A day of palmistry

I was never a real believer of chiromancy. I mean the idea of someone being able to see the future by reading my palm always seemed a bit farfetched to me. But the shocking number of people who believe and swear by palmistry got me wondering whether there could be something real to it after all.

I figured if anyone could do it, so could I. And whilst there are different schools for palmistry and techniques you can acquire through months of learning, I decided to skip it all and went straight to my teacher for everything – wikihow. In about ten steps, wikihow taught me the art of palmistry and if you were wondering, yes, there were a lot of instructions on how to read hands. 

I guess I wasn't really ready to learn the whole process. I just wanted to make ridiculous predictions to see if I got any right. Something down the lines of, “your jeans are old” or “you were once an annoying kid” or even, “I know what you did last night.” I was sure one of those would be a home run. 

If that wasn't enough, I also had awesome one-liners ready to awe my unsuspecting victims. Stuff like, "the cosmic forces of the universe ebb and flow and the mystic mirror of your own mind provides the answer," would definitely leave them a little shocked. But even before I did all that, I needed to come up with a few awesome questions. You know, questions I could ask that would help me fill in some of the gaps about the life of the person whose palm I'd be reading.

Questions like, “Do Lipton Tea employees take coffee breaks?” or “If Fed Ex and UPS were to merge, would they call it Fed UP?” and finally, “what happens when you get scared half to death, twice?” I was sure that these were gold. 

It also occurred to me that Palmistry was a lot like magic or poker. Well, at least in some aspects. In magic, you need to manipulate your audience and in poker you need to be able to read people and watch for their reactions. I was sure that you'd need to do both those things when you are reading a palm. So finally, after consulting a magician friend and playing some Facebook poker to ready myself, I was done preparing. All that was left was to set up the most epic palm-reading environment.

It had to be super legit so I had to pull out all the stops. The first thing on my list was a turban which I would match with long colourful robes. I would also disguise myself with a fake beard and sport a fake and terrible foreign accent so as to emit a mysterious and weird vibe. I also took time out to do some meditating because I did not want to break character halfway through my reading. 

And finally to set the mood, I set up a tent behind my house, got a table and covered it with Aarong patterns, got a crystal ball, some candles and covered the whole inside of the tent with rich silk materials. To top it all off, I got a smoke machine, some speakers to emit scary sounds and an auto tune microphone. 

I was ready. I had invited a group of my university friends to be my first test subjects and they were on their way here. I was nervous but to steady myself, I turned on the Pokemon theme song. And before I knew it, they were here. 

Sabrina, an old friend, was going to be the first one coming through the tent. I readied myself, turned on the smoke machine, started playing the song “echoes” in the background and summoned her in. She came in and I invited her to sit down without speaking a word. I was so ready to make all sorts of predictions about love, life, health and much more! Then, suddenly, I started to get woozy and before I knew it, I blacked out.

The next day, I woke up in my room with a note stuck to my forehead. Turns out the smoke had gassed me out like a SWAT unit and I had fainted. Beside me lay a T-shirt which said “I heart Palmistry” and on top of that was another note from my friends that read, “This T-shirt marks the retirement of legendary palmist – nav.”

In all seriousness, palmistry whether it's real or fake, requires a lot of showmanship. You need to be good at reading people and be able to guess and infer from the details based on signals or clues given by the other person. But be aware for it is definitely not for the faint-hearted and I mean that quite literally!

By Naveed Naushad