DAY 394: Chennai, India's fourth largest city formerly known as Madras, isn't exactly on a backpacker's must-see list. Cuckoo in Mumbai warned me there wasn't much to see there in terms of tourist sites. Geeta said it's primarily a place where people travel to for business. Some Indian girls at the guesthouse said that in terms of nightlife, Chennai was "a sleepy town."

Chennai did host an old fort and some decent museums -- just as many other Indian cities -- but it did have one major thing that separated it from other places: it was here that in 72 A.D. that St. Thomas, one of the Apostles of Jesus Christ, was martyred when he was pierced to death by non-believers on the top of a nearby mountain. It should come as no surprise that a shrine had been erected where he died, making Chennai on the must-see list of Christian pilgrims. I was templed out and forted out already and gave it a whirl.

"How do I get to St. Thomas Mount?" I asked Geeta after breakfast. She showed me where it was on the city map hung on the wall.

"You come with me," she suggested. "I'll bring you [halfway.]" St. Thomas Mount was about 12 km. from the city center in the same southeastbound direction as Geeta's workplace, a software company where she worked as a Japanese translator. I hopped on the back of her motorscooter and she whisked us away wearing her helmet and dust mask. I hopped off the scooter and jumped into an auto-rickshaw while we were stopped at a traffic light. Geeta negotiated a reasonable fare for me and zipped off to work.

The "auto" (as auto-rickshaws are called locally) took me to the base of the mount, the beginning of the upward path lined with the Stations of the Cross, depicting the scenes of the Passion of Jesus Christ, from the carrying of the cross, the nailing and ultimately to the crucifixion itself, sculpted in life-size scale at the top of the mountain. Aside from the nice view of the haze above the city, the top of the hillock also had a church built by the Portuguese in 1523, consecrated in 1986 by Pope John Paul II in his visit to Madras. The building held a relic (a piece of bone) of St. Thomas himself, as well as several ancient paintings of the Jesus and his apostles. The most notable holy item in the church was the stone cross that St. Thomas was praying to when he was killed which, according to Christian lore, bled every December 18th (the anniversary of St. Thomas' death) between 1551 and 1704.

THE DAY TURNED OUT TO BE A SCORCHER by midday, so I just chilled out in the "harem bed" in my room with my laptop to catch up on Blog duties and flip through the additional DVD content of the Bollywood film Dhoom that I bought the day before. Amanda came home early from work and stopped by to see what our plans were for the night.

Chennai might be a "sleepy town" as the whole, but fun can be found if you just look for it. It was Tom's last night in town before leaving to Nairobi to present a documentary he shot, and we decided to go out to the big to-do in town: the magic show of Jagudar Anand (picture above), performing his last week at a big auditorium in Chennai.

Amanda, Chrissy, Tom and I joined Shakti and his partner (I forgot her name), a Chennai couple that ran an indie film and video production company that worked with Tom. We piled in Shakti's car and rode not too far away to the auditorium just before the show started. All the cheap 50-rupee seats were sold out, but we got a row to ourselves in the 200-rupee section. We passed around the bags of spicy popcorn that I bought until the show began.

Shakti told us that magician Jagudar Anand was in the Guinness Book of World Records for the busiest magician in the world, with the most performances per year than anyone else, or something like that. The Great Jagudar Anand had been performing in Chennai for forty days straight thus far, twice daily at 4 and 7 p.m. When the show started, his exhaustion was evident as the first act was a barrage of off-the-shelf tricks that he did left and right as assistants brought them over in rapid succession, all without the enthusiastic flamboyant flair that most stage magicians have. Rabbits disappeared and reappeared, birds flew out of cages and paper flowers "magically" materialized from thin air.

Covering the bags under his eyes was caked on make-up that made him seem plastic and a bit frightening. (Chrissy said that and his turban, he looked like Jambi from Pee Wee's Playhouse.) It was this same kind of make-up that was used on his younger female assistants, who were probably covering not just their exhaustion, but their drugged out looks since they were most likely strung out on morphine to keep the show going twice daily. We swore the girls were probably kidnapped and forced to work in the show; whenever they walked off the stage after a trick, they moped with the most unenthusiastic (and therefore funny) waving of the hands to the audience.

The show went on with its 70's funk-meets-80's video game music soundtrack as Jagudar narrated the entire show on a microphone. His creepy demeanor was made a bit more freaky with his soft spoken, yet somewhat raspy voice that made him sound like a child molester or something. In fact, in one of the acts he sort of played the part of such a fiend since he had his hands all over some young volunteer boys from the audience. One of the three boys luckily ran off before the big part of the trick with the excuse that he had to go to the bathroom -- he narrowly missed what Jagudar did to the next boy over: unzip his pants and magically make him urinate milk from a funnel he placed over the boy's crotch.

THE MAGIC TRICKS GOT BETTER as the show progressed. It wasn't anything new, just your basic saw-a-woman-in-half, move-a-woman's-head-independently-of-her-body, and turn-a-woman-into-a-"gorilla" sort of thing. "Now we will turn a beauty... into a beast," he said in his dramatic, child molester voice when he introduced the latter. "Ask yourself, can a body... pass through... another body?" he said to the audience to introduce the trick where he stood behind a free-standing box where his unenthusiastic assistant popped out of, seemingly passing through him. Afterwards, she walked off stage with her drugged out wave to the audience.

The one trick that we were looking forward to see wasn't his final trick as expected: an elephant named Lakshmi walked from the back of the auditorium to the stage, and he "magically" made her disappear after a quick flash of light and then quick period of darkness. An elephant wasn't the only thing he made disappear. A guy assistant playing Harry Houdini magically escaped out of a box, only to magically appear in the aisle of the auditorium. "I'm here!" he yelled from the back. In that trick, just as in every one, no one knew exactly when to clap. Often after a trick there would be no applause from the audience except for when a little five-year-old girl started clapping her hands off.

Not all of the show went as planned. When Jagudar called for a girl to volunteer from the audience, one of the girls in the row in front of us ran up -- only to have Jagudar motion her "not this trick, the next one." When she finally got up to "volunteer" in a trick where he'd magically pierce a skewer straight through her neck, she freaked out and ran off. (Perhaps she was creeped out by his child molestation behavior.)

AFTER TWO AND A HALF HOURS OF MAGICAL HIJINKS (and dancing midgets), The Great Jagudar Anand ended with a levitation as his assistants danced around in Mexican costumes to Mexican music. "It's magic," I said. "He's turned Indians into Mexicans."

The Mexican theme continued when a waiter brought over a plate of nachos at Zara, a hip, modern Spanish tavern that we went to after the show, a place where Chennai's business class hung out over cocktails and entertained clients. The six of us shared an assortment of tapas over drinks and conversations about the show. "You think that boy's going to be scarred for life?" Tom said.

"I think we're all scarred for life," I said.

Chrissy and I shared a pitcher of "Indian sangria," which was just like regular Spanish sangria with an Indian twist that we couldn't really figure out. Regardless of that twist, it got both of us pretty drunk; Chrissy made us laugh with her dead-on impressions of the unenthusiastic assistants walking off stage with their hand waves. Later on our amusement continued when we flipped through the 80's Indian music videos on TV, all of which starred really beautiful Indian women and really sleazy-looking Indian men all of which sported thick moustaches.

IT WAS A SHAME NO PHOTOS WERE ALLOWED during the magic show -- I was even busted when I tried to get a photo of the elephant walking down the aisle -- but in lieu of that, watch now as I magically make this can of Coke... disappear. That may seem pretty lame, but at least it didn't involve any child molestation.