‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’ and the Mysterious Case of Kuda Bux

It originates at the hut, as all Roald Dahl’s stories do.

The first in the Roald Dahl anthology series that Wes Anderson is doing for Netflix is The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.

This 39-minute, 39-second short is a film, a stage play and a pop-out book all at once. It is a story within a story within a story within a story, seamlessly blending in together, the characters and set moving around as though in a giant pastel dollhouse captured through a lens of nostalgia.

Dahl has a distinct voice, very cheeky and if you were a child, it sounds like a co-conspirator, telling you things that nasty adults don’t want you knowing (which is probably why there’s always a looming threat of his work being sanitized). And while many of his works have been adapted for screen, a lot of them are tweaked here and there to become more… shall we say, adult-approved? The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is no exception to this rule, but the changes to the source material don’t take away anything from the plot.

This certainly isn’t the first Dahl adaptation by Wes Anderson — 14 years ago we had the stop-motion animation of Fantastic Mr Fox and that was when he made up his mind to adapt Henry Sugar’s tale as well.

The Question: How does one retain Dahl’s iconic way of writing (which is often present in his descriptions) while translating it into the visual medium?

The Answer: Have the characters along with the author narrate the events as they happen.

The Result: The characters talk a mile a minute to keep up with everything and describe things as they unfold around them. AnditreallygetsconfusingattimestokeeptrackofeverythingbutitmakesforaverychaotictimethatworksoutintrueDahlfashion. It is hilarious that not only actions but also expressions, are described.

With the same actors playing various characters throughout the short, the painted backgrounds, the extremely artificial vivid set pieces – like the ‘property department’ seat the yogi is seated on while ‘levitating’, the use of the stationary car and a projector – come together so cohesively, so contained. It feels like you are watching a whimsical traveling theater troupe that has a single show during the golden hour on a Wednesday.

It is surreal and dreamlike. You wonder at the end if you really saw it all.

Throughout the course of the second part of the film, we are reminded that the story is real. That all of these events took place. It is most certainly not fiction, because if it was indeed fiction, things would take a different turn. 

At the end of the film, Dahl (played delightfully by Ralph Fiennes) tells us that the tale he has related to us is true. That he had been called in by Sugar’s accountant to document his story. And while the names and details have been changed, it is all real.

And that begs the question, is it really true?

The story itself by all accounts sounds fictional. Something plucked right out the imagination of the man who created characters like the BFG and stories like The Enormous Crocodile and The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me.

But believe it or not, this story within a story within a story within a story is indeed a true story. 

We just weren’t told which story was real.

No, not Henry Sugar.  

Imdad Khan. Or Imhrat Khan, if we were to go by the original text.  

Twenty-five years before Dahl wrote The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, he wrote an essay titled The Amazing Eyes of Kuda Bux in Argosy magazine in July 1952. It is probably the only detailed version of Kuda Bux’s biography in existence, written verbatim as Dahl mentions in the short.

So, who is Kuda Bux?

Kuda Bux’s early life mirrors Khan’s very closely. Kuda Bux, whose real name was Khudah Bukhsh was born in Akhnur, Kashmir in 1905 (like his fictional counterpart). At the age of 13, he ran away from home to study magic under the tutelage of Professor Moor in Lahore. 

The novelty of studying under Professor Moor soon wore out in a few weeks.

As he told Dahl:

“…what a terrible disaster when it comes to me that there is no real magic in Professor Moor, that all is trickery and quickness of the hand.… My whole mind becomes filled with a very strong longing, a longing to find out about the real magic, to discover and to understand something about the strange power that is called yoga.”

And like Henry Sugar, Bux’s motivation for learning yoga, in his own words:

“I wanted to acquire yoga powers for two reasons and two reasons only: Fame and Fortune.”

Luckily for Bux, unlike Khan, there were no repercussions against performing yoga in public. One would certainly not drop dead performing yoga while not in absolute privacy. (If Dahl’s dramatic flair had been true, International Yoga Day would certainly be a morbid affair.)

Bux did not need to camp out in the jungle and incur the wrath of the levitating yogi to learn the mysterious yoga powers. He merely journeyed to Haridwar where he learned the craft under a yogi (who neither levitated nor threw a brick at him). The training that Bux underwent in Haridwar was the same as that of Khan. The methodology is the same; according to both yogis, it takes 15 years of intense training to be able to focus on an object for three and a half minutes.

Bux decided to focus on his brother’s face. The technique that is outlined in the film, of studying the candle flame and the colors all of it is exactly as Bux related to Dahl. Only, Bux picked up the skill faster than Khan, he had honed his skill to concentrate absolutely on his brother’s face for two and a quarter minutes, after two and a half years of daily practice. By 1933, Bux could read a book with his eyes closed.

In 1953, a British psychic and ghost hunter Harry Price tried to get to the bottom of this. Was Kuda Bux the real deal? Bux agreed to subject his powers to a laboratory test at the University of London Council for Psychical Investigation’s séance room. Even the ghosts (if they exist) were witness to this event.

And so, at 14:30 in the afternoon on July 10, 1935, Kuda Bux’s powers were put to a test.

They put dough in his eyes and wrapped bandages around his head, leaving only his nose and mouth free. Bux read the books placed in front him. He could even read notes that were written behind him!

(In the Manchester experiment Dahl had described in his essay, doctors verified that Bux could stop the beating of his own heart.)

The only thing Bux could not do was, to tell if the lights in the room were on or off after the investigators covered his head with a strip of black cloth.

Then came the debate of whether or not Bux was peeking through the sides of his nose. The only condition Bux had given was that his head should not be covered with a bag. He explained that he sees via his nose when his eyes were blindfolded.

Taken from Price’s book Confessions of a Ghost Hunter:

…. it is necessary to leave the nostrils free in order that his blindfolded or blinded subjects shall distinguish colors. He says that ‘the nasal mucosa is sensitive to light and to different colored regions of the spectrum. This function is sharply distinct from smell.’ He continues: ‘The part played by the nasal mucosa leads us to the following question: is the unknown organ of extra-retinal vision situated in one part of the body? Localized in a single one or diffused through many?’ Kuda Bux answers that, in his case, the ‘unknown organ’ is situated in his nose…

It brings to mind a dialogue from the film.

Imdad Khan: The seeing is done by another part of the body.

Dr. Z.Z. Chatterjee: Which part?

Well, I suppose we have an answer to that question now.

By the end of the experiment, Price and the investigators were none the wiser. No one could say that he was not able to see without his eyes, and no one could say he wasn’t. The investigators were left in the dark.

Bux, unlike Khan, lived a pretty long life. He died in 1981 at the age of 75 in Hollywood.  

One thing to be mentioned here is that as Bux grew older, he gradually lost his vision to glaucoma. His performances however continued with full force.

So, it remains to be seen (or smelt) if Bux really could see without his eyes.

It’s hard to believe that the fantastical part of the story was true. But often reality is stranger than fiction.