A Curious Soul.
A Wave in
the Same Ocean.

What’s the story?

A life of experience. A gift of intuition.

Omar Kahn came into the world in Melbourne, the son of a Pashtun from Afghanistan whose father and grandfather had served the British Empire in uniform. His father had come to Australia as a student, earned a degree in textile engineering, and met the woman who would become his wife in an Indian village. She was vivacious, formidable, and, according to family legend, smart enough to outwit him.

In the 1960s, they opened the Taj Mahal in Melbourne: the first Indian restaurant in the country. Film stars came through the door. Politicians came through the door. So did ordinary Australians who had never tasted Indian food before and were suddenly confronted with a plateful of something fragrant, unfamiliar, and impossible to ignore.

Omar was six. While the dining room roared above him, he sat beneath the tables and talked to the dead, who had come in for dinner like everybody else.

His mother passed from cancer when he was fourteen. She had been the only person in the house who understood him. After that, there was nobody left who did. Nobody living, anyway.

His great grandfather, Shahzad Mir Khan: soldier, author, explorer, medium, protector, and gatekeeper, remained with him in another way. A historical figure in his own right, Shahzad had served with the 7th Bengal Lancers. Omar believes he has watched over him from the moment he was born.

At twenty, Omar went to work. For the next twenty five years, he operated clandestinely, carrying a drawer full of names that were not his and sitting across tables from men whose faces usually appeared in newspapers only after the handcuffs had gone on. Some were criminals of the highest order. Others were men capable of ending a conversation permanently. His handlers were utterly mystified by the remarkable speed with which he garnered the trust of the most elusive targets in the criminal underworld. Omar never explained it. Some things you do not put on paper.

Then his daughter passed. She was fourteen. After that the life he knew came apart, piece by piece: the marriage, the work, the roof over his head. And then a medium he had never met sat with him and passed on messages from his daughter. When the session was over, the medium looked at him and said, “You’ve forgotten. You were always the boy with the ear to the angels. You have a gift.”

Not long afterwards, Omar found himself in a room with thirty strangers. Kelvin Cruikshank, the medium whose word he trusted above all others, pointed at him and told the room that Omar was gifted, that he could do this, that this was what he had been put here to do. And that was that.

The validation opened a door. In Bali, another life began.

He took a backpack, threw it over his shoulder, and walked, not away from the pain, but with it. He carried the wreckage forward, turning each piece into purpose. He understood now what the ability was for: to reach mothers and fathers who had lost a child, to sit with people in the darkness of loss, and show them that the ones they love are still near, and to guide them back towards an empowered life. From Bali, he grew into what he had always been.

Seventeen years later, he has connected parents with children they lost, carried people through grief they believed would finish them, sat with heads of state, and encouraged public figures to move forward and do something useful with what they had been given. And ordinary people, more than anyone.

For two years, he served as resident medium at the Association for Research and Enlightenment in New York, the organisation founded by Edgar Cayce. The rest is in the book.