We stepped out of the hotel, where the three of us had just had tea and headed off. The concierge retrieved our newly acquired suitcase, and insisted on carrying it out to the car park where he sounded disappointed we had no car. I explained we were going to the metro station. He wheeled the suitcase as far as the gate, where the gateman took over, insisting he wheel the bag to the metro station.
Just before the metro station entrance, a man, sat on a low stool, stood up and came over and offered to read my palm. Travel, it seems to me, must involve risky interactions such as this! So I named a number between 1 and 9, and he flipped a piece of paper over revealing the number 7 I’d chosen! Then he said to my waiting companions that he’d demonstrate his ability by predicting my choice of colour. Quite at random (or so I thought) I chose blue, and he flipped over a small scrap of paper to show me he had successfully predicted that too.
I thought I should allow this to go a little further, and before I knew it I was seated on another low stool tucked a little behind a hut announcing that he was a travel agent. Over the next half hour he told me all sorts of things: he used a noughts and crosses arrangement to lay out numbers creating the atmosphere of a predictive science. Suddenly there was my date of birth laid out on the paper. Then he asked me to think of the name of my mother, which he promised to predict. My mother changed her name in mid-life, so I insisted that we were only thinking of her name at birth. Suddenly there was my mother’s name, but it was the name she adopted when we moved back to England in the ‘60s. Then he offered to tell me my wife’s name. Again I said it had to be her name at birth, but the name he produced was the name that I know her by which she was finally given at her christening! In between each prediction there was a certain amount of waffle: sort of pop religious advice, plus the prediction that I was having amorous problems with an old girlfriend. He then took pains to inscribe on another small square of paper a mantra he wanted me to recite each morning on waking. It was the work of genius, a cross between a psychic medium at the village fair, and the guru from the High Himalayas. Then came the fee! He said that poor travellers only put in 100US$ (about £80), medium rich travellers $200, and the very wealthy $500. I could see that this self-assessment process was a psychological brilliant strategy: I’d place myself in the category of my own choosing, and the fee appeared non-negotiable. Of course I had free-will, I insisted to myself. I looked in my top pocket for a small note: he protested that I had more money around my waist! Feeling my inner secrets were known to the man, I pulled out my money belt and put 100 US$ into his folder of fan mail. I could sense that he felt I should be more generous making my contribution to the childrens’ home he claimed he was supporting.
Then he asked me for a gift from ‘your home country’: my pockets were empty, but then he jumped up and fetched from his office a set of prayer beads which was his gift to me. He would have detained me for at least another hour with predictions and revealing information of my (misspent?) life. It was all conducted in a rapid-fire English I was not always following, with him very concerned about a loan in May which would go sour. Here I am writing this on the last day of April. My sense of being held by invisible bonds suddenly snapped and I made my excuses and left: his final words were that I must not breathe of word of this encounter to anyone. So here I am telling you!
But I want to reel back to my tea in the hotel: it’s a grand place probably built before the First World War. Taking people there is a bit like a conjuring trick in a magical setting. We sat on the terrace over tea and cake. Suddenly using the hotel’s wi-fi seemed to make sense, so I asked the waiter if there was a code I could use. He asked for my passport and disappeared for quite a while before returning with a string of numbers on a slip of paper. As it turned out there was no wi-fi on the terrace, but I managed to send a message once I was back inside the wide corridor, full of 19th century prints. It’s a place of unashamed old world detail. Nothing ostentatious, just luxury of another age. The carpet pile is a little deeper, the paint on the wide pillars confidently smooth. As we left, the staff bowed deeply, and wished us a good day. The concierge insisted on seeing us out, carrying the suitcase. It all seemed a little over the top: we had after all only had a cup of tea!
But looking back after the palm reading exercise, I began to wonder if my passport had been mined for biographical details: were the concierge and the medium working in tandem? The hotel staff had been in possession of my passport for 20 minutes, and may be able to log into the government’s visa records, discovering my mother’s name perhaps!
But this doesn’t quite answer the palm reader’s ability to look at my palm and say: you say you have two children, but what happened to the third child, pointing to a faint crease in the side of my clenched fist? He predicted I would live to 94 (Lord preserve us). His final conjuring trick was to ask me to write down three favourite flowers, but only after he had written down the name of one of them on a small piece of paper which he had folded into a small packet, popping it in my top pocket. I named ‘fritillary, daffodil and daisy’. It was only later after getting home when I was putting my shirt into the washing machine that I discovered the small piece of paper, on which the obvious choice of ‘rose’ had been written.
A charlatan, a wise man, a con-artist, a man with a certain gift? I was glad to have spent time with him, and very relieved to get away.
Next time a soothsayer stops you to tell you your fortune, work out where you last left your passport details!