She looks at you, her lips inert, but her eyes penetrating yours, as if attempting to reach the depths of your soul. You can smell the sea, hear it roar in the background, feel the wind in your hair and yet hear her voice clear above all sounds. She claims to be able to read the chapters of your book of life and get a glimpse of what the future holds for you. Like assembled pieces of a shattered mirror, fragments of other’s lives form the crust of Murugammal Kadruvel’s livelihood as a fortune teller.
The salty sea breeze, the feel of the soft sand, the roar of the sea and beseeching voices offering to tell fortunes; Marina beach is not just a picnicker’s paradise but a fortune teller’s turf as well. White hair and cheeks lined with age, a weathered nine yard sari and wrinkled hands wielding a wooden rod, were the image of a fortune-teller that I had developed during my six-month old stay in Chennai.
While most of the fortune tellers on the beach were usually well beyond their 50s and spoke rural Tamil, Murugammal Kadiruvel was a window to breaking stereotypes.
“This is our ancestral wealth,” she said, referring to her profession. “Forecast telling has been an inherent part of our lineage, going back 2000 years. My grandmother was a fortune teller, my mother and both my sisters are still in the field.” Though Murugammal spoke fluent Tamil, her family were originally Telegu speakers. The last four generations of her family have been settled in Tamil Nadu. “Hardly anyone in my family knows Telegu now.” she said with a grin.
In her early thirties, wearing a polyester sari, Murugammal’s vocabulary was peppered with many English words. “I have done my schooling till the ninth,” she revealed.
“It is a community-specific and a gender-specific occupation,” she explained. “Only girls from our community are permitted to practice this as a profession. The parents who want their girls to enter the profession visit the community temple when the girl five to ten years of age and take an oath that pledges the girl to Jakamma, the community devi (Goddess). The child has to then observe a fast for 48 hours after which she is granted the kuri, the smooth, well-rounded wooden rod.”
That, such a young child is exposed to responsibilities of such a grave nature was surprising, but Murugammal just shrugged and continued, “Taking the oath does not necessarily mean that the girl has to immediately plunge into the vocation. The oath is just a pledge to the Goddess to seek her blessings. The kuri is symbolic of the Goddess’s approval. The girl has a choice to start practicing whenever she chooses to.”
Murugammal also talked of young children who tell fortunes and predict the future. “I know of two such children who are young fortune tellers. They are revered as divine, by their clients.” However, Murugammal quickly clarified that not everyone who takes the oath, practices! “Many women never practice despite the oath and many enter the business when they are middle-aged. But once you start practicing you cannot withdraw. That is written in the shastras and cannot be defied,” she solemnly declared.
“I do not want my daughter to continue this profession.” She firmly retorted when we were talking about her family. But is she willing to let her ancestral lineage discontinue as a result? “Enough of ‘ancestry’”, she exclaimed. “Both my husband and I want our children to study, and we are determined to continue their education. Jobs can wait, but I do not want my children to be deprived of opportunities to a better future.” She shyly added, “My secret desire is to see both my children as graduates and in good jobs. So, we decided not to take the oath for our daughter.”
Murugammal has been in the fortune telling business only since the past seven years. “I was a housewife before. But then the vocation called.” Muttering that explaining these things would be difficult, she said, “I just felt like taking it up. My heart was telling me to do so.”
She frequently referred to the ‘divinity’ of her profession. “We can tell your fortune if you just tell us your name. We read palms as well, but fortune telling for us essentially means revealing details about your present and future once we know you r name. Our craft is a God-given gift, and we say whatever God tells us through the medium of our hearts.” How did she view her ‘craft’ then, as a God-given gift or a money-yielding profession? “After all everyone needs to eke out a living and this is my means of earning. I feel blessed by the Panchabootham, the five forces of nature (air, wind, fire, water and earth), ” she said.
Murugammal’s probability of getting clients depends entirely on her luck. “I have seen only two clients today,” she says. Sundays, being the most lucrative as the visitors to the beach increase threefold. How does her family react to her sacrificing her Sunday for work? “On weekends, I usually set out for the beach, only after I have sent my husband off for work, and my children to school. Whether to go or not, the choice rests with me, but the choice between gain and loss rest on me as well,” she conveyed adding that her family is very ‘accomodating’.
Murugamma charges Rs 11 for palm reading and Rs 21 for telling fortunes after hearing your name. “If the client looks well-off, I sometimes ask Rs 50 rather than Rs 15, but if a client looks poor, I have sometimes in the past also decreased the rates to Rs 5.” she said without any hint of conceit.
In view of the female monopoly in this vocation, are there any such similar, prescribed vocations for the males? “The men from our community have been traditionally involved in the fortune telling trade as well, involving the use of parrots.” Murugamma’s husband used to be a ‘parrot fortune teller’ as she refers to him, at the time of their marriage and now constructs false ceilings.
Does she ever predict what his life holds for him? “I do, and it turns out to be accurate too, though he never believes me” she sighed, continuing, “just yesterday I had told him that stop drinking, there is a probability that it might cause you some problems. He didn’t listen to me and now is sitting solemnly at home with a stomach upset. He has even vowed to listen to me in the future,” She says with barely concealed glee.
Murugamma says that most of her clients go away satisfied, despite the initial reluctance to either have their fortunes told. Even the non-believers have turned believers she says referring to a Christian couple who gave her Rs 100 instead of the initial Rs 25 that they had vouched for. “In the past year, I have even received three saris from my clients,” she reveals proudly.
There is one person’s fortune she will never read; her own!With a smile she replied, “Just like a doctor cannot operate on himself, a fortune teller cannot tell her own fortune.”
The sun had turned into a hazy ball of fire by the time she had finished and a dull evening sky prepared to bid adieu to it. Before departing, I decide to get my fortune told. “You will live for 77 years, she starts in an orderly manner and continues about the rosy life that I have ahead of me, my flourishing career (with many chances for going abroad, she specifies), my rich, loyal husband and two wonderful kids who will make me proud and finally the brain that God had gifted me with (a man’s brain in a woman’s body, in her words.) My curiosity prompted me to question the much-rehearsed manner of her fortune-telling. “The basic gist remains the same, I just fill in the details specific to each client,” she explained and immediately my mind conjured up the image of the fill-in-the blanks exercises of my childhood.
I do not know whether the fortune will turn out to be true, but as the figure slowly walked away from the sunset I realized that, much as I had forgotten, she hadn’t asked me for any money.
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