A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  On New Year’s Day, 1993, I imposed on myself a second ban, besides the one on planes: not to stay in any of the usual modern hotels, all indistinguishable one from another, no matter what country you are in.

  In Ipoh I found one for $5 a night, very Chinese, dirty, littered with cigarette butts, and with an ancestral altar on each floor. The fire escape was inaccessible, being used for storage, and all the rooms had several beds. But even Ipoh was undergoing modernization. I went to visit the oldest Chinese temple in the city, and found that it had just been completely rebuilt in concrete. I went to see the grottoes in the limestone mountain, where the first Buddhists in the area had lived, only to find that these too had been plastered with cement and lit with neon. The statues in the gorges were new and shiny. The old ones, blackened by incense and age, had been removed.

  I arrived in Kuala Lumpur by bus as night was falling. I had not been there for years, and was surprised to find that the city had acquired a Muslim character of its own. The Malays had managed to give a new face to the capital and erase its Chinese look.

  I landed up in one of those hotels with dirty carpets, plates left in the corridors after meals, and curtainless showers; but at least I was spared having to view the world as if through the glass of an aquarium. I opened the windows, letting in all the noises and smells of Kuala Lumpur.

  The hotel’s owners and all the employees were Chinese. The only Malay was the doorman who carried the luggage of the guests, who were also Chinese. After about two words of conversation he too started telling me about the problem that divides Malaysia: race.

  “Look,” he said with a sweeping wave of the hand. “The skyscrapers are Chinese, the market stalls are Chinese, the shops are Chinese, the supermarkets are Chinese … So tell me: is this Malaysia?”

  Just then a motorcycle with a sidecar pulled up in front of the hotel. The rider took off his helmet and set to work. In the space of a few minutes he had turned the sidecar into a miniature restaurant, with two gas rings and a table spread with tempting specialties on little trays. People stopped and selected skewers with meatballs on them, pieces of octopus, slices of liver, sausages and chicken wings. He would boil them in a pot, then dip them in red, yellow or orange sauces lined up in little dishes. The customers ate standing, and paid by the number of empty skewers they had in their hands. It was all clean, attractive and well organized. The man was Chinese. Chinese were all the people I saw in the streets, busily running here and there on all sorts of errands.

  With such competition the poor Malay felt he would never get anywhere.

  10/SORES UNDER THE VEIL

  I had been in Kuala Lumpur for barely twelve hours when I was invited to the home of the prime minister … along with millions of others. I had read in the paper that on Hari Raja, the holiday when traditionally every Malay opens his home to all, even the head of government’s official residence would be open to anyone who wished to visit, with him there to receive them. And this was the day in question.

  A taxi set me down at the residence’s wide-open gates, and I entered. An enormous crowd milled around the platters heaped with rice, meatballs and pancake rolls. Guests were filling their plates and going to eat on the lawn. Others were queuing to shake the hand of Mr. Mahatir, who stood with his wife in the middle of an air-conditioned salon with signs on the walls requesting guests not to smoke.

  The overwhelming majority of the prime minister’s guests were Malay, all dressed for the occasion in lustrous, brightly colored silks. The men, even the little boys, wore blouses and trousers with mini-sarongs over them like little skirts, and the Muslim black cap on their heads. The women wore the two-piece garment which has become the national costume: a floor-length skirt with a modest tunic down to the knees. They all looked as if they had stepped out of a fairy tale that began: “Once upon a time there was a rich land in which the Malay people lived happily and peacefully …” They all appeared well-fed, slow-moving, a bit vain, trying to look severe, but really quite mild. I grasped the gist of their fairy tale: “One day some colonialists came from a faraway land, but the country was rich and the Malays continued to live serenely. But when the colonialists went away, the Chinese remained in Malaysia, and there was no more peace for the Malays.”

  For centuries they had lived in villages, kampongs, under their sultans, who were both spiritual and political leaders. It was the need to compete with the Chinese that forced them to give up their pleasant life in the kampongs and move to the cities. The man who stood in the air-conditioned salon, shaking one hand after another, was the great strategist of this operation. His intention was to ensure that Malaysia would remain Malay and at the same time become a modern country.

  The previous governments had likewise tried to protect the interests of the bumiputras—the sons of the soil—and to keep the Chinese at bay, but the results had been debatable. They had ruled that Malays must be involved in every Chinese company, and the Chinese had brought in some compliant Malays to act as dummies; they had imposed Malay as the national language, lowering the cultural level all round; they had limited the number of places for Chinese at the universities, so the Chinese had gone abroad to study, returning better educated and more aggressive than the Malays who had remained at home.

  Mahatir, on coming to power in 1981, realized that further measures would be required to get to the root of the problem. His aim was to remodel the Malays, reinforcing their identity, and to marginalize the Chinese, while taking every care not to drive them out of the country: 70 percent of the private economy was in their hands, and their sudden departure might be fatal. Mahatir’s idea was to dilute the Chinese presence through a huge increase in the population. Malaysia has only twenty million inhabitants; Mahatir wants seventy million by the year 2020. The fact that as Muslims the Malays can have four wives, and their rate of increase is double that of the Chinese, should produce the desired results. The strategy is a reversal of the process of ethnic cleansing.

  When it came to remodeling the Malays to give them a stronger identity, no longer influenced by a century of life alongside the Chinese, Mahatir turned to religion, pushing the country toward a Muslim orthodoxy it had never known before. For someone like me, who had been away from Malaysia for years, the changes wrought by this mass “reconversion” to Islam were surprising. Apart from the abandonment of traditional female clothing and the introduction of the veil, there were Muslim innovations in every aspect of life. Every hotel room throughout Malaysia is required by law to have an arrow on the ceiling to indicate the direction of Mecca; every restaurant has a special section reserved for Muslim food; each community has a “Muslim public eye,” a sort of religious spy to check on people’s behavior; the newspapers discuss what is “decent” according to Islam; and the bookshops sell manuals prescribing how a good Malay should behave.

  I eyed the crowd of Malays in Mahatir’s garden, the house, the city’s skyscrapers, shopping centers and luxury hotels. Despite the Muslim patina, Malaysia struck me as not all that different from Buddhist Thailand, or from what the Chinese would have made of it had the country been in their hands. Despite its claim to be different and its anti-Western rhetoric, Mahatir’s model of modernity was like all the others: a copy of the West.

  I joined the long queue to pay my respects to the prime minister, and eventually my turn came. “Just imagine how many more hands you’ll have to shake when there are seventy million Malays!” I said as he shook mine. “By then I won’t be around anymore,” Mahatir instantly replied.

  There were not many foreigners in the queue, and my having reached that point led to other invitations. By the end of the day I had been in the homes of some high government officials and three ministers. That too was an experience: their houses were more or less identical, modern and kitsch, with no character, no style or tradition, stuffed with electronic gadgets and ornaments bought by credit card in London and New York.

  The culture of the kampongs was finished, even if certain festivals
like Hari Raja were still being observed.

  In the days that followed I got down to my article on the Chinese, but another topic had begun to simmer in my mind: the long-term consequences of the Muslim “reconversion” of Malaysia. With the help of an old Malay colleague of Indian origin, M.G.G. Pillai, I interviewed some academics, a couple of ex-politicians, and a possible future prime minister. The picture that emerged was disturbing. Using Islam as a political tool to strengthen Malay identity had been like letting the genie out of the lamp. This genie was now at large, growing with a logic of its own that was not necessarily what the government leaders had in mind. Young Malays who had been sent to study in Islamic universities abroad returned influenced by fundamentalism, and were highly critical of the way the country and the religion were being run. The Malay armed forces, once steeped in British tradition, were starting to change their character under the influence of young officers who were more disposed to obeying the Koran than their superiors. I noticed that the women around Mahatir and in the ministries wore no veil, unlike almost all the girls at the university. The government left them free to choose, but the young Islamic radicals imposed it on female students. Using Islam as a tool to unravel and divide the Malays from the Chinese now threatened to divide the Malays from the Malays. Mahatir was particularly concerned at the increase in Islamic sects, one especially, Al Arqam, which was popular among the young.

  My journalist friend M.G.G. Pillai telephoned to arrange a visit to their headquarters. M.G.G. was invaluable to me. He knew everyone and remembered everything, which did not always make him popular. Shortly before my arrival, he had found himself once again on Singapore’s list of “undesirables.” To the diplomat who informed him of this fact, M.G.G. had replied: “Never mind. I’ve already done my shopping.”

  The famous fortune-teller whom Kaka had mentioned in Penang and who held court in one of the city’s big hotels was booked for every hour of every day for the next three months. This made me all the keener to see him, and I asked his secretary to let me know if someone should cancel an appointment. As I did so, I couldn’t help wondering if my eagerness to see the man was related to my research, or if I were not becoming addicted to “witchcraft.”

  Really, I reflected, if one were not careful one might gradually poison one’s life with this uncertainty, requiring a regular “fix” in the form of vague pronouncements from one of those characters. Has so-and-so said something positive? Something negative? Then a second opinion is called for. And then a third. Dissatisfied with a palmist? Well, try an astrologer, and then someone who does tarot cards … It never ends, and as a last resort, to justify one’s own credulity, one may get to the point of bringing about what one of the humbugs has “foreseen.”

  You have to look at the world from the fortune-teller’s point of view, too. The power he has! He shuts his eyes and says: “I see that you’re a person of such-and-such a character. Within a year, this, that or the other will happen to you, within two years something else.”

  Someone with no respect for other people’s humanity might amuse himself by experimenting with this power. He could go up to someone at a bus stop and say: “Excuse me, sir, but you must be ultracareful. I see in your face that on the twenty-third of next month you’ll have a nasty accident. I see it, take care!” Until the twenty-third of the next month the poor dupe will have no peace! And if he is told that to avoid the misfortune he must run around the kitchen table three times every night, he may actually do it—eventually, half-jokingly, when no one is looking. “You never know,” he will say.

  The mere fact of having formulated the threat is enough to make it seem real, and sets the mind reeling—much more than a prediction of winning the lottery! The positive goes in one ear and out the other, but the negative leaves a creeping doubt, a nagging uneasiness; because fear is at the very root of the human condition.

  Something of the sort once happened to my daughter Saskia. She had come to Bangkok, and went to visit a Thai neighbor of ours. There she met an odd woman, frustrated and a mass of problems, who wanted to read her palm. Saskia did not know how to refuse. The woman told her that no one would ever truly love her, that she would not marry and would have no children. For a beautiful girl of twenty it was like a curse; for that unhappy woman perhaps it was just a way of taking indirect revenge on life.

  Saskia said she did not take it seriously, but I knew that the witch’s words would weigh on her mind, and I was afraid she might unconsciously try to make the facts tally with the “prophecy.” I certainly had not forgotten Saskia’s experience when I decided to investigate fortune-tellers and try to understand a little more of how their world works.

  I telephoned the Malay wife of a high official, a woman I had known for years and who had offered to help me during my stay, and told her I wanted to see a fortune-teller.

  “A fortune-teller? Of course,” she said. “I sometimes go to an Indian woman …” Another surprise: she too, I would have thought, was “above suspicion.”

  The Indian woman lived in a working-class district of Kuala Lumpur. After passing the shops of blacksmiths, glaziers and ironmongers, we came to a very modest house. Down we went to the floor below, and stepped into a small room with a cement floor. One wall was dominated by a statue of the Indian god Shiva. At its feet were some small trays of flower petals, an oil lamp, and packets of money left by previous client-patients. The room was filled with the sweetish odor of Indian incense.

  The woman was dressed in a cyclamen-colored sari. She had gray hair, a broad smile, and very intense black eyes. Originally from Madras, she had obviously been a beautiful woman, and still had an air of self-confidence and a majestic bearing. In 1969 her only son had been killed in a road accident, and since that time she had had the gift of sight. “God gives and God takes away,” she said, turning toward the statue with joined hands and a slight inclination of the head.

  There followed the usual procedure: date and time of birth. But she made no calculations. She looked at my hands, my face, then went into a sort of trance, and began: “You’re a sincere person; if you give your word you keep it. You have already made your life. You have gambled, and it has gone well. Now you are thinking of retiring from the world. In your previous life you lived on the island of Sri Lanka. You were of very high caste. This time you were born in a very humble house, but you still behave as if you were of royal blood, and you are at ease with whites and British people.” (She spoke to me as if I were an Indian from the days of the Raj.) “For years you’ve been moving about from country to country, but soon you’ll go to a particular one and stay put; but it won’t be the one where you were born.”

  India, I thought. Since telling her my date of birth I had not opened my mouth. The woman continued, holding my hands tightly in hers. “You should go and live in Sri Lanka again, or in India, but not in a village; preferably in a big city in the north. Delhi would be right for you. If you find a place to settle in, then settle. You’ve wasted a great deal of money, you’ve given it away to anyone who asked for it. That’s why you aren’t rich, though the beggars who see you on the street think you are. You have a family…”

  She went on in that way for a while, saying nothing particularly wrong or particularly remarkable. She said that in 1997 I must be very careful about my travel documents (perhaps some problem about going to Hong Kong to see the Chinese take the colony back, I thought), and that I must always wear white (as I always did).

  The woman had no particular method. She was simply “psychic,” and by going into a trance managed to “feel,” partly through touch, the person whose hand she was holding. In my case she may have felt that I was there from mere curiosity, that I had no problems requiring her help. Once she put herself on my wavelength, so to speak, she found that I had no anxieties that she could get hold of. I failed to inspire her. Only when she asked me if I had any questions, and I asked what would be the fate of my daughter, did she become animated.

  “What’s her na
me?”

  “Saskia,” I said, and the woman began to smile. She stood up as if to touch her, and produced a physical description of Saskia as if she were actually there in front of her. And perhaps in a way she was. At the moment when I pronounced her name, my mind had filled with images, conjuring up a Saskia that she saw and described. Possible? I think so. The existence of a “language of the mind” may explain such cases. People who know each other well, who live together for a long time, develop this kind of language. How else can one explain something that keeps happening to Angela and me? For example, we are driving on a motorway; neither of us says anything for miles and miles, and then suddenly one of us says: “Do you remember that time in Australia … ?” And just at that moment the other was opening his or her mouth to say exactly the same thing. It has happened to us too many times to be pure chance.

  With regard to Saskia, the woman answered in an “Indian” way. She said that the right age for her to marry would be after her twenty-third birthday, and that it was up to me to choose a good husband for her—best of all some sort of technician, so that if they wished they could emigrate to America, Canada or Singapore.

  After we had paid and left, my friend told me she was disappointed; the woman had been much better on other occasions. She told me about someone else whom she had brought to this fortune-teller, a high government official who had lost his job because of a scandal. He was too old to embark on a new career, but too young to retire. He could not find work, and was terribly depressed. The Indian woman told him that he was passing through a period of great misfortune, and it was absolutely useless trying to do anything about it. He was to wait until a certain date. In the meantime he was to pray and put lotus flowers in front of the statue of Shiva every day. Around the stated date he would meet a person who would offer him a good job. Relieved, the man prayed and offered the flowers, and when around the appointed time he went to meet the head of a big industrial complex, he had regained so much self-confidence that he was offered an excellent job. If things had not worked out that time, the fortune-teller would have found a justification and suggested other things for the man to do until his next interview. Sooner or later, luck always changes. It is just a matter of waiting, and of having someone—a friend, a psychoanalyst, or a fortune-teller—with whom to share the anxiety.