The Mystery of Palmistry

I was a very thin teenager. Perhaps, “painfully thin”.

I had gone to Bangalore to attend a wedding. After the wedding I visited an aunt of mine. Her husband dabbled in palmistry. He casually ordered me (he was that type of a man) to show him my hand and I meekly thrust my hand out. He brought a powerful lens and studied my hand.

After some time, he asked me, “Do you suffer from constipation?” I was impressed. I did suffer from it frequently. I nodded apologetically. As if it was my fault.

He growled, I will teach you an exercise and if you do them regularly, (the heavy emphasis was on the ‘if’, mind you) “it” will go. He taught me sit-ups.

I surprised myself. I did do them regularly.

I was very bookish. I was so bookish that my father had to drive me out of the house, in the evenings. (Oh, I am ever so grateful to him). Now, I developed some interest in my own body and learnt a few more exercises. Push-ups, pull-ups and many other free hand stuff. As coincidence would have it, “Science Today” published an article called the “daily dozen” which taught a dozen exercises to keep one reasonably fit. I started doing them all except the one with the bar bells. I did not have one.

After a few months I went to my tailor to get some new shirts stitched. He enquired, “The last measurements?” I said, “No! New ones!”, proudly. I can imagine him suppressing a smirk as he took out his measuring tape. He took the chest measurement and gawped. He checked his tape to see if he was holding it right. He was. He rummaged through his drawer of his cutting table, fished out his note book and located my earlier measurements. There was a 4 inch difference, in the chest measurements. (Tailors did use inches in Metric India then)

“Ye kyaa baa! Kyaa hogaya there ko” he started off in his “chaste” Mysore Urdu, forgetting that I did not speak or understand that language. I could still divine the gist of it. The wonder in his eyes spoke for him. I had a semblance of a masculine figure now in comparison to my, perhaps, 28-24-30 figure earlier.

Well, a little later I went to Bangalore again and my uncle promptly accosted me and asked me, “how are you and how is your constipation?”. It was then that I realised that I had not had an incident of that in the intervening year or so. I was amazed. (We do tend to take our good health or fortune for granted and crib when we lose it) I told him that I had not had it for a year. He looked me head to toe with a satisfied smile. He was genuinely happy and proud. He was in deed fond of me.

I have often wondered how he knew I was prone to constipation. Was he so ‘good’ a palmist?

I do not think so. He was, in fact, a body builder in his younger days. My father had actually seen him pull a car with a rope as exercise! I had seen him bend fairly formidable looking iron rods with his hands in his workshop. His understanding of the human body must have told him of my state as soon as he saw my palms. It used to be clammy, pale and had red spots.

Then on, I have never suffered that particular ailment again.

After all, it was my fault that I had constipation. I was not taking care of my own self!

So much for the power of palmistry . . .