By Malcolm MacPherson
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
What would a visit to India be without an encounter with a snake charmer? We were asking ourselves this same question almost as soon as we arrived. In the weeks that followed we saw sad-faced sloth bears dancing in the dirt on the road to Fatepur Sikri. We saw bizarre bazaars and little old men with matchstick legs who were dressed in white from pate to toe and walking the roads with paper tissues over their mouths so as not to inhale bugs, the death of even a tiny gnat being a dreadful sacrilege in their Jain faith. We saw lepers galore, even an albino one once, and unfortunate people who have to shill their deformities to get by. We met one very oily carpet salesmen in Rajasthan and as many slick hawkers in as many places as there are trinkets to sell. But we had not yet seen a single charmer.
Our guidebook did not mention them. I wondered if, perhaps, they had passed out of fashion in turn-of-millennium India. When I last visited here forty years ago, they were itinerant and nearly ubiquitous. Back then, the mother of the family whom I lived with in Madras one morning invited one of these traveling charmers up to the front porch to perform. He carried his assistants in two rather large round wicker baskets. He pulled out a pipe made of a dried tropical gourd and crossed his legs in the gravel of the circular driveway, then popped off the top of a basket and started to blow. An evil sound strained itself through the end of his pipe—as annoying to me as apparently it was to his basket of King cobras. Right away they stuck up their heads to see what the racket was about, then fanned their hoods and swayed back and forth like hissing river reeds. The charmer was wearing dark glasses, I recall now, and looked like a Beatnik with a basket instead of a bongo drum. He had very little to offer by way of humor, as I recall, but that's the way it clearly was among the snake charming class in those bygone days.
When the time came to pay him for his services, his complaints were as loud as his pipe music. He shouted curses in Telegu at my hostess, the wonderful Mrs. Babu, and demanded more than she was willing to pay. Meanwhile, to our delight and utter fascination, the charmer's snakes used this disagreement as a diversion to escape from the theatrical life and go back to nature. They slithered into a neighboring garden. One large and clearly addled cobra nipped up on the porch where I was sitting, requiring me to quickly use my chair as a step stool. We all laughed nervously as we watched the charmer sputter and curse, bent over in the bushes chasing after his snakes.
On this trip, Molly and Fraser had heard me talking about snake charmers and rightly wanted to see one themselves. But where were they to be found? They are not advertised in the Yellow Pages, and concierges of hotels simply rolled their heads in reply when asked about them. I had already warned Molly and Fraser not to set their hearts on seeing fakirs climbing hemp ropes in thin air or swamis lying on beds of needle-sharp nails or hot glowing coals. We had all but lost hope of spotting a charmer, when on a sultry afternoon last week, we turned a street corner in Cochin, just down the lane from a visit to the oldest synagogue in the world outside of Israel, and from near a banyan tree the telltale whine of a charmer's pipe rode the still air.
We followed the sound. Money was not an issue. Please just charm us with your snakes, Oh Charmer of Snakes, we thought. Which was just what he did. Dressed in a dirty dhoti, he was skinny and had wrinkled dark skin and hawkish eyes and legs that looked too frail to support him. By his side, a furry mongoose tugged on a string attached to a stick that had been stuck in the soft dirt. The charmer knew aficionados of his calling when he saw them. Right away he asked us if we cared to pay 200 Rupees to see his mongoose fight a cobra. The offer was tempting, but we declined, out of sympathy for the cobra, which always takes the short end in these encounters. Then the charmer began to play his flute.
Three king cobras competed for attention in their baskets. Once the top of the basket was laid aside, they came out willingly and blinked in the sharp light as they swayed back and forth, now and then lunging at the charmer and his mesmerizing pipe. I hoped their fangs were removed. Fraser stood well back from the action, and Molly looked on, disgusted. I, of course, was right back in my element and happy as I could be. The snakes did what they were paid to do, the charmer too, and all too soon, the wicker top was plopped on the snakes' heads, pushing them back where they could have a nice nap in the shade.
"That's it?" the expression on Fraser's face asked. Weeks earlier in Jaipur, he and I had watched a young girl turn herself into a snake, before our eyes. That's the truth. If smoke and mirrors were used I do not know. I saw only a girl turn herself into a black snake with a little girl's head. We were definitely wowed, and by comparison the charmer at our feet was thin gruel.
Molly looked from the charmer to me, with a sidelong glance, as if I had committed a fraud. "Jeez, where's the charm?" she wanted to know.
Maybe that's the reason why so few of the charming ilk is afoot in India these days. The younger generation wants more than a mere cobra in a basket to charm them. I suppose Molly's generation wants… Well, I can't imagine what. But I still contend that no visit to India can be considered complete without at least one basket of swaying cobras and a man with an off-key flute.
© 2001 Newsweek