was to rid itself of its traditional vendors of street food, now considered ‘unhygienic’: an act which was to put an estimated million people out of work. Thousands of
jhuggis
(slum houses) were being bulldozed along the Yamuna Pushta (a stretch of land along the River Yamuna that trickles through Delhi), leaving an estimated 100,000 people homeless.

With the Commonwealth Games approaching in 2010, Delhi is anxious to promote a new image of India to the world, and the papers are full of homilies by politicians on the ‘world-class’ city they are creating from the ashes. Few articles, however, address the human cost of this modernisation or consider the catastrophic effects of the changes on the city’s poor – who number a third of the total population. One government plan proposed to jail the city’s beggars for the duration of the Games, so that foreign visitors are not unduly distressed.

Entering Delhi’s Old Quarter, one is – for now at least – returned to an older mode of being. Here there are no shopping malls or multiplexes, but an ancient, distinctly Eastern city, full of the sights and sounds of a bygone world. It’s a frenzied mass of bazaars, open-air butchers, hand-painted Bollywood posters, sweating bodies, peripatetic farmyard animals and monkeys, as well as startling olfactory delights and disasters.

For a long time, it’s been my favourite part of the city. As with much of the old world, it reveals its secrets warily. If the new world gives everything away in a glance, the former works in subtleties and shadings, demanding a little trust before opening its arms. One can wander for an hour in the shadowy back streets subsumed in grime, before glimpsing, in a beam of sunlight, a mother washing her child, a man throwing offal to a flock of vultures, or a greybeard tracing his forefinger over the elegant gilt lettering of a Koran.

On this morning I walked for some time, beginning at a stand of gnarled trees in Nizammudin east, then proceeding through an area which appeared increasingly at odds with the city I had come from. By my guesthouse near Connaught Circus, a gated community protects its inhabitants from the encroachments, visible or psychological, of the Indian poor. Here the medieval lanes kept no one out; its children spun wooden tops under a pacific sky, and its food was butchered, cooked and, by the look of things, sometimes reared, in the streets where people lived.

Not far from the shrine, the roadside stalls began to take on more of a devotional aspect: CDs of
qawwali
(Sufi devotional music), handfuls of fragrant rose petals, technicolour icons of Saint Hazrat Nizammudin, books, video cassettes, bundles of heady incense and
chadurs
– cloths with which to cover one’s head respectfully. Some stallholders offer nothing but a series of empty boxes. For a nominal fee one can leave one’s shoes in safe keeping, before continuing to the shrine barefoot. I liked these: as business plans go, an empty box seems like a stroke of genius indeed.

At last, after moving through a closed bazaar, I stepped out into the courtyard of a tomb. In an instant, the visceral scenes of the Old Quarter were behind me, and I felt myself serene and in a place of great devotion. This was the
dargah
– the tomb of a Muslim saint, derived from a Persian word which can mean, among other uses, ‘portal’ or ‘threshold’. That translation said a lot about the reasons so many people were here. They were here to seek remedy for their problems, material as well as spiritual, and they believed that beneath the flower-strewn marble there remained some spirit or essence of the great saint which would hear their prayers.

As is so often the case in Indian holy places, I was promptly approached by a devotee, eager to know why a foreigner was investigating such a holy place. Interestingly, I noted that I wasn’t asked what my religion was, which is unusual in India: Nizammudin embraces all.

Wasi was perhaps about thirty, with flashing green eyes, a charcoal-grey jellaba and one of the loudest and most obnoxious ring tones I’ve ever heard on a telephone. As it rang for the second time, pumping the soundtrack to
Salaam Namaste
, that year’s Bollywood hit, across the complex, he grinned sheepishly and silenced the machine with a fleshy finger.

‘
Salaam Namaste
,’ I said. ‘I recognise that music.’

His face lit up in amazement. ‘That film is
too
good!’ he said. ‘How many times have you seen it?’

I confessed, sheepishly, that I hadn’t seen it at all, but that my landlord’s daughter in Varanasi had played the soundtrack so recurrently I’d been forced to ask what it was.

Wasi told me a little of his life. He was the son of a local merchant and would one day inherit two successful shops. He liked nightclubs and fast motorbikes, but there was also another side to him, one which felt the inexorable pull of God.