This is a fantastic book in more ways than one. It’s amazing what scrapes Tahir Shah manages to get himself into. Partly this is because, like a member of an improv comedy troupe, he hardly ever says “no” to anything (well, he does draw the line at bedding down with a pair of Siamese twins). The result is a funny memoir of the author’s time in India learning about Indian magic.

When he was a child living in rural England with his displaced Afghan family, a man named Hafiz Jan turned up on their doorstep quite unexpectedly. The guardian of Shah’s Afghan warlord ancestor Jan Fishan Khan’s tomb, he had journeyed all the way from India to England to protect the young Tahir from the danger he foresaw in a dream. That summer, he taught Tahir some of his repertoire of magic tricks.

Fast forward twenty years later, and Tahir Shah sets off to India to study once again with Hafiz Jan. He gets redirected to Hafiz Jan’s teacher, the sadistic and mysterious Hakim Feroze. He gets accepted as a disciple and learns many of the tricks of the Indian godman/sorcerer/trickster.

Eventually, Shah emerges from Feroze’s mansion to undertake a journey of discovery around India, trying to find anything and everything that is bizarre in any way, with a young sidekick who specialises in trickery of every kind. In the course of his journey we learn about a side of India it is hard to believe still exists today. The credulous, miracle-mongering, yet on the flip side wholly-ingenious-in-fleecing-ordinary-people side.

The nice thing about this book is that he actually reveals the secrets behind many of the tricks, a surprising number of which involve an extensive use of chemicals. This would be a good way to encourage a kid to get interested in chemistry, I think – see all the magic tricks you can do with it! But Shah doesn’t scrub all the mystery from India – his teacher Feroze and sidekick Bhalu remain uncanny until the very last page. We never learn how Feroze manages to change his shoes seemingly in the blink of an eye.