Black Magic in Paradise

The Maldives, an archipelago of nearly two thousand coral islands scattered across the Indian Ocean like so many grains of sand, have always seemed surreal. Almost too small to notice, their collective land area is a negligible three hundred square kilometres, and few individual islands are more than a short stroll across. Low-lying, covered in dense thickets of coconut palm, they are of an incomparable beauty, yet strangely unsettling. Like outposts of another world, pristine--but unsuitable for man.

Certainly the Maldives have always been a menace to mariners. Surrounded by massive banks of coral reef and all but invisible from more than a few hundred metres, the archipelago forms a great, semi-submerged shoal seven hundred kilometres from north to south, ready to tear the bottom out of any ship, from outrigger to supertanker, unlucky enough to run aground. Yet, just scant metres from the shallow waters of the treacherous reef, the deep abyss, beyond all hope. No wonder ancient mariners steered well clear, whilst medieval maps portrayed the islands as threatening ranks of shark-like teeth.

It is extraordinary, then, that the Maldives, alone of all the remote Indian Ocean archipelagos, have been settled for more than two millennia. When Western sailors first came upon the Seychelles, the Chagos Archipelago, the Cocos-Keeling Islands, even the Mascarenes, they found them quite uninhabited. Not so the Maldives. Here were an ancient people, small, dark-skinned, sophisticated yet circumspect, making a living by selling dried fish, coconut-fibre rope and tiny white cowry shells--the latter, in pre-modern times, a much-valued unit of exchange from the high mountain deserts of Tibet to the wastes of Mali and Mauritania.

When, exactly, the Maldives were first settled, and by whom, remains a matter of conjecture. Historians suggest that the first islanders may have been relatives of the Veddah aborigines of Sri Lanka, subsequently subsumed in a wave of Indo-European migration from the Indian mainland more than two thousand years ago. When Harry Charles Purvis Bell, Director of the Archaeological Survey of Ceylon, first began investigating the islands more than a century ago, he found an Indo-European people speaking a language closely related to Sinhalese, but written in a script unique to the Maldives and based on an unlikely but scientific system of Arabic numerals.

Mystified but fascinated, Bell returned again and again to the Maldives, making the unravelling of their history a great part of his life's work. The islanders--Muslims all, from the Sultan downwards--showed him every kindness and consideration, but there were some areas they would not--dared not--broach. Some islands were out of bounds at night, others objects of dread even at high noon. Why? Because they were haunted, the nervous islanders explained. But haunted by what, precisely? For thirty years Bell scratched and scraped, both literally and figuratively, at the enigma of the forbidden islands before he discovered the truth. The Maldives, like the Maldivian people themselves, were haunted by the ghosts of their own past.

It was in Bell's footsteps, in search of the mysterious side of these magical islands, that I set out for Addu Atoll, in the far south of the archipelago, some years ago. Bell had shown beyond all doubt that the islanders had once been Buddhist. The strange, tumuli-like mounds which dotted some of the more remote islands--especially in the south--had long since been revealed as stupas, reliquaries for Buddha artefacts and, mysteriously, a Roman coin--a denarius of Caius Vibius Pansa--dating from 90 BC.

The legend of the conversion of the islanders to Islam is well known, having been recorded by Ibn Battuta, the "Traveller of Islam", as early as 1340 AD. According to Ibn Battuta--and to many islanders today--the sea off Male, the king's island, was haunted by an evil spirit of great power which demanded the regular sacrifice of young virgins. These unfortunates were taken and left tied to a stake by the shore, only to be discovered ravaged and dead in the pale light of dawn. The monster--seen by Ibn Battuta, who records: 'I looked out to sea, and there was something like a great ship, which seemed as though it were full of lamps and torches'--was only driven off when a passing Muslim mendicant volunteered to be tied to the stake in place of a young girl. In the morning the terrified islanders went to the sea shore expecting, as usual, to retrieve a corpse. Instead, to their astonishment, they found the traveller still alive, reciting verses from the Qur'an. "And so the king and all his subjects converted to Islam". Such, at least, is the legend.

It's easy enough to read the facts behind this event when the islanders' name for the sea demon--Budkhanah, a Persian derivative of the name Buddha--is taken into consideration. In recent years this has become still more true, as archaic copper-plate grants have been unearthed, describing Islam's spread to the southern atolls and the gradual extinction of Buddhism. In time the entire archipelago converted, and, as the last followers of the Buddha concealed their venerated images in sand-buried stupas, these lost outposts of the faith of Gautama became forbidden places; haunted indeed--but by the ghost of the islanders' past religion rather than by evil spirits.

And yet, at night--when the darkness can be near total, dispelled on the outer islands by the narrow flicker of a coconut-oil lamp or, in the vast uninhabited reaches of reef and palm, by no more than the seaborn phosphorescence of a billion algae--it is easy to believe the islands haunted. This much became apparent as we sailed south in a creaking wooden dhoni, the universal ferryboat of the Maldives--a mere cockle-shell, wind-driven, no more than fifteen metres long.

My travelling companions on the voyage south were my wife and co-researcher Fawzia Ali, and Ismail Yusoof, an educated and engaging Maldivian with a teaching diploma from the United Kingdom. Ismail was happy to agree with Bell's interpretation of the Maldives' past history. Nevertheless, he assured me, no Maldivian, himself included, would voluntarily stay alone on such an island - any island - by night. Not because of the buried stupas, but for fear of something older, more primal, and with more potential for malevolence than the ghosts of religion past. Knowledge of this force was limited to the islanders, and amongst them only certain initiates - known as fanditavaria - fully understood its workings. Ismail believed implicitly in fandita, which he described as "White Magic", and promised to introduce me to a powerful fanditavaria on our arrival at Addu, an offer which I was pleased to accept.

What Ismail failed to mention and, when asked, was loathe to discuss, was the equal and opposite downside of fandita, known in Maldivian as sihuru, which may be loosely translated as "Black Magic". When pressed, he allowed that such a thing had once existed, but sorcery was now a thing of the past, its practice forbidden by law, its evil dissipated by Islam. So why wouldn't he stay on an uninhabited island by night? Ismail, unamused, would not answer. Besides, where had I learned of sihuru? It was a secret, privileged knowledge. Only islanders knew about it!

In fact I owed my very limited knowledge to H.C.P. Bell who, after uncovering the Maldives' Buddhist past, went on to reveal - but with more difficulty and in less detail - a still deeper substratum of the Maldivian psyche. Beyond Islam, beyond Buddhism, but drawing on and supplemented by both, there still survives an archaic system of religion. Over the centuries, as first Buddhist missionaries and then Muslims came to the islands, the inhabitants learned to hide their indigenous beliefs from outsiders - as well they might, for to orthodox Islam they represent serious heresy. Even so, the islanders retained a considerable reputation for sorcery down to pre-modern times, and Arab voyagers stopping at Male to pick up supplies of fresh water, dried fish and coir rope carefully avoided the other atolls.

Was this exclusively because of the danger posed by thousands of kilometres of submerged reef, or because of the eerie, other-worldly quality of the outer islands? Common sense would suggest a combination of both. The Maldivians believe their islands and reefs to be inhabited by a plethora of demons and spirits, some evil, some benevolent, some merely aloof from the doings of humanity. Islam allows for the existence of jinn, creatures of fire where man is of earth and angels of air. Yet in the Maldives the fourth element, water, is everywhere prevalent, and Maldivians - whilst excellent sailors - retain an inherent fear and awe for the immensity of the sea.

I was reminded of this as our dhoni crossed the great Equatorial Channel between Suvadiva and Addu Atolls - eighty kilometres of wind-tossed, surging waters, thousands of feet deep, separating two tiny groups of sandy islets, remote coral outcrops resting on the highest peaks of a submerged mountain range. This was at once the uttermost part of the earth, and - at least for the visitor - a kind of paradise. Far from the crowded strains of city life, covered with craning coconut palms and surrounded by waters rich in fish, the outer atolls are blessedly free of the internal combustion engine, the only omnipresent sound the muffled beating of wave against reef.

Illusions of paradise were quickly dispersed as I staggered ashore. Ten days at sea had altered my sense of balance, and the very island seemed to be moving. It was fully twenty four hours before I felt well enough to eat. Soon after, over a meal of rice and tuna fish curry, Ismail told me that he had made arrangements for me to meet the fanditavaria. It was better, I was assured, to meet him alone, without my wife, as the presence of a woman on such an occasion would be inauspicious.

That evening, as the setting sun turned the Arabian Sea a myriad sparkling shades of amber, I visited the magician in his house. Sitting by an open fire, he poured me glass after glass of strong, sweet tea whilst telling me, through Ismail, some secrets of the outer islands. Fandita - from the Sanskrit, pandit, a learned man - is a positive force which, properly managed, can cure sick people, make crops grow, ensure a good fishing catch, and dispel evil spirits. Whilst not a formal religion like Islam, it's power, he was quick to assure me, derived ultimately from the One God, Allah.

As the evening wore on, he told me of the demons and spirits of the Maldives. The islands fairly swarm with these denizens of darkness, from the terrifying Kandumathi seen by Ibn Battuta, through the seductive Kandu Handi which arouses lust in men and the disgusting, dirty Kudafulu which causes epilepsy, to the harmless Avateri who may enter homes and do the housework, unbidden, by night.

At midnight, as I rose to leave, the fanditavaria drew me aside and asked if there was something - some charm, or potion - which he might prepare on my behalf. Fascinated by the information he had divulged, and more than a little captured by the magical atmosphere of that tropical night, I agreed. But what had he in mind? "Something to control your wife, to make her obedient, to ensure your mastery", he suggested. This seemed an excellent, if unlikely idea, and a price of 250 rufiyaa (about US$25-00) was agreed upon. Two days later I received a tiny silver cylinder, exquisitely formed, on a leather thong to wear about my neck.

I kept this matter a secret from my wife until, on the long voyage back to Male, I could no longer suppress the information. I had expected some amusement, but was amazed by the amount of laughter my revelation produced. All became clear when she revealed, about her own neck, a similar cylinder procured from the magician's wife. This good lady, on being advised by her husband of his efforts on my behalf, had taken my wife aside, explained the situation, and offered to provide a counter-charm which would emasculate my new-found powers. The price: 200 rufiyaa; the lesson, even in paradise,caveat emptor - let the buyer beware.

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