A Fortune-Teller Told Me (22 page)

My thoughts reverted to the helicopter, and I asked Cheong Keat, “Do you believe in fate?”

I expected him to burst out laughing, but instead he said, “Let’s have a look.” He examined the hand I held out to him.

“You are destined to have a life out of the ordinary. In this we are similar. Look.”
He showed me his own hand.
“Both of us, in the middle of the
palm, have a big ‘A.’ Yes, two men with a destiny.”
Then he stopped, as if embarrassed.

“Go on,” I said.

“I’m trying to find the strength to tell you something I see without ruining our friendship.”

“Go on.”

“Your hand plainly shows that you’re not an intellectual. You’re a man of great feeling, but not of great intellect.”

“Of course. I’m quite well aware of that.”

“Anyone looking at your house, your library, would take you for someone devoted to thought alone. On the contrary, you’re a man of action, a doer. Never by logic, though, always by instinct. You have great highs and lows in your emotional life.”

“Where did you learn to read palms?”

“Not from books, that’s for sure. They’re all secondhand knowledge. In chiromancy, as in
feng shui,
there’s something of the magical, the divine—you have to feel it, you can’t learn it from books.”

I had known Cheong Keat for many years, but I knew nothing about this interest of his. With his collections, his plants, his birds, the palm trees he studied, I had always thought of him as a man of scientific bent. But here he was talking to me of magic! As with so many people, there was an unsuspected side to him.

Every day I had at least three appointments with people from the university or the business world, and at the end of each interview I would ask if there were any really good fortune-tellers in Penang.

“Fortune-tellers? I detest them!” was the reaction of a history professor who had just given me an excellent lesson on Malaysia prior to the arrival of the British. He told me a story. When he was small, an Indian passed his house and persuaded his mother to let him read her palm. “You have an illness for which there is no cure,” he pronounced. “You’ll be dead within the year.” The mother was shattered. She said nothing to the family, but from that day on she was no longer herself. She had been a strong, loyal Chinese woman, completely devoted to her husband and children. Now she began to go out, play cards and live it up. Nobody understood why. When she confessed to her husband and
told him about the prophecy, he was extremely understanding and let her do as she pleased. Time passed: a year, two years, three. She did not fall ill, let alone die. In the meantime, however, she had grown so used to her new lifestyle that she carried on with it. Twenty-five years later she died of a heart attack. “Lucky woman!” I said, but the professor did not agree. His childhood was blighted by that story, his mother never at home and his father always struggling to pay her debts.

I had better luck with the wife of an economist. “Yes, indeed, there’s an outstanding one in Bishop Street. He’s in the room behind Vogue, the tailor’s,” she said. “He’s an Indian. His name’s Kaka.”

Bishop Street is in the heart of old Penang. In the shade of low white porticoes is a row of shops—haberdashers, perfumers, tailors and barbers. Their names are all smartly painted in red or black characters on the columns that give on to the street, and I had no difficulty in finding the Vogue tailor shop. But Kaka was no longer there. He had moved, though not far away, and the tailor—also an Indian—offered to take me there. It was a way of doing me a courtesy, but also of ingratiating fate. He told me as we went that he too consulted Kaka from time to time.

I climbed a narrow stairway to the first floor. Behind a glass door was a clean, tidy waiting room. Two stout Indian ladies and a tall, elegant gentleman, broad-chested and perfumed, were sitting in blue imitation-leather armchairs eating dried beans. I realized that it was lunchtime, and the shady room offered a pleasant refuge from the boiling asphalt in the streets.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” said the man, getting up. I had not uttered a word, but what a perfect way for a fortune-teller to introduce himself! He showed me into his office and sat down in a big managerial armchair, with me on the other side of the desk.

Date of birth, country of birth, calculations on a piece of paper, and the diagnosis:
“Your lucky number is eight. This is a very important number in your life. Make sure that your house number, your telephone number and the number plate of your car always contain an eight, or that the numbers add up to eight. That way you will be 100 percent lucky. The other number is five. Your lucky stone is the emerald.”

Then he took my left hand and studied it.
“In your family everyone
reaches old age, and you too will die old, because you don’t have one life line, but two. It’s this second line that protects you. If you’re involved in a car accident, for example, the car will be wrecked but you’ll come out unscathed. When you were forty years old you had problems caused by some friends who betrayed you; but after fifty-five you’ll have seven splendid years. You’ll soon do something you’ve never done before, and you’ll be successful. If you play the lottery, you’ll win.”
(I shall end up believing this!)
“When you were young you had an illness you nearly died from.”
(The year I spent in a sanatorium when I was eighteen?)
“You should now begin to meditate.”
(That is what Chang Choub said.)
“If you do, then you will become able to see the future, and will have the power to cure people.”
(I wouldn’t mind.)
“You already have these abilities within yourself, you need only learn to exercise them. If you happen to go to a place where you’ve never been, and have the sensation of recognizing it, that’s because you were there in your past lives. You’ve already had many lives, some extremely interesting.”

“What lives? Where?”

Kaka said there were experts who could see these lives in detail, but he could only speak in general terms.
“You’ve already had many lives, and you’re on the point of reaching the higher state, that of…”

“Of a guru?” I said irreverently.

“Yes, it’s possible. The problem is that you have a lot of heat in you; you must be always very active sexually, and this saps your energy. You’re irascible, at times downright unbearable. You’ll be like that into old age,”
he said, as if to punish me for my levity.

“At sixteen you had two love affairs: both ended badly. If you were married before the age of twenty-four your marriage failed; if at twenty-eight, you have an excellent marriage.”
(Wrong, but I said nothing.)
“Money comes your way in abundance, but it goes just as fast.”
(The same old story.)
“If you want to keep it you must put a gold ring on the middle finger of your right hand. Just a small gold ring. The signs on your palm say that you should have three children. If you don’t, it’s because one of the mothers aborted, perhaps without your knowledge; otherwise you still have time to have three.”
(That’s all I need!)

Taking both my hands, Kaka examined the fingers and nails.
“You are particularly healthy,”
he said,
“and you’ve no problems with constipation. But if you should ever have it, don’t take medicine—eat only fruit and
vegetables.”
(Excellent advice.)
“In any case, the vitally important thing for you is to begin meditating.”

Kaka was clever. By introducing most of his remarks with “if,” he left himself a way out. That was his trick, and once I understood it I lost interest in what he had to say.

“Your hand shows you’ve been left a fortune by someone. If not, then you’ll win the lottery …”

“Kaka,” I interrupted, “do you believe in fate?”

“Yes, but only as a tendency. The lines in the hand are just a warning, they indicate what may happen. Look at my hand. Any palmist can see that I suffer from heart trouble, and one colleague, a famous one in Kuala Lumpur, told me years ago that I’d die at fifty-two. I’m sixty-five now, and even when I do die it won’t be of heart failure.”

Kaka had studied all the medical books he could get hold of. He had learned what causes heart disease, and for years had dieted, exercised, eaten huge amounts of raw garlic, and lived a very regular life: up at half past six, in the office from eight in the morning until seven in the evening, 365 days a year.
“I won’t die of heart failure!”
he said, and thumped his chest resoundingly with his fist.
“I won’t die of heart failure because the signs in my palm have put me on guard.”

I told him I had been warned by a fortune-teller not to fly, and that the very helicopter I should have been on had crashed. What did my hand say? Was I really meant to die in that helicopter?

“Of course not!”
replied confident Kaka.
“You’ve two life lines in your hand, and if you’d been on that helicopter you’d have got off without a scratch. In fact, if there had been three or four people with hands like yours on that helicopter it would never have crashed. Always remember, in moments of danger it’s that second line that saves you.”

I wish I had known that years ago in Vietnam. There were days when I was obsessed by the idea that in somebody’s rifle, somewhere in a paddy field, was the bullet that would kill me. I could see that bullet. I could smell it. I never told anyone, but the thought tortured me. At times, to go where my job, my curiosity or just my spirit of competition with colleagues took me, I really had to pluck up courage. Yes, courage: what is it? I have always thought of it as being the strength to overcome one’s own inexpressible fear.

In those years one of my colleagues was an extraordinary Australian
cameraman, Neal Davis. Every time I got to where I was told the front was, I would always see Neal, with his white towel around his neck and his old Bolex, ahead of me. He was a man who had no fear of war. Once, in the last days of Saigon, a plane tried to bomb the presidential palace and the antiaircraft guns started firing wildly. Thousands of bullets rained on the roofs and the square around the cathedral, and we all dashed for cover. But Neal just stood there in that inferno and carried on filming. Ten years later, in Bangkok, during a failed coup, a tank crew mistook his Bolex for a gun and fired at him. Neal put the camera on automatic and threw it down in front of him, thus producing his last dramatic film: that of his own death.

I asked Kaka if he believed the hand was the best guide to a person’s fate. He said yes, then added,
“But you must pay attention, and try to understand what the palmist says.”

He told me the story of a Chinese client of his, a well-to-do businessman. Kaka read his palm and told him: “Your hand shows that you’ve two wives. If you don’t, you may one day.” The man wasted no time. He went home, gathered the family together and announced that he was marrying his secretary because the palmist had told him to. The family were terribly upset, and went to Kaka. He had to call the man back and explain to him that “you may have” does not mean “you
must
have.” He said, “If I told you that in your hand it’s written that you’ll die by fire, what would you do? Get a petrol tank and throw yourself in, or prepare a water tank to put out any possible fire?” He convinced the man to remain monogamous.

Kaka said that the signs in the hand do not remain the same all one’s life; they change as time goes by, and your fate changes with them. If I began to meditate I would see for myself how my hand would change. I failed to see how this would be possible, but I said nothing.