A Fortune-Teller Told Me (33 page)

“Your mother has a strong vital sign and will live long. But your father has a weak sign, very weak, he must already be dead.”
(Quite so.)
“You have been married for a long time, but take care of your marriage. If it has lasted this long it is because your wife has a strong sign. If it had been up to you, the marriage would have ended several times. Your problem is that you can’t manage to be sexually faithful to one person. Sex for you is very important and dominates your attitudes. Sexually you are an elephant. Sex will interest you until you die, and this will lead you into difficulties of one kind or another. Temperamentally you are someone who can have more than one wife, even at the same time. Whether you remarry or not will depend on your wife’s horoscope. But if you manage to stay married to your present wife until your sixty-second year, the marriage will be perfect thereafter. When you were thirty-nine you had a matrimonial problem. The marriage was about to break down.”
(Not really, but if there ever was the beginning of a crisis, it was precisely in 1977.)

“You should have three children: one weak, two very strong.”
(Yes, now that I have learned to interpret these words: one child was so weak that it was never born.)
“The two strong ones are a boy and a girl. On your name there’s a sort of light. It’s a name that doesn’t come from your family, but one you made for yourself. From time to time you have health problems, and your body will have to undergo an operation between the ages of fifty-nine and sixty-one, and another between sixty-five and sixty-six. You’ve traveled all your life and you’ll continue to travel until you die.”

Rajamanikam spoke as if he were reading from a book, and the book seemed to have pages similar to those read to me by others. In fact that is the case, and that is why astrology, especially if practiced by experts, has a particular attraction. It is presented with an air of certainty which is lacking in other methods of divination. In astrology there are texts, rules, measures. Once the date and time of birth are known you need only know how to apply the method properly, taking account of all the variables, and at the end the message. And there they all end up reading more or less the same things. With repetition, therefore, the prediction gains more and more credibility.

Rajamanikam took a sheet of handwritten numbers from the folder. This was my detailed horoscope for the years to come.
“Between April 18, 1994 and March 14, 1995 you must move house and go and live in another country.”
(Again this idea that I must leave Bangkok.)
“From March 14, 1995 to August 8, 1997 you’ll have to face some expenses, but nothing that will ruin you. But take care … from August 24, 1997 to the year 2000 there’ll be numerous changes in your life. This is also a period in which the influence of Saturn will begin acting on you, and it’s the period of your great power. If you want to enter politics you must do so in that period, and you’ll win. It’s also the period when you must take care of your health. If you want to stand for election, you must announce your candidacy on August 8, 1997, and you can only rise and rise.”
(At most I might run for the presidency of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong. That is where I want to spend the summer of 1997, seeing the end of the last colony in the world.)

“You’ll have a very happy old age. Your lucky numbers are five, three and nine. In particular five and three are excellent. Your stone is emerald.”
(That’s what Kaka said in Penang, too: same page of the same book?)
“And the yellow sapphire. Any questions?”

I asked him if he thought I should go to India.
“Certainly, but you must go and live in northern India, not in the south.”

“What’s a good time to do it?”

“Absolutely before your fifty-seventh birthday. Preferably before you turn fifty-six.”
(That means before September 1994: impossible. Our lease for Turtle House runs until May 1995, and it’s not certain that
Der Spiegel
will want to send me to India. Anyway, not for two years. I shall have to acquire some merits, I told myself.)

I was struck by what he said about my marriage. “Should I look for another wife?” I asked jokingly.

“That’s not the problem. Whether you want to or not, there’ll be another woman in your life, because you’re an elephant and can’t have only one. Another weakness of yours is that at times you’re not firm in your decisions, you’re not capable of carrying out what you’ve promised yourself. But remember: the best time of your life is still to come.”
That was a consoling thought.

I liked the man. Of all those I had seen, he was the most detached. Never for a moment did he give the impression of wanting to please me or flatter me. He was not saying: “I see problems, but I can help you solve them.” He offered nothing. It really seemed as if he were reading in a book to which he held the key, and in that reading there would be nothing personal, as if my life had nothing to do with him. His detachment carried conviction.

By now I had learned that these people, who are always talking about the lives of others, are happy deep down to find that someone is interested in theirs. I asked Rajamanikam to tell me about himself. He had no hesitation. It was a Saturday, when normally he was not available. He was seeing me only because I had insisted so much and because he had the time.

He was born in Tamil Nadu, in southern India, and had recently turned seventy-three. His father had been an astrologer, and so had his grandfather. His whole life had been dominated by astrology. “You foreigners say that Indian astrology is six hundred years old, just because it was only six hundred years ago that you realized it existed; but it has been practiced for thousands of years. The Indians themselves give it little thought, they don’t boast of it, but in India there are old books, copied from other older books, that describe how horoscopes should be
made according to the various epochs. In our own epoch, which began 5,995 years ago, the moment to consider is the one when a person is born; in a previous epoch what counted was the moment of the first sexual intercourse. That determined a person’s destiny.”

Rajamanikam said that astrology was a science based on mathematical calculations. The problem was that these calculations had to be exact. It was very important, for example, to know at what time the sun rose in the place of a person’s birth, because that influences his fate. He said, too, that the various calculations should be interpreted according to the culture and social environment of a person and the times in which he lives.

According to Rajamanikam there are ancient books in which it is predicted that men will travel among all the planets; others forecast floods, earthquakes and other cataclysms in the different regions of the world for a thousand years to come. He said that there was a time when the Indians could determine the sex of a child according to the position of the couple at the moment of conception. He said that in temple-building they knew the nature and influence of the stars so well that they could calculate, for example, the hour when a certain stone could be most easily lifted. Legends, myths. But perhaps there was a grain of truth in them, I thought as I listened.

Rajamanikam had begun taking an interest in astrology at the age of twelve. He read his father’s books, but his father did not approve. He said that astrology did not pay, and that to make a career in British India a boy had to go to school. To force him to go, his father beat him. One day a
sanyassin
, one of those holy vagabonds who have renounced worldly goods and go about clad only in a loincloth, living on charity, passed through their village. The
sanyassin
looked at Rajamanikam’s palm and told his father that the lad would not study as he wished, but even so would become famous among people of other castes, tribes and races, that he would be carried about on a palanquin, and would marry a woman with a mole on her breast.

“It all came true,” said Rajamanikam. He studied astrology in a nearby village. In 1938 he emigrated to Singapore, where he was known by people of all races and religions. As for the palanquin, he laughed, he now drove a Volvo.

“And the wife with the mole?” I asked.

It happened when the Japanese occupied Singapore. All the unmarried young men were being rounded up and sent to build the Burma railway, known as the “death railway.” So Rajamanikam had to find a wife quickly. A matchmaker offered him one who was perfect, but she did not have the mole. Time was pressing, the matchmaker continued searching, and finally found a girl who had one. They were married. Just before they celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, the wife suddenly died and Rajamanikam fell ill. “The only regret I have is that I didn’t die with her,” he said. Another of those cases in which love is not the point of departure but of arrival.

I asked Rajamanikam if he had ever cast his wife’s or his own horoscope, and if he had been able to foresee the events in his own life.

“An astrologer is like a doctor. If he falls ill, if he needs an operation, he must go to another doctor,” he said. After the
sanyassin
he had never had his fortune told by anyone, because his life was guided and protected by Durga. So saying, he turned his eyes upon a picture of the goddess seated on a tiger.

He told me a number of stories about people he had saved by putting them on their guard against certain dangers, and of others who had not listened to him. The best story, I thought, was Rajamanikam himself—so solid and serene, so sure of what he read in the book of other people’s lives.

I thanked him and left an envelope with my “offering.” I stepped out of the house as if on tiptoe. The man had made an impression on me.

He had also made me very hungry. A few steps away I came across a working-class restaurant, and sat down at one of the tables. In a big room with a cement floor there were several stalls, each with a Chinese cooking his own specialty. The customers looked into the boiling pots and chose what they wanted. I had a good soup of rice noodles with soya bean sprouts and some very thinly sliced chicken liver.

The whole neighborhood was perfect: clean and tidy, the grass was cut, the trees pruned, the drains cleared, the streets without a scrap of paper or a cigarette butt. The people spoke in low voices as if they did not want to disturb each other. It was pleasant, but stifling at the same time.

My every attempt at reaching Jakarta by boat had failed. The only way to get out of Singapore was to take a ferry to the nearest Indonesian island, Pulau Bintan, and try to find another lift from there. I had no choice. I felt more and more oppressed by claustrophobia, as if Singapore had me by the throat. When I paid my bill and lifted my backpack onto my shoulders, it felt like a real liberation.

Not even the taxi driver who asked why I was taking the ferry, how many days I had been in Singapore and what I had bought could spoil the joy of leaving that air-conditioned island. On the way to Keppel Pier the taxi passed near the house we had lived in for years, but I did not dare go and look at it. I feared I would find it changed, destroyed, remolded in plastic, or simply “deleted” like a file in the memory of a computer. I wanted to remember Singapore as it had once been.

I
had been looking forward to the joy of sailing away from Singapore, to the renewed sense of freedom the sea would give me; but it was not to be. Keppel Pier was not the sort of port I had imagined. It was a space station, with everything performed electronically, and my ferry was a spaceship—flat, aerodynamic, extremely fast, and hermetically sealed so that we could enjoy the air conditioning. It seemed that in Singapore even the sea had been recycled and sterilized, as if they had added dye to produce that magnificent jade-green color.

We passed the island of Sentosa, which I remembered as a wild and barren place. Now it was a tropical paradise, or rather a copy of a tropical paradise. Pure white sand had been imported by the shipload from Indonesia, hundreds of palm trees had been planted around the new hotels, and “old” British blockhouses had been rebuilt from scratch to be admired by unsuspecting tourists as mementoes of the Second World War.

I was the only foreigner on the ferry. Apart from a few Singaporean Chinese, all the other passengers were Chinese from Indonesia—provincials returning from a visit to the capital. Wedged in the middle of a row of seats, I tried to read a complacent article in that morning’s
Straits Times
, the Singapore newspaper, about Asia’s “economic miracle” and the inability of even informed Westerners to understand it.

I experienced the effects of that miracle all around me. From the moment the ferry left the pier I was deafened by a cacophony of music, howls and whistles from various television sets, each with its own kung-fu film of incredible violence, with murders, stabbings, stranglings, blood. This was accompanied by songs from a video and beeps from a large number of electronic games in the passengers’ laps. My neighbor, a Chinese woman of about thirty, loaded with gold jewelry, was so
absorbed in her game that she totally ignored her small son as he repeatedly poked his fingers into my ears. They were all Chinese of the new diaspora generation which I was getting to know: self-confident, vulgar, exhibitionist. The modest uniform of the old days—white singlet and black shorts—had given way to the floral shirt, beeper and mobile phone, comb and fat wallet in the back pockets of the trousers and lots of gold around wrists, necks and fingers. Everyone carried a “project” in his head, to develop, to build, or to cover in cement.