Mystical Powers | Kim Farleigh

After weeks of beggars, intruders and pestering merchants harassing us, we booked into a five-star hotel. Being white seemingly implied having unfathomable talents, such was the furore created just by wandering in Rajasthan. Was I Christ and didn’t know it?A man stopped us near the hotel, his “serenity” indicating mystical powers.

“I see futures,” he declared.

His crimson turban sat above dreamy eyes that beamed with supreme knowledge. People, rickshaws, cars, bikes, elephants and horse-drawn carts fled by us, mayhem emphasising the clairvoyant’s “tranquillity.”

Stacked cardboard covered scurrying men’s bent backs, their stressed eyes dense with effort. They knew their futures.

“I, too, read futures,” I said, my fingers twirling in spellbinding convolutions; “for I’m Harold Arthur William George Christ, nephew of Jesus. Call me Harry.”

Our facing eyes beamed “wisdom”; strange: he who read futures preferred the streets and not government policy-making or gambling.

He grinned. “Wisdom” left his eyes.

“I know all,” I continued. “Nothing eludes me. So NASA thought I was mad when I declared my unearthly brilliance to them; anyone can have a bad day, even H. A. W. G. Christ, nephew of Jesus, Harry of North-East Nazareth, H. A. W. G of B for Bethlehem, The Jaw of Jerusalem, The Garrulous Gifted Gab of Galilee.”

A flashing smile ignited his face.

“You shall,” I predicted, “fool idiots who sit with closed eyes during sunsets before men whose beards could cover basketball courts and whose safron-coloured apparel drips with sublimity’s elixir. But don’t leave that engineering course, whatever you do.”

His face erupted with boyish dimples. Pleased iris gleams had wiped out “wisdom”.

“Thank you for your insight, oh great one,” he said.

His actually was full of tranquillity, real tranquillity.

“That’s two rupees,” I replied. “Credit cards aren’t accepted. Especially American Express.”

We smiled at each other’s cynicism.

He laughed when I asked: “A fine line separates entertainment and begging. What side are you on?”

Tim and I entered that five-star hotel. Some foreigners pursue “total consciousness” in India, Indians with “total consciousness” benefitting from foreign unconsciousness.

The hotel’s café’s garden’s greenery contained red, white and orange flowers; the red epaulettes on the silver-tray-carrying, impeccably-polite, white-coated waiters’ shoulders flashed against green, the garden an escape from Rajasthan’s reality.

We sat on red, satin cushions on white chairs. My newfound guruhood caused: “When time’s forelock kisses truth’s aardvark and veracity’s river flows into verisimilitude’s well, then, and only then, will floodlight audacity illuminate the sledgehammers of brutality to unleash the trapped wings of Shakespearean pterodactyls.”

My “recondite gravity” made Tim’s blue eyes shivered joyfully. Being “the conduit of profound insights”, I continued: “When dead racehorses’ kneecaps have ascended into paradise’s pastures and the hair dryers of peace have boiled the lakes of turtle juice that ripple between the ice-cream mountains of crystalline purity on the planet Zorbic, then, and only then, will the B-52’s of bliss bomb the trenches of puerile negativity, allowing the rising dust clouds of benevolence to dilute the raging mists of absurdity.”

The garden’s peace ensured that incomprehensibility would reign.

“And when insight’s raindrops dampen the brooding forests of pessimism, making the leaves of perspicacity gleam with the enlivening freshness of jewelled brilliance, then, and only then, will eternity’s angels descend from vaporous vitality to carry the enlightened up to the blessed kingdom of everlasting orgasms that floats amid the palm-fringed islands of supreme consciousness.”

I was irrepressible: “And when the dolphins of sleek commentary unite to unplug the drains of murky seediness and the eagles of swift transitions swoop to capture the brain-dead rodents of numbing ideas, then, and only then, will H. A. W. G. Christ tell his illustrious uncle to stop shagging the sky-bound sluts of eternal screwing and get his lazy arse back down here to fix this mess.”

A blonde, long-haired beggar, wearing loose, cotton pants, approached us. His hippy appearance ignited our prejudices. We had seen many red-forehead-dotted foreigners hoping ambition was frivolous, this firing our already healthy cynicism.

When this seventies throwback said he didn’t have the cash to leave India, that he had spent all his money in the six months he’d been there, Tim said: “Get a job.”

Disgust replaced flippancy, cynicism, constant, bracing all sensations.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Bosnia.”

“Good luck.”

His smiled contained droll resignation. He may have been a NGO volunteer, free food and accommodation. He looked clean. He was obviously washing. He approached another table.

“Incredible,” Tim said. “He could work in a restaurant.”

The people at that other table shook their heads.

“Prosperity’s cow is only milked by industry’s humble hands,” I said, “and not by fantasy’s flighty fingers.”

Tim grinned. Unreal perceptions delighted him.

“It’s amazing they let him in here,” he said.

“The waiters get a percentage,” I replied. “If people complain, the waiters say, with clairvoyant consciousness, ‘We can’t oppress the downtrodden,’ and the guests think: ‘True,’ so they give the time-travelling hippie money; twenty percent goes to the waiters.”

Tim’s eyes shone happily.

“We’ve underestimated his entrepreneurial skills,” I said. “The guests help another person, rare for five-star-hotel occupiers, the waiters supplement their incomes and the Bosnian avoids the rat-infested streets. Everyone’s a winner.”

I grinned before sipping my gin and tonic.

“Like nature,” I added, “each species maintains the ecosystem. Remove one element and the lot collapses.”

Tim’s guffawing rebounded off the surrounding sunlit trees, his sapphire irises illuminated by my sardonicism.

“The Bosnian has overstayed his visa,” I continued, “because he discovered he’s useful. After years of pointless hippydom, when ambition was irrelevant and serenity came by thanking the birds for existing, discovering he had a purpose must have come as quite a shock to him.”

Tim’s laughter caused heads to turn, one a sunglasses head, Indian and suave, made for luxury. No sublime philosophies for that head.

Outside, a legless man on a skateboard was begging at traffic lights; men were carrying heavy loads on their backs, like humanoid ants, their brown eyes hard with strain; wiry men, with thin, muscular legs, were riding rickshaws through fumes heaved out without restriction.

Chuckling Tim sipped his Bacardi and Coke, the perfect audience for sarcasm. He loved disrespect towards idiocies, idiocies gold in his appreciation mine. One of his MBA friends had “no respect for anyone with an IQ of 130 or less.” They admired the “switched on.” The Bosnian appeared as “switched on” as an amoeba. Tim believed that insulted amoebas.

We were in India in February 1992. Years later, I realised the Bosnian was probably avoiding Bosnia. In 1995, a Bosnian, who made the last flight out of Sarajevo in April 92, told me his school friends had been killed. I had seen brawls between Yugoslavs in Australia during the 1970’s, war clearly inevitable.

Youth’s happy cynicism had stopped us from understanding the Bosnian’s droll resignation. Maybe the Bosnian thought: If only you knew. Time teaches that conclusions need full information.

I asked the clairvoyant which people believed he had special powers; he said: “Miracle-hunting Americans dreaming of positive, eternal certainty.”

“Do you feel guilty about conning them?” I asked.

“No. They leave happy and the money’s nothing to them. They’ve got something miraculous to tell their church groups, which is why they come here. The intellectual damage has been done anyway. Sorry for having associated you with them.”

His clear-headed philosophy earned him two unexpected rupees.

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Kim Farleigh has worked for aid agencies in three conflicts: Kosovo, Iraq and Palestine. He takes risks to get the experience required for writing. He likes fine wine, art, photography and bullfighting, which probably explains why this Australian lives in Madrid; although he wouldn’t say no to living in a French château. 121 of his stories have been accepted by 79 different magazines.