Just ask Nicholas Hope, resident director of the World Bank's office here. After an accident damaged his Toyota Crown, a local garage said repairs - mainly body work - would take two weeks and cost $700. Too long and too much, Mr. Hope's staff decided, turning instead to a practitioner of 'ketok magic', or magic knock, an Indonesian hybrid in which mechanics tap unearthly powers to better wield their socket wrenches and spot-welders.

Half a day later the car came back, fully restored. The bill came to just $122, and now, more than 18 months later, the car "still looks fine," Mr. Hope says.

Thousands of ketok-magic shops have opened in Indonesia in recent years. Workers in these garages protray themselves as merely the tools of a magic spirit with which they can commune after long periods of fasting and rigorous study.

These magicians prefer to practise their trade with no outsider looking on. At Ketok Magic Nusantara, which fixed Mr. Hope's car, visitors are kept from the inner sanctum by an iron fence. Another garage bars customers from viewing the tools.

All of Indonesia's under-the-hood sages claim ties to a day labourer from East Java named Turut, who acquired a reputation as a kind of Merlin among mechanics before he died in 1986. Eddy Susanto, a 32- year-old worker at Ketok Magic Nusantara, says that, as a child, he saw Mr. Turut pick up a length of railway track with his bare hands and tie it around his waist. Says Mr. Susanto: "It convinced me he wasn't an ordinary person."

Mr. Turut guided Mr. Susanto and 29 other self-proclaimed disciples through a training regimen. They earned the right both to practise ketok magic and to train others, but proselytizing has proven difficult. Young people "aren't patient to learn the magic things," Mr. Susanto says.

Sceptics abound. Ishak Ismail, owner of a Buyong Motors, a conventional Jakarta garage, says: "I don't believe in such a thing. I do the real things. No magic."

Tarsikun, the driver who delivered Mr. Hope's World Bank car to its ketok doctor, is also dubious. He says that while waiting outside, he heard loud noises that "didn't sound like magic." Still, he adds, "the results are OK, and much faster than ordinary workshops."

Source : The Wall Street Journal - 5 Feb 93'
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