This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 22, Issue 2, from 2012.
The first time I met Prem was in March, 1992, when I picked him up at Heathrow airport – “Namaste!” He was not difficult to pick out – the white hair and long, straggly beard, the knee-length white kurta of Indian cotton. He was in the UK to give a talk in London’s Conway Hall. His audience came to see miracles, and they were not disappointed.
Early in life, he had become incensed that poor people were being tricked into handing over large amounts of their life savings to the charlatans who were known in India as godmen. All that the victims got in exchange were phoney miracles, worthless advice for their future, and useless remedies for their ailments.
Prem was the antithesis of your average secret-obsessed magician: his mission was not to mystify, but to clarify. He did the same for us in Conway Hall: running flames along his bare arm, chewing broken glass, creating fire, putting lighted camphor into his mouth – the whole works – and then showing us exactly how it was all done.
One of his favourites was to produce seemingly endless quantities of vibhuti (holy ash) from empty hands. He used to joke that he got it from the same shop as the godman Satya Sai Baba. (If you were to represent godmen as Prem’s target, Sai Baba would have been the bull’s eye.) Prem stayed with me for the week or so that he was in London, and we had many a splendid (and often hilarious) discussion well into the night, mostly about magical methods and deceptions. There was talk of a girlfriend that was a paediatrician in Boston, but he didn’t elaborate, and I remember thinking there could not have been many occasions when they could get together.
Prem was full of surprises. I told him once that his pulse-stopping trick was well known to magicians (it involved stuffing a lemon under the armpit), but that any doctor could easily show that his heart was still beating normally. Not so, he explained. All you needed to do was fill your lungs with as much air as possible, and keep the breath in by pressure in the abdomen and chest. The resulting air cushion absorbs the heart beats. (I still have a video of a Dutch TV show, in which Prem does exactly that for a doctor, complete with stethoscope, who stared in puzzlement at the man with no heartbeat.)
I remember searching the local shops with Prem, looking for chemicals for his ‘miracles’ (potassium permanganate plus glycerine equals spontaneous combustion). At home, he would also occasionally disappear: he would be ironing (he insisted on doing his own), or wandering in the garden to enjoy his beloved cigarette.
My wife Susheela made Indian meals for him – a bit tricky, as he was vegetarian, and we were not. He was quite at home with the magicians we invited round for dinner, and he could discuss their methods as an equal. But for all his serious purpose, he was a mischievous fellow. He fooled us all with a trick in which a banknote was burned, and was then restored whole and unharmed. When I told him I’d finally figured out the method, he said I was wrong. But just before he left at the end of his stay, I said, “Prem – about that banknote…” He said, “Actually, you were right.” Then why keep me racking my brains all this time? With that big grin of his, he said, “Racking your brains is good for you.”
I became a life subscriber to his magazine Indian Skeptic. It was always a rather poorly copied little booklet, and I’ve more than once offered to fund a new photocopier for him, but he has always refused. In fact he would never accept donations of any kind. Well aware of his enemies in the miracle trade, he just didn’t want any records to show that he was receiving money (and possibly influence) from an outside source.
After he left London, he kept in touch. He has occasionally written to ask me to check out some claim in the newspaper archives here in London. And when a relative of his, Madhav, was trying to gain entrance to the UK to continue his medical studies here, Prem was rather miffed that he couldn’t find anyone in the family who would sponsor him, so I agreed to act as guarantor. When I last saw Madhav, he was doing well as a surgeon at a hospital in London. (And as I remember the contract, I’m still responsible for taking care of his burial arrangements if he dies!)
My physical mementos of Prem include shelves full of copies of Indian Skeptic (whose arrivals gradually petered out as his health worsened), videos of him at work, his book Science versus Miracles (invaluable if you want the real lowdown on how to be a godman), his 600-page tome Murders in Sai Baba’s Bedroom, and – just for fun – the fake spike he gave me for the spike-through-the-tongue trick.
My very last memory of him was returning him to Heathrow. His final gifts to me were a warm hug and an impish grin. Namaskaaram, Prem, and thank you for the friendship. It was a pleasure and a privilege.
