Sorcerer's Apprentice
An Incredible Journey into the World of India's Godmen
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Sorcerer’s Apprentice is the amazing story of Shah’s apprenticeship to one of India’s master conjurers, Hakim Feroze, and his initiation into the brotherhood of Indian godmen. Told with self-deprecating wit, panache, and an eye for the outlandish, it is an account of a magical journey across India. Feroze teaches the author the basics of his craft, such as sleights of hand, immersing his hands in boiling oil and lead, and—Aaron’s old trick from the Bible—turning a rod into a serpent.
To complete his training and prove himself, he is sent on a quest to discover the ways illusion is manifested in every corner of the subcontinent. Saddled with a hilarious sidekick and guide he calls the Trickster, Shah travels from Calcutta to Madras, from Bangalore to Bombay. Even as he recounts the most miraculous and bizarre feats of the sadhus, sages, sorcerers, avatars, fortune- tellers, healers, hypnotists, and humbugs whom he encounters, he reveals—and admires—the imagination and resourcefulness ordinary Indians deploy in order to survive. In this incredible book, Tahir Shah lifts the veil on the East’s most puzzling miracles and exposes a side of India that most never imagine exists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The child of Afghan parents living in England, Shah (Beyond the Devil's Teeth: Journeys in Gondwanaland) first witnessed magic at age 11, when an Indian Pashtun named Hafiz Jan visited. Twenty years later, he travels to India to learn the magician's trade from the Pashtun. Hafiz Jan sends Shah to Calcutta to learn from his teacher, a magician named Hakim Feroze, who subjects his new apprentice to tortuous physical and mental exercises before casting him out into the streets to make note of whatever oddities he encounters. Shah learns trade secrets of hangmen and gold scroungers, eats in a restaurant that serves dishes prepared from refuse, visits a skeleton-processing factory, watches a psychic surgeon "operate." Then, accompanied by a 12-year-old scam artist he describes as "a walking crime wave," he travels through India meeting sages, sorcerers, astrologers, mystics, healers, miracle workers and other brokers of the supernatural, including a medium who reads fortunes in eyeballs, a chemist who turns drinking water into petrol and a guru named Sri Gobind who causes Easter eggs to emerge from his ear, candles to ignite spontaneously and flowers to bow to him. Unlike most magicians, Shah reveals the secrets chemicals, props, sleight-of-hand and dozens of tricks e.g., Sri Gobind's flowers perform thanks to chloroform and his symbols of "new life and purity" are Safeway's expired chocolate Easter eggs. Despite an unconvincingly tidy final twist, Shah's strange focus and vivid, lurid and amusing descriptions distinguish this travelogue from the crowd. Photos not seen by PW.
