The second time I attempted to have my palm read was in a village where I was teaching English in Thailand near the Burma border. The palm reader (I will call him Jim for convenience sake) was more than a palm reader but I will reduce him to that for the sake of this story. Anyway, it was my birthday and my gift to myself was knowledge of my fortune.
Like everyone in the village, Jim lived in a bamboo and wood house with a grass thatched roof. He was a sort of mentor/ big brother type to one of my students, who was the one who brought me to Jim’s house and served as translator. Pleasantries aside, I showed Jim my palm.
He pointed at a small freckle on the ring finger of my left hand. “This means you can kill a man by striking him.”
It wasn’t the fortune I was expecting, but, still good to know my hands — or hand rather, just the left one — is a deadly weapon.
“What will I be?” I asked him. Jim leaned back slightly and looked at me. I’d been referring to a career or even just a job. Will I be a judge? A teacher? A writer? I hope he sees “writer”!
“You will be this,” he smiled slightly as he gestured his hand towards me, not quite as aggressive as pointing and not quite as subtle as a head nod. I wonder now whether Jim saw my disappointment in that moment. It would be years before I could begin to understand what a gift it was that Jim had given me. At the time I saw it as a non-answer. I was asking him to look into the future and see what exterior I will present. He was seeing into the present moment and seeing me as myself. And in this way, he was also seeing into the future. In some sense I was what I always had been and what I always would be. There is some essential “Rhena-ness” that has always been here and always will be here.
But in that moment, I wasn’t able to understand that. Mostly, I was just disappointed that I couldn’t get an answer.
At some point, I presented my palm to him and he peered into it.
“Have you ever had your palm read before?” my student asked me on Jim’s behalf.
“Yes,” I told them. A year or so prior, I had taken a short trip to India. In a hotel lobby, a man was offering to read palms and I’d taken him up on it, one of the bell hops kindly serving as translator.
“Did the palm reader do this to you?” Jim asked me as slid one hand over his flattened palm.
Had he done such a thing? I wondered to myself. It seemed that in the moment that Jim showed me the gesture, I recalled the man in India doing just such a thing to my hand. Or was this some small trick of memory? Had Jim doing the same created a new memory in my head? Neurons seemed to overlap and twist together in my brain and it’s funny how easily I go along with this potential remaking of my memories.
“Maybe?” I said. “I don’t really remember.”
“When he did this,” Jim explained, “he took your luck.” Or maybe the better translation would have been fortune or even karma. “And I can’t read your palm.” So this man in India stole my luck and put some sort of block on my palm to prevent future readers from reading? He’d censored my future? And how had Jim been able to tell this? Was my body, my aura, my spirit marked in some way? “Victim of karmic theft!”
Since that time, I’ve sometimes wondered about those fortune tellers. In my mom cynical moments, I think, “Had Jim really been able to tell that I’d had my palm read before or was it just a good guess?” When I’ve had a run of difficulties, I’ve thought back to fortune teller #1. Had he taken my luck? Was this like some sort of curse? What did I need to do to undo it?
And then I read The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras.
Specifically, I read this passage:
Nobody wants the truth, but everyone wants a story, Mami said.
Tell yourself a different story, Mami now tells me.
My whole life, Mami has been trying to teach me: there is no such thing as a curse.
More and more, I understand what she means.
Everyone suffers.
To believe in a curse is to believe oneself above suffering.
No one is above suffering.
You can only believe in a curse if you believe in being spared.
And there it is: the Four Noble Truths. And there, also, is this idea that I’ve been struggling with: that I can somehow “outwit” suffering. That my suffering was created when Fortune Teller #1 stole my luck (or maybe it was my karma he took) and the only way to resolve my suffering would be to either steal it back or re-build everything that he took. Who would have thought that living with my suffering would begin with accepting it? Well, honestly, Buddha would have (and did) think it as did Ingrid Rojas Contreras and her mother.
I recently heard one of my writing mentors, Lori L Tharps, repeat one of her refrains: “memoir is magic.” I believe it. The Man Who Could Move Clouds re-affirmed that belief.
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