WHAT the FUTURE HOLDS
Kazi Md. Rasel is a palmist. He has a shop, which consists of a medium sized low table, where he sits amidst all his instruments and flow charts. The shop is situated underneath the over-bridge at Mirpur-10 roundabout, and he tells me he is open every single day for the sake of his customers.
When I ask him if he gets that many, he nods. “A lot of them come back,” he says.
He only charges 50 taka to “look at one's hand”, and happily takes mine for a glance. I was hoping he'd use one of those big magnifying glasses he keeps in a red case, but he assures me that his eyes are quite alright in being able to decipher my future. I am to have success in the workplace, my finances will increase, and that I should have faith in God during tough times. When I ask him whether or not anyone takes his words as generic, he smiles. “Not a lot,” he replies.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Business is okay, he tells me. The number of customers hasn't rapidly increased or decreased. “All the other stalls here have to pay for their space, but not me,” he says, pointing at the nearby stalls where clothes were being sold at cheap rates.
How long has he been doing this? “Fourteen-fifteen years. I don't remember.” He offers me some yellow threads which I was to wear on my hands, but I decline and take my leave in search of other fortune tellers.
Other palmists weren't as forthcoming as Md. Rasel. One of them grumpily told me to come on Friday; that that was the day he talked to visitors like me, as if interviewers came every weekend to talk to him. Another practically shooed me away for no reason at all. I could have been a good customer. He'd never know.
Not very far away, I catch on to another street astrologer. He not only looks at hands, but also sells different kinds of stones that come with various shapes of rings as solutions. Going by the name of Kamal Haque, his method is pretty much the same as Md. Rasel, although he asks me lots of questions: what is my date of birth, whether I have any spot on my shoulder, etc. At the end, he advises me to wear a necklace or ring made of gomed stone that will “help me through this bad time I was having.” I tell him I am not particularly having a bad time. He replies there will be one and falls silent, before complimenting me on the weirdness of the lines on my palms.
I ask one of his regular customers what he thinks of him and he replies that “he is a good man. Very honest.” He won't say any more and I don't carry on.
If you are looking for a more entertaining kind of astrologer with more unnecessary complicated procedures than any, the parrot astrologers are perfect. Their numbers are slowly diminishing but there still are a number of them on Dhaka's streets.
Khaled Mohaimen, one such parrot astrologer, beckons me with a smile to sit in front of him and asks me for my name. He is seated with twenty or so ragged envelopes on a red plastic sheet. We are in front of the Hazrat Shah Ali Bughdadi Mazar, on Mazar Road. On one side he has a wooden cage, where the parrot rests. I tell him my name and he gets his bird out of the cage and commands it to look for my card. It picks up one from the far left and hands it to his master. Apparently, I'm supposed to give the money (10 taka) to the parrot. Which I do. Every envelope has about 3-4 lines of wisdom in them. Mine says that I need to have faith in the Almighty and rely on him for everything.
But that isn't all. The words are also accompanied by a couple of numbers. And to know the meaning of those numbers, the astrologer needs to look at his book, which will cost me 20 taka more. I relent. He opens the book and makes me look at a grid with numbers and requests me to put my finger on one of them. I do that, and he turns the pages and reads to me some lines about whether there were any “crisis in my life” looming ahead or not. This process of putting your finger on a grid and choosing a number is repeated another 2-3 times and every time it leads to a passage that is supposed to tell me something about myself.
It is fun the first time round, but gets tiring after the next few times. He doesn't mind though. He has been doing it for about 20 years now, every day. “I get enough people regularly to get by,” he comments.
On a different note, it is also surprising seeing a lot of them mixing up one or two elements of the trade to spice up their profession. There is this one guy who reads your palm and based on that lets his parrot choose an envelope for you. So he is a combination of both a palmist and a parrot astrologer.
Conmen or not, these people are part of the social fabric -- a reminder of how interesting and remarkable our culture is.
*Some of the names have been changed for the sake of anonymity.
Comments