The Great Mangal

Dear dedicated reader,


“Madam!” An excited Hitesh drew my attention over to his bench during a writing assignment in 9D. “Are you going to see the magic show?” He asked me in Hindi, with a big smile.

“Yes,” I answered, enforcing my English only class policy. “Are you?” The students had to pay 10 rupees if they wanted to see the show, so not all the students could go.

“Yes!” He said, raising his eyebrows and wiggling his head with excitement. He could barely sit still.

As soon as I begin to think that life is going to get boring here, something new happens. With yoga class over, I was in need of some new entertainment. Lucky for me, Mangal the Great must have heard my cry.

After lunch, I walked over the school auditorium, a term I use loosely as it is really just a large, stone building with an empty inside and a wooden platform for a stage. There are some stacked plastic chairs in the back for teachers. Outside, I could see the mountains and mountains of discarded shoes that indicated the students were inside, already seated.

As I entered the hall, I was first impressed by the sheer number of students that were able to fit on the floor. The entire 8th, 9th, and 10th grades had been brought in and were sitting practically in each other’s laps on a large tarp which covered the floor of the hall. I scanned across the black haired heads on the boys’ side for Hitesh. Finally I saw him, seated in the second row of boys, chatting excitedly with the other boys while waiting for the multicolored curtain which had been erected and hung across to hide the staging area.

I took a seat in one of the cream colored plastic chairs provided for the secondary teachers in the back. I had no class until the last period of the day, so I settled in, feeling excited to watch the show.

The music started and the students’ began to clap in time: I laughed out loud. The song they were clapping to was the Michael Jackson hit, ‘Thriller’.

There was a sound of someone speaking Gujarati into an echo-ey microphone and suddenly the curtain was pulled to the side, revealing a mustachioed man with shoulder length hair striding on to the stage in a full-body glittering sequined cowboy suit, smoking a cigarette.

“NAMASKAR!” The man boomed into the microphone (WELCOME!) in between puffs of his cigarette. He followed this with a number of other greetings that I couldn’t understand. He took a long puff and then (to my relief) threw away his cigarette.

“Well, that was hardly appropriate,” I thought as I eyed the hundreds of impressionable young students in front of me.

Turning back to the stage, however, I saw to my confusion that he was still smoking. I watched as took a long, dramatic puff and then, threw away his cigarette yet again, only to have it reappear in his hand, lit, a moment later. This cycle continued five or six times and each time the cigarette’s reappearance was greeted with loud cheers from the students, particularly the boys. The hall filled with the stink of his cigarette, and that was when I realized he wasn’t the only one smoking. His set up crew, lounging on the side, was also smoking and expelling each puff towards the crowd of delighted children.

Having completed this trick, the Great Mangal uttered a few comic words that drew hearty laughs from the students and teachers as the music restarted. As the tune wafted through the air and the students started to clap again, I realized, with some delight, that this time it was Macarena.

Mangal and his merry crew continued to amaze through producing plastic flowers out of jars, boxes and other assorted containers, pulling a rabbit rather fiercely out a hat by the ears, throwing a dove around the stage (and one time missing and throwing it into the waiting arms of a boy in the first row by accident). His assistants were both young men and young women clad in messy jeans and t-shirts, all of whom could have used a little coaching on adequate stage presence.

The person from whom they should learn was one of their band itself: a chubby, mulleted man wearing a sleeveless black sequined top and loose green pants who took every possible opportunity to make his way to the front of the stage and thrust his pelvis in a robotic, strange imitation of dancing out at the audience. The language barrier kept me from enjoying the cheap jokes of most of the show, but at these moments I laughed along with the rest of the crowd.

Although his tricks were standard, the students seemed to enjoy the show very much. Afterwards, I asked Hitesh which was his favorite trick.

“Cigarette! Cigarette!” he shouted.

Lovely.

Best,
Cat