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A certain Jeet Singh walked into the office at what would have seemed to be the right time, as the colleagues are all away in Ipoh for a wedding.

I was serving another customer but this ragged man,  with overgrown grey beard and curly grey hair patiently waited for me, before he showed me his extended namecard, which was the size of a regular wallet and it was actually a laminated piece of paper.

He wore a smart looking, pressed shirt and light grey pants, and sort of walked and talked funny.

He mentioned that he was from Bombay and said that he’s a fortune teller, when I asked if he was looking for anything to print.

Naturally, like anyone who’s trying to watch the Avatar movie in the office (when customers are gone) would have, I would have chased politely ushered him to the nearest MRT station but something he said made me ponder.

“You have good face. Lucky face.You work good, you like. But your heart not here.” — I had to take a second, third and fourth look at this fella.

The words he used were cliche, and were like copywriting 101, where any good copywriter will use them weapons against you.

It’s that effective, so I listened further to this fella.

Okay firstly, I believe in luck, but fortune telling, to me, is more entertainment/gimmick than a blueprint to live your life.

But it’s boring in the office, and this was something different anyway.

So we took a seat, and he started to do his thing, like writing stuffs on a piece of paper, which we later tore up, and him writing the usual stuffs here and there.

I would not be so freaked out if not for something that occured at the end of his ‘show’, but in the beginning everything flowed naturally.

For starters, he told me to write a few things on a small piece of paper and he wrote something on another smaller piece of paper.

At this point, we didn’t see what both of us were writing, after which we folded our papers, twice, and exchanged them, where he beckoned me to keep his folded paper in my pocket, while he shredded my piece of paper right in front of me.

It was now in really small unrecognisable pieces, and before I could check if it was really mine (in full suspicions of how these gimmicks usually use proxy for maximum effects) he passed it back to me and told me to put to one side.

So we went back and forth and gradually he revealed bits and pieces of my information, that were written on my small piece of paper, like my date of birth, a girl’s name (heh), and some other numbers, and it wouldn’t have bothered me if not for the fact that everything he mentioned was the stuffs that I wrote on the piece of paper.

Lucky? Maybe, but definitely sneaky. (Did I mention that when I passed him my folded piece of paper he tore it up instantly?)

Just wow. Freaky Saturday afternoon indeed, and up to this point, I was already entertained and even if I wasn’t an advocate of fortune telling, his predictions were catching up on me.

The crescendo of his performance has yet to come. He saved the best for last.

Remember at the start the piece of paper that he wrote, and then passed to me, which I kept in my pocket?

Okay, towards the end of the ‘show’, he told me to pick 4 numbers from one to nine, and pick a colour.

So I RANDOMLY plucked the numbers and the colour and he asked me if these numbers had any relation to anything, but I insisted that they were totally random.

I thought I’d just given this guy a hard time, and he finally couldn’t ‘decode’ my mind, but I was wrong.

Yep, if you can’t guess by now, those very numbers, that very colour which I RANDOMLY picked off my mind towards the end (after a good 10 mins or so), was actually written in his piece of paper at the very start, and all the way they were in my pocket!!!

Wahhhhhhhhhhh!

Talk about freakyness! No better way to be entertained on a Saturday afternoon than having a Bombay fortune teller predict your fortune eh?

Anyway, even if I didn’t believe in mind-reading predictions, at least his last few words felt consolatory, as he recapped on the stuffs that we went through.

“Remember 20 April, Your love Good. Jan 2010. You lucky.You live long. 79 years. Good life. You die natural. You die at home. Good life. Rich life, but not money rich. Bad luck go. Good luck come.”

Then he gave me a tiny yellowy-amber stone and said,  “Your lucky stone.”

He then wrote 50 / 70 / 90 and asked me to pick one. When I picked one he told me that I can pay him that amount.

What a sly fella. Good entertainment but asking for $50 as the least amount to pay for something that was never even agreed upon the start.

I had only $27 with me then, and he’s asking for $50?

Then I gave him $20 and a keychain, and he left.

Funny, he couldn’t see that coming eh?