The special power of the fortune-teller

smoking a cigarette tapped my boyfriend on the shoulder and said: “It will tell your future, yes?” My boyfriend frowned and tapped his ear. The teenager repeated himself and added with an exacerbated smile: “It knows your life, okay?”

And as if on cue, the crowd was muted and the rusted, red soothsayer delivered his first prediction in what we assumed was Ladakhi. The recipient of the prediction, a wiry man wearing a buttoned-up Levi’s jacket, laughed, throwing his head back, but seemed worried when no one laughed with him.

“Now is your chance,” the teenager shouted while pushing us to the front and the increasingly frantic crowd accepted us as though we were an exotic sacrifice. Accepting the change from the candyfloss, the robot’s owner nodded solemnly then carefully pressed a selection of buttons on the robot’s tummy. The Nostradamus began speaking very swiftly. Before I could try “Will I be rich?” in elaborate hand signals, the owner offered an apologetic smile and started packing up. The crowd disappeared quickly, leaving only a few yawning grannies, who gazed at us with a look of disappointment usually reserved for relatives.

“Was our future that bleak?” I wondered. “We’re obviously screwed,” said my boyfriend, chuckling. Before I could reply, the teenager was back to tell us the robot had skipped our prediction in order to remind the owner of its impending doom by offering in a monotone “Malfunction. Please change batteries.” — © Heather Clancy

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