Magicians Are Among Us

My mother can be a funny woman sometimes. Those times, she goes to psychics and different sorts of magicians to see where our family’s life is going and how to make it better. She jumps sometimes from one psychic to another, when the previous one’s statements don’t turn out to be true or when the new one says something fresh and interesting. Right before I left for college she took me to one of them.

He lived in a small house, right outside the town of Osh, in an Uzbek neighborhood, mahalla. It was in the evening and we had to sit on the bench by the door, covered under yet green grape tree. On the bench with us there was a elderly Uzbek woman with a little boy. He apparently feel off a horse and she needed to consult the magician about the demons that made him fall. There was also a large businessman, his SUV parked outside, who kept checking something on his cellphone.

I had an odd feeling about all of that. At the beginning I wanted to laugh but then I didn’t want to disappoint my mother. Confronting our parents is not something that we do in our family.

We entered the house, it had a smell of a very old carpet and were asked to sit on the blanket on the floor. An old man, bald, much like any other man his age in Osh came in, talked quietly to my mother first and then turned to me.

“There are a lot of dark powers waiting for you in America,” he said to me. “People are jealous here, jealousy creates demons in people.”

I nodded and then he performed a ritual. He told me to lie on the floor and tuck up t-shirt. Then he got a piece of paper and placed it on my stomach. He a small container of water that he started saying things to. He then lifted the container above my body, did a couple of circles and dropped a couple of drops on the paper. Throughout all this my mother looked extremely serious and concentrated.

The guy folded the piece of paper, wrote something on it, folded it and gave it to me.

“This should keep you safe from the demons,” he said.

My mother thanked him, as if he just cut my appendix off with that magic and gave him a five hundred som bill (somewhere around $15). He tried to to resist it, shaking his head and looking down, but took the bill nonetheless and put it in his pocket.

My mother took that piece of paper later that night and a small leather bag for it with a rope to put around my neck.

Maybe it would have worked, if I actually believed in this stuff.

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