February 21, 2023 • 61 mins
Mangesh travels to India to find a horoscope written about him centuries ago and waiting for him in a shop in rural Tamil Nadu... but it isn't long before everything starts going wrong!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
Warning. The following episode includes discussion of magical leaves, prophecies, miracles,
big temples, bigger disappointments, black magic, fresh lime, soda, and
snake astronauts. Sensitive listeners, you've been warned. It's the middle
(00:35):
of August. I've been in India for two minutes and
everything is falling apart. I want the complaint number for
the universe. I want a manager on the line because
this is not what my astrologer, Dr Kumar told me.
What happened. So you're in the right track. Something very
profound is going to happen to you know. I mean
Dr Kumar did predict I'd be going to India for
(00:57):
this show. There are lots of things for you to accomplish,
including foreign travels, So go to India because that is
all the gn in wisdoms. And he also said this
you cannot feel, let's put it as there. Back in April,
(01:21):
I experienced a miracle of astrology. I had walked into
a random astrologer's office and queens and during my session,
the astrologer Dr Kumar had told me something horrible would happen,
and he was right. Exactly one month later, my father
passed away and it changed the trajectory of both this
(01:41):
show and my life. And for many people that would
be enough to make them believe in astrology, but it wasn't.
For me. Astrology had told me what would happen, but
I still had no idea what to do about it.
But there was one place that I really thought could
have and there's these little shops hidden across India that
(02:03):
practice nati astrology. The idea is, your fortune was written
on scrolls centuries ago, and if you can find your scroll,
it'll reveal everything, your past, your future, who's the person
you're supposed to be? Anyway, the moment I decided to
book the trip to see one of these shops, I
called my aunt Someone and asked her to be my fixer.
(02:26):
When I was in high school, Someone or Simonoka and
my uncle Giant let me live and intern with them
in Bombay for a summer. They were running this hot
advertising company called Heartbeat, which had just made huge waves
with this racy condom campaign. Of course, I sat in
(02:51):
on the decidedly less racy creative meetings, which I loved,
pitching ideas and jingles for things like washing rich jeans
and ceiling fans that summer gave high school me a
huge boost of confidence. It had this direct impact on
my co founding a magazine a few years later. But
(03:12):
also hanging with Samonica was just fun. She inspired silliness,
like sometimes she'll just decide it's more enjoyable to have
a conversation like you're singing opera to one another. Today's
shopping list from me coffee jam, a bag of tea,
something sweet, and spaghetti. This will be hot, boring, spreety.
(03:35):
So I'm eager to hang out with her again. Except
somewhere between Bombay's baggage claim and customs, I get this
call right now. I'm shivering away, so I'm so, I'm
really so sorry that you're you're ill. It was really
frustrating because I've arranged everything else. Samonica is waiting for
(03:57):
the doctor to call back, and it's very likely she
has Danae fever. Well, I've been using my mosquito repellent
like it's cologne, and so it's I'm playing it cool
on the phone, but this is me secretly terrified. Not
so much about the diseases though dan gay and COVID
(04:18):
are definitely not great, but more how I'm going to
manage these interviews. If they speak English, I'm fine going alone. Huh,
he only speaks Hindi. This is a problem because marry
Hindi a k a. My Hindi as ship. So I
(04:38):
panic and then I have an idea. What if first
Sun plays translator for me? And I realized this is
a ridiculous question. But for the Nadi guy, is there
any way I could take argin with me. Origin, who's
a few years younger than me, was always a golden child.
He was handsome, sensitive, artistic, and musical. But I lost
(05:01):
track of him in our twenties when he moved to
Dubai and started a career there. And then there was
this period where he fully disappeared, this dark spot which
our family doesn't really talk about. We'll have to ask him. Yeah,
you just call him, Yeah, that could be nice. The
(05:28):
rain pommels the city as I take a cabin, but
I'm happy to see the monsoon. It's both wet and
sunny outside, and everything smells green and earthy as the
rain continues to fall. In the lobby, the hotel doors
are open, and if you look just right between the
swaying ponds and the mist, you can spot the Arabian Sea.
(05:53):
I'm fiddling with my recording equipment when I spot Argent
walking in. I can't tell you how happy I am
to see him. We're both Brayre, both dads. Now, after
a quick embrace, I tell him about the chaos that's
welcomed me, how he saved me, because I feel like
(06:14):
that's my entire trip, is like everything's falling apart slowly.
You know. The charm of India is that even if
everything's breaking, now everything's fine. You know, everyone has a
very nice, relaxed kind of attitude like this happens. Yeah, Well,
you can't take life so seriously. There's a phrase in
India which loosely translates to don't worry things happen. You
(06:41):
hear it a lot because India is unbridled. No matter
how much you try to will it, it runs on
its own schedule. And that's wonderfully easy to embrace when
you're on vacation or not responsible for what happens. But
it's a little more difficult when you're on an impossible
quest to determine what you should and shouldn't believe for
the rest of your life, and you've given yourself two
(07:03):
weeks to do that. But that's why people come to
India right, to go on some sort of spiritual retreat
and find themselves. God, I'm such a cliche. The only
thing I can hope for now is that Dr Kumar
is going to be right twice. You cannot feel. Let's
put it as that. From Kaleidoscope and I Heart Podcasts.
(07:28):
I'm Mongayatika door, Welcome to Skyline Drive mhm h M
(08:12):
Chapter one, Straight from Shiva's mouth, Coming, Come, Come from holiday.
This is Bombay as a kid, Bombay is where I
(08:36):
used to start and end every trip to India, midnight
arrivals and two a m. Feasts with relatives who have
been waiting years to see us. The world was bigger
than harder to wrap your arms around, and flights to
India took twenty two hours with multiple layovers and refueling stops.
New York than Paris, than Cairo, than Delhi and only
(08:58):
then Bombay. And it was expensive. We'd save up until
we could go back, and every trip was an event.
This is the library. It's under my aunt's apartment in chamber,
and it's where I used to borrow old comics and
Mad magazines. This is the gym Kanna where I learned
to play snooker. This is Xaviers, where my dad studied
(09:23):
and then didn't in his more delinquent years. This is
the disco where I learned to dance, and Kaiber where
my parents went on their first day. Bombay has always
felt like my city in New York. People correct me
when I say Bombay, but Indians never do. Still, I
(09:45):
talkle between the names depending on my mood. Driving through
the city. It feels like an old friend whose path
is veered from your own, like you don't quite see
eye to eye anymore, but you're also not around each
other for long enough to make a thing of it.
(10:05):
The thing is, I still feel my dad here, like
a fog that descended on the city ages ago and
refused to burn off time. But I kind of just
got into this relationship, so I don't know, I'll do another.
And she was like a cool and Urgean and I
(10:26):
are standing on a street corner in the Santa Cruz
neighborhood of Bombay, and we're waiting to step into the
naughty shops that my aunt someone somehow located for us
from the outside. The place looks tiny and nondescript, something
you'd overlook if you weren't hunting for it. How would
you describe it since you're not from up There's a
fleet of rickshaws going by us, right and uh, and
(10:50):
the rain is stopped now, but there are tons of
puddles and lots of Even in central Bombay, cows owned
the road. We're gonna walk into this place to see
the naughty Do you know anything about natty? This will
be my first experience tools but there's a lot of
fortune telling that happens in India, and some of it
can be pretty alternative. The chalats are much more number Yeah,
(11:15):
so I'm hoping this is a great experience. The funny
thing about these naughty shops is that as soon as
people tell you to go to one, they'll also tell
you how many fake ones there are. But this place
is well regarded, so I'm hopeful. We walked through the doorway,
leave our shoes in a dusty two ft by two
(11:36):
foot vestibule, and then enter reception barefoot. I don't know
what I was expecting, like maybe a wall full of scrolls,
or maybe big brass sculptures of little known deities and
saints or maybe just some wal art. Instead, we're standing
in a tiny, poorly lit box, a couple of benches
pressed up against the walls, and a desk facing the door.
(12:00):
We give our name to the man pottering at the desk,
and then we just wait five ten minutes of my
complete Of course, of course, the naughty reader whose peeks
out from behind the wall to tell us he's doing
his borning prayers. He asked us if we like water
or tea while we wait? How incredible would it be
if the first astrologer I met in India located an
(12:23):
instruction manual for the rest of my life? What if
the leaves hiding in his archive actually contained my life's purpose?
I am genuinely giddy. The prayers take longer than ten minutes,
but sub child, hey, it all works. We get ushered
into an even tinier room, though this one actually has personality.
(12:45):
It's bright lime green, with a couple of temple calendars
on the wall. And then Mukish walks in with an
armful of wooden bundles. So these are a whole bunch
of scrolls. Actually days have Ki places the scrolls on
his desk and let's his inspect them. Oh wow, it's engraved.
(13:06):
It's beautiful. I've been calling them scrolls, but that feels
like the wrong word. Have you ever seen those pantone
booklets with pages that fan out? These are almost like
an ancient version of that, but longer, made of very
thin sheets. Each scroll is maybe three to four inches
wide and about a foot and a half long, and
they're stacked and bound with maybe thirty or forty per booklet.
(13:30):
As we marvel at the tiny lines of text etched
across them, explains the origins and these are These are
palm leaves, just leaves, he tells us, were etched in
the eighteenth century when a family made copies of the
original millennia old predictions. The engravings were laborious and the
script is tiny. But these scrolls have lasted because the
(13:51):
caretakers meticulously rubbed them with oil once a year to
preserve them. Here's argin translator, this is coming from the Southerner,
who community the oldest language in the world, and it's
coming from the Star tradition does as other oldest keepers
of knowledge according to in India. Kish also tells us
(14:13):
that these Nati shastras, or sacred prophecies have a mythological prominence.
Lord Shiva, in his infinite wisdom, shared this knowledge with
the goddess Parvati, his wife, and then she passed it
on to Lord Brahma, who passed the knowledge from the
gods to the sages and then finally to the priests.
And to me, it sounds like a game of celestial telephone.
(14:37):
But Kaish, she tells us these scrolls are actually less
prone to human error than traditional astrology because the words
inscribed here comes straight from God, so he is only
the reader. That the information is directly available and cannot
be soiled by human Touchess Kish tells us he's been
(14:59):
doing this for twenty nine years. He shows his photos
on his phone of him with clients people he asked
us not to share, but they include some of India's
biggest politicians and most famous scientists. He stresses that he's
a humble man. He is just a reader providing answers
for people in need, and I believe him. Then he
(15:20):
gently reaches for my thumb, rolls it across a pad
of ink, and he presses it onto a sheet of paper.
He gave us a methodology directly relating to the thumbing
for which there are under any divisions. Basically, the worlds
on my finger will give the librarians a clue as
to where my leaf might be. There are thousands and
(15:42):
thousands of these bundles of scrolls in the back, and
they're all carefully organized. Sometimes, he says, the process can
take fifteen minutes. Sometimes it takes months. He also comments
on my aunt's absence. He says, part of the reason
she felt ill was that she wasn't meant to be
here today. You can only show up in this room
if it's your destiny. Sometimes people have car accidents trying
(16:05):
to get here. Others apparently get dane. But since I've
made it into this room, he tells me, this is fate.
If there's also such that at the end of the day,
this is a yeah, there will be problems. He said
that you must remain in your mind and your heart
quiet because problems will come, problems will go, so try
(16:31):
and stay calm. But it is distiny. I stare at
the income I thumb, remembering this weird fact for my
days at mental flass that koalas have fingerprints that could
be mistaken for humans. And I laughed at myself wondering
if my scroll could be mistaken for Aquala's. If walks
back in and tells me that I'll enjoy napping in
(16:52):
trees for eighteen hours a day, or if in my
older age, I'll really love feasting on eucalyptus, then I'll
know exactly what went wrong. It's the type of dumb
joke that i'd share with someone, but it's too dumb
to make in this room. Over the next three weeks
that I'm in India, Cash will look and he'll keep
(17:14):
touching pace, but he won't find my scroll. Chapter two.
(17:34):
The thing that matters local local swagger, the wan local local,
local local year swagger, or the want local local language
(17:57):
is curious and how it informs and reflects I deals.
The way my family talks is gentle. The dialect we
speak is sing songyy. My old roommate Losako used to
tell me it was like butter when she heard me
talking to my mom on the phone. But if it's
sweet and overly polite, it's also not direct. My dad
(18:19):
didn't often talk about the sad things or the hard things.
Often he'd skip over the specifics and allude to difficulties
in terms that were vague but capacious. So if you
were to discuss my cousin Argent, he might say it
was so hard what he went through. It's really good.
(18:39):
He's back now, which is insufficient. My cousin Argent is
back now, And of course I've heard the whispers, but
he told me his story. I'm also going to try
and get you up in the right show. It involves
him building townships and the Ivory Coast and yeah, and
(19:02):
then coming back to Dubai to help sort a multimillion
dollar deal. I actually shifted to the Middle East. Everyone
was like, what's wrong with you? It involves a reneged
transaction and him taking the fall for someone else's carelessness.
They hold up and I said, can I come back
now that let's send the old money to clear everything.
(19:22):
Come on back. There's no problem. You send the money.
You've cleared everything and came back and I got arrested.
It's him being thrown and some of the region's worst
and most violent prisons yea, and pretending to be a
Buddhist so he wouldn't be killed for being a Hindu.
(19:42):
Many of them are of them. It is a story
of trauma, kind of spiritual psychologically and finding a Guru
who nurtured his resiliency. The gu so we can't identify
within you whether you're ready or you're still holding back.
(20:04):
And it's the story of a miracle. When they came
out for fifty days without medication, there was no practical
reason in the world I should have done and another
I sentence disappeared. The appellet me go because they didn't
(20:25):
know what they were doing. I'm the person that didn't
have any courtphnities. Some of our chats I taped some
of them. I didn't, But I know he could have
died in prison from beatings or malaria or anything. He
could have been there forever, except somehow a mystic told
him his court records would disappear, and they did, and
(20:47):
the mystic assured him the jails would release him on
house arrest, and they did. And then the Guru told
him to go. So he hid, and he waited, and
he waited until in darkness he was stuffed into the
bed of a truck, crammed in with other terrified bodies,
and trafficked across borders until he found his way home.
(21:10):
And now it is him being here in India with
me and see that come out life once again. You
know that many have done that. It's a way to
tell a story without telling a story. It is vague
and capacious and insufficient. But he is back now and
(21:34):
it's the thing that matters. Don't Chapter three. Believe me?
(22:00):
Despite Lukisha's reputation, I had struck out in Bombay, but
luckily I had come with a backup plan to make
a pilgrimage to Chennai. The truth is, I don't know
anything about Chennai. I've never been, and mostly people in
my family have warned me there's no reason to go,
not because of anything cultural or political. It just comes
(22:21):
down to the weather. Everyone complains about the intense heat
and humanity, but Chennai, which is located in the South
Indian state of Tamil Nadu, is special in terms of Nadi.
According to the story, when the rishi's or holy men
received the wisdom of the gods, they transcribed it onto
leaves and those leaves were protected by generations of South
(22:41):
Indian kings and at some point these manuscripts ended up
in a library in Thuanjore, also in Tamil Nadu, and
while some of the copies were loaned out to other
cities like Delhi or Mumbai. The majority of the authentic
Nadi centers stay at local within driving distance of Chennai.
My friend and story editor Mark has agreed to come
(23:02):
with me, which is a really nice security blanket, and
I also invite Argent. Should I get you a ticket
to come meet us there, I would love that perfect.
For a minute, we thought Mark wasn't going to make
it to India. His visa got backlogged. There was a
moment where I wanted to tell him not to worry
ChEls day, but even I lost faith by this point.
(23:26):
Then thanks to God or the Indian embassy or possibly
Dr Kumar, it was approved right before he was set
to leave. It'll be fun, I think. I think the
three of us hanging out will be fun. Yeah, that
so cool? Okay Greek. When we land, where welcomed by
(24:06):
our drivers, satish, and an entire town plastered in chess
olympiad posters featuring a cartoon horse and a dooti because
apparently Chennai is India's chess capital. Besides the posters, which
are honestly everywhere, I'm a little surprised by how little
of the language I can follow. I don't speak a
lick of Tamil, the local language here, and neither does Argent.
(24:28):
And the six or seven languages we can cabble together
between the two of us don't help us in the slightest.
So it's funny how alien I feel in the country
where I'm normally so at home. Speaking of aliens, I
should probably tell you about the strangest person on meeting
my entire journey between Mumbai and Chennai. I had stopped
off in Bangalore, a town filled with relatives. On one
(24:52):
of those days, my aunt Sheila or Shila Uaca introduces
me to a medicine man who supposedly channels the spirit
of St. Augustia and shake's metal keys as he goes
through a trance to identify what's wrong with your body.
Sant Augustina, aside from being the Sidtha or enlightened soul
who's supposedly brought the naughty leaves to humans by taking
dictation from the gods, is also a patron saint of healing.
(25:16):
I tried to go into this meeting with an open mind,
but the healer is a character probably in his sixties,
spry and cocky with a mischievous smile. If I was
trying to cast a South Asian leprechron for an Indian
Lucky Charms commercial, he'd be on my short list. And
even though his accent is unbelievably thick, like so thick
(25:38):
that I'm working overtime to understand each and every word,
I am captivated by his experience with black magic. What
they do somewhere, I mean man about people know. As
he tells it, a neighbor put a voodoo like curse
(25:58):
on him, and he kept losing weight and balding, and
losing weight and balding, and no one could tell him
what was wrong with him, until when he was sickly
thin and had been robbed of all his glorious plumage,
he found a talisman buried in his backyard. It was
wrapped in rags and hair and blood, all the telltale
(26:19):
signs of black magic. And when he burned it and
reversed the curse, his neighbors had some of the worst
luck ever. They lost their money, their health, even their home.
He grins wide when he tells me about this instant karma.
I honestly don't know what to make of this guy.
On one hand, my aunt told me that after years
of not being able to conceive, it was this man
(26:42):
who gave her the herbs and tinctures to finally carry
a child. Her story is really powerful, and I've heard
so many others that he's helped or cured. But he
also tells me with absolute certainty that Tamil is the
greatest language bar none, because it's the oldest, which is true,
and the most powerful, which I don't quite understand, but okay,
(27:05):
and the most sophisticated, which I start to chuckle at
because now there are a lot of descriptors being used,
and I'm sensing a real air of Tamila hubris here.
But then he brings his argument all together by saying,
and this is the strangest part, it only makes sense
that Tamil is the language that aliens communicate with all
(27:28):
speak Tamil. You need to come plain. When I look
at him quizzically trying to understand how exactly we moved
from astrology to aliens, he just assures me he's right.
Then he smiles at me like I'm an idiot, because
obviously aliens speak Tamil. Okay, It's just that, like chapter four,
(28:05):
Snake astronauts. Gotta take a lot, take a lot, please
name us Kanji. Yeah yeah, that's you're gonna record your
(28:29):
six Yeah. Sorry. I think I had two of Boost
coffee at six am, and it feels so much earlier.
We drive off the hotel lot straight into traffic and
(28:51):
I can only tell where past the city limits when
the cartoon force posters disappear. Up until this point, it
felt like every advertisement was about chess. But now the
billboards are for toothpaste and soaps and clothes and wedding
rings and Argent and I both notice how strange it
is that everyone in the ads is incredibly light skinned,
(29:12):
and what a mind funk that must be. But then
I stopped paying close attention. The drive starts to feel
like every drive I've taken between cities in India, stretches
of rickety shops, stretches of vibrant villages with kids playing
outside long dusty in between started with fields and factories,
(29:33):
banks and petrol stations. There's these trees that lined the
roads with red and white trunks painted that way to
prevent termites. And also the show poachers that the forestry
services keeping. Watch Mark and I are both feeling the
chat night, but Origin's two coffees have definitely kicked in.
He peppers those with questions about life in the States,
(29:54):
about recent Supreme Court cases. He talks about India and
all the miracles he's witnessed that have made him a
true believer, and then he says this, I feels the texts.
You'll understand that there's a lot of interaction between snake
(30:15):
culture and human culture, and there's a lot of snake Okay,
so I'm going to pause right here to say, I
don't know what's going on with all the snake talk,
but they keep coming up again and again, and it
feels like it should mean something. The way George in
(30:39):
our last episode saw a snake as a sign that
he could be good to himself, that he could shed
his trauma and transform. The way my mom experienced snakes
is a curse, something she had to transcend with mysterious prayers.
And now Argent is talking about how he read early
Hindu texts about snakes is the superior beings, carriers of
(31:01):
a greater wisdom. And he starts talking about one account
you read from a mystic who claims to have seen
these astral snakes. He said that he's Guru got him
to me one of the incoming astronauts, space snake astronauts. Yeah,
(31:28):
it feels unlivable. It's just the idea of a snake astronaut. Yeah, well,
I mean like a traveler. He doesn't wear it. You
didn't have to wear a space ship. And when you
read the book, he says, it's it's not possible for
(31:52):
me to explain what exactly I saw, but the snakes
are very different than what you all imagine, and you
and the whole I can describe to you. Is it
blue and glowing? In my cursory understanding of Hindu and
Buddhist cosmology, these serpent like beings rule over three planes
(32:15):
filled with multiple planets, and they're worshiped as the keepers
of both incredible treasure and concealed wisdom treasure texts. As
one book puts up. As we drive further away from Chennai,
I feel like they're this harbinger of what we're about
to learn. The snakes don't rule over the rule over
(32:36):
a different set of planets, and they're supposed to be
very opulent creatures. Is this in this book versus a
different book? Mark who has been quiet this whole time
perks up at this talk of snake astronauts. He has
so many questions about the origins and about how much
Argent could actually believe in this, but he mostly just
(32:59):
smirks and saves his commentary for later. Yeah, that's that's
the problem that I have, hang off. That's the issue
whether or not they were space suits. First of all,
let me imagine that suits. Before long we realize we're
(33:23):
in Kanji Forum. The temple town is famous for its
beautiful shrines in architecture, along with its saris, which are
gorgeous bolts of rich silk embroidered with thread dipped in gold.
I set up to look at the surroundings, noticing these
little altars side by side with banana stands. All of
a sudden, so these turns in and we pull up
(33:45):
to one of the most gorgeous temples I've ever seen.
It towers over the city, and I craned my neck
to see where it's crown touches the sky. I later
learned it's called Acomberry Short temple. Records of its initials
struck or date back to and it is stunning like
a sixty meter tall zigarette, except instead of a giant,
(34:09):
blocky pyramid. It has eleven stories of relief work with
intricately carved pillars and depictions of myths and avatars. If
the greatest churches and cathedrals are meant to fill you
with awe, to make you feel humbled in the presence
of a greater beauty, then this temple does the trick.
(34:30):
I can't wait to see the inside, to meet the
temple leaf readers. But as soon as I try to
hop out, so these motions me to stay inside. He
steps out and gestures and a man nearby, and the
man just shakes his head. It's clear we're in the
wrong place. So Sing jumps back in, and then we
drive and drive. Fifteen minutes later, we're parked in this
(34:54):
dusty lot in front of a cinder block wall that
feels like it's in the middle of nowhere. If there
wasn't this big yellow sign outside declaring that this was
a house of astrology, I would have assumed it was
a storage facility, or maybe a clinic. Whatever it is,
it's no eleven story carved temple. Chapter five, The Waiting Game.
(35:36):
We swap mosquitoes and reapply repellent. We make idle conversation.
We look at our phones and like kids in a car,
asking over and over are we there yet? I walked
from the patio into the little reception area to see
if we can get started. Origin goes in a few
times too. After a few hours of waiting, they finally
(35:59):
take my thumb prints Mongish, Yeah, I mean, I mean
born in America. Follow me. My father's name is Scomish.
All Indians and not even They put us in the
queue and then we wait some more. Every ten or
(36:22):
fifteen minutes, someone's name is called, and one of the men.
Because it is weirdly almost all men here, a mix
of middle aged business owners and young people who look
anxious to get married, they start disappearing inside. When it's
finally our turn, we follow the receptionists to the second level.
Despite the thatch roof, it's actually way more modern up
(36:43):
here and welcoming. They're these sliding doors with little enclosures
where people are doing one on ones, and our June,
Mark and I all squeeze into a room. When our
man finally walks in, he's wearing viv with the these
three stripes across his four head, applied with sacred ash
often associated with priests. He also has a big pile
(37:05):
of scrolls in his arm. Now this is going to
be hard to follow, but he asked if I speak Tamil,
and then in broken English, he tells us he needs
to find my palm leaf first. He indicates how the
scrolls are like a card catalog. Your thumbprint helps you
find your scroll. Your scroll helps you find your full horoscope,
which is also hidden somewhere in the stacks in the back.
(37:27):
I am really pay one bombing, Okay, tell me, I
am really you were name pole, their mother, and name
fool that we're not going to leave, but still bomb
the counpound. Our reader starts reading the Tamil off the scroll.
He asked, your father's dead and your mother's living. I respond, yes,
(37:47):
I want to be the bother. They're looking for an
exact match, the perfect card in the card catalog, and
each time the details of the scroll don't line up
with my life, he slaps it to the back of
the bundle and moves on to the next You were
married and living with your wife, Yes, your mother had
two marriages. Ever, no smack. The leaf goes into the
(38:10):
back of the pile. Sometimes when he starts reading a
leaf and sees it doesn't match. He doesn't even ask,
He just moves it to the back and the sword
and keeps going. He asks if I'm forty five, and
I just laugh. I am enjoying all of this, feeling
like there's real momentum, and I tell him no, I'm
forty two. We keep going and some of it gets confusing,
(38:32):
like he asked if I have two sons. I have
two children. I mean I have a son and one
kid who's non binary. He slaps into the back of
the pile. But I'm a little dizzy, trying to stay
on top of his accent and trying to make sure
(38:53):
I'm answering the questions correctly, until he says this what
he wants to set it. I have one sister, no brother, married, yes, Margy,
but engagement yes, even married, living into the way, yes,
but I don't want to do one sister, yes, sister Marie,
(39:14):
unmarried it you have married a living in the way mother,
the mother living you were in flavor jaboking and dingo.
That is it. He has found it. After fifteen hours
of being on planes, two weeks of hunting through stacks
in Mumbai, another hour long flight a two hour drive
and three hours of waiting on a humid patio that
(39:36):
would give most steam rooms and inferiority complex. We see
this man for twenty minutes and he just finds it.
Argent thinks I'm blessed. Mark looks more skeptical, and the
three of us we filed downstairs. That's what happens. So
(39:56):
to part is done, which is yet to be matched.
We won day when to get a matched in bombing,
we didn't. They couldn't find him. Yeah, and now you've
got the real thing. Now the part will be that
you will be broadcasting to America your future ship. Chapter six,
(40:27):
The Son of a Milkman. So you cut at the
lock a seed you must. We wait outside a little
more and then we're called in and walked through this
(40:48):
long hallway to a room in the back which faces
onto a courtyard. The complex is bigger than I've realized,
with places to do poujas and with rooms to rent.
As we sit down, Mr Kumar, the same man from reception,
double checks that this is the right file. He goes
through some details about my thumb, that I'm a Brahmin,
(41:11):
that I was born on me first, and then he
reads my filet. I'm listening keenly, but nothing he says
here is interesting. He says, my mother may get ill,
but medicines will help. He says, my sister's engagement has
(41:32):
already taken place, and in the near future she will
get married. But here's the thing. While we're sitting in
this room, I have one of those kaiser so's a
moments from the usual suspects in the whole scroll section,
(41:52):
I've given away all my details. Is your mom's name Chitra, No,
it's Lolita. Is your father living, No, he's passed. Is
your sister married, Well, she's engaged. And as I realized this,
everything from here on becomes tainted. Like the predictions are
so mundane. You'll have a good life, you'll get sick,
(42:14):
you'll have medicine and get better. Your children will have
a good education, you'll make decent money, you'll have good
relationships with others. I mean, it's just a mishmash of
vague things that happened to everyone and details I've already confirmed.
In some ways, the most surprising thing he says is
this line. I laughed, because in some ways this is
(42:38):
both the most ridiculous thing and the most specific thing
about me today. I have never had a new car
or a luxurious one since high school. I've just driven
a series of beaters and men. I would love a
car that starts when you wanted to. Anyway. The rest
of the reading is more of the same, m h,
(43:01):
you want things. Basically, he's up selling us here. What
I got was the starter pack. We've already paid for
that part, and we put down a healthy tip on
top on his insistence. Or you don't take like Google
pay or anything like. Okay, okay, I'll figure that out.
(43:23):
And now if I want to know more about any
specific part of my life, the section of the leaf
that deals with my career, or my health, or my
kids or one of like nine more things, we will
need to pay more. You okay. I step outside to
(43:45):
chat with Mark. It's confused. The truth is I was
more than confused. I was feeling deflated after that experience
in Mumbai. We had spent so much time trying to
figure out the perfect, knotty place to visit. I'd come
all this way and dragged Mark and Argin here because
(44:09):
this is where I thought I had the best chance
of finding my fortune, and then nothing, because I kind
of yeah, I expect grand relations. There's a line I
didn't catch on tape, but it's stuck with me. Mark says,
(44:30):
you already got your miracle of astrology. You can't expect
a second one. You can't expect it every time. When
I go back in the reader opens the chapter about
my last life. He says I had been born the
son of a milkman in the milk business, you know,
in a typical milk vendor family. Was no was He
(45:03):
tells me that I slept around, and I think he's
saying that I gave my wife STDs. I also treated
my parents horribly and didn't support them. I cheated my
business partners. And I am nodding vigorously and enjoying this
because this part is kind of the realest to me,
(45:23):
Like every time someone tells me they've seen a psychic
or a reader and had some revelation in a dream,
they're always a king or queen in their past life.
And to me, it's like, there are not that many
kings in history. How can all of us have been kings?
So weirdly, this is finally a storyline I can buy into.
(45:45):
Being here smiling at the story it reminds me of
this thing. The writer Short Vendrum, who grew up in Chennai,
once wrote how she loves to read and reread her
horoscope because to her it's like a very sue being
work of fan fiction. And she told me about how
sometimes the horoscope feels accurate and sometimes it doesn't. She
(46:08):
will be a girl of a restless nature. She will
be a girl of a self destructive timidity her moods.
But if she puts it during times of upheaval, it
reassures me to read these type in pages to be
reminded that one long dead man took the measure of
my life and said it was not all bad. She
will brood over the memories of the past. She will
(46:30):
brood on fancied slight, very unflattering, but also like really specific,
and I'm afraid to say, like super accurate. I do
love this Milkman stuff, not because I believe it, but
because I love that someone has created in new mythology
for me, a new origin story for the problems I'm facing.
(46:51):
And now they've given me a new way to remedy
those problems too, albeit through a few too many visits
to temples. For my liking Still it is pure fun,
but when I think about it later, it won't scratch
the itch I actually have, because, like Stripy, I wanted
(47:12):
to walk into the shop and let someone take the
measure of my life. I'd hope that they would find
my leaf and look into my eyes and with complete
certainty tell me that my life wouldn't be all bad.
And although I made the journey here, and although those
words were said in the end, I just couldn't believe them.
(47:40):
Chapter seven, spinning to be thirty in the morning, content
team stuck inside, obviously stuck in my head. Can't do ship.
(48:00):
I've got to go back to now. Let me make
this sens a statement. To drive home from the Naughty
Shop is somehow so long, and I feel the clock ticking.
We have maybe five days left on this trip, and
I have not felt the magic here. Nothing has brought
me closer to believing Argent senses my tension Mark too.
(48:25):
I tell Mark, maybe we should raise to our Nasi
in Northern India. Even though my astrologer friend Keith warned
me it was like a Disneyland of astrology. If we
wanted to do someone totally crazy that you could actually
like I fly to like the Naves. There's a university
there and a lot of astrology PhD s and also conment,
(48:48):
so maybe there's some fun to be had. Or we
could do what the Naughty Reader told me to do
for penance for my sins as a milkman, I could
go to an offering at a Hanuman temple, and I
have a specific like one in mind. My aunt and
family whipped in this place and hopefully where my grandfather
finds Jim House. I don't know. I mean, I am
(49:12):
just throwing ideas at the wall. We stopped for lunch
at this place, our drivers at these loves where they
serve giant heaping plates of rice on banana leaves with
curries and chutney's ladled on top. We eat with our
hands in the traditional style, shoveling the piping hot food
into our mouths. I pairmine with the thumbs up an
(49:32):
Indian coke of sorts, and while the food fills our bellies,
it doesn't calm my nerves, and I grow increasingly irritated
about my journey to the Naughty Shop. A few days later,
when I start reviewing my tape, I realized I've missed
a crucial detail. A woman I had interviewed previously named
(49:53):
Moutids had walked into a naughty shop a skeptic and
walked out a believer, not because of what she heard
from the reader exactly, but because of what she saw.
I was looking very disinterested though. That man asked me, man,
can you read them? I said yes, very good, I
could take them. Then he started showing the bomb leave
(50:14):
to me after point then he said, that's your father's
name started with A. They said yes, and then I
could see the name written that of my mother in law.
That was when it take me really, you know, I thought, Okay,
there's something here. They're not bluffing. Then I feel like
(50:35):
an idiot. I hadn't thought to photograph my leaf. I mean,
I don't know if they would have let me, but
maybe there was a miracle lurking in there. Not in
the prophecy, which I thought was so vague, but in
the sorting system. Was there something beautiful I had missed.
When Mark and I talked about it later at our
(50:57):
hotel bar, Mark has a different perspective on the play.
It's basically like a magic correct Then we couldn't see
the word Yeah, it was like hearing the was like
hearing a magic correct. As he puts it, it doesn't
matter if it's real, because the shop is in the
business of hope. And I think about how he's right, Like,
(51:17):
there's so many people that come in such desperate situations, right, Like,
if you hear you're going to have a comfortable life,
You're gonna get a new car, and you're gonna like,
you know, like four to five years. You got to
watch around here. Yeah, I mean like like that probably
like sustains a lot of people, right, that would be
such a big deal to a certain kind of First
(51:46):
Chapter eight, Double Dose. Months later, my memories of Chennai
are blair, early morning, strong coffee, ceiling fans that are
no match for the heat. But mostly it's just car ride.
Hours in the car with Origin talking about philosophy and
(52:07):
science and our childhood's the moments we were too proud,
the moments that humbled us, and how we got here.
If Bombay felt like an old friend whose path had
diverged from my own, then Argin was like a close
friend I had lost and then found again. And it's
funny that he's here with me because I've forgotten that
(52:29):
Origin had been warned by his group that he should not,
at any cost dabble in astrology, something I'm reminded of
when my wife Lizzie calls, wait, I'll pull you answer, Well,
he's my brother at the end of the day, and
I wasn't going to abandon him. But there's a phrase
(52:53):
I grew up using in India cousin brother and cousin
sister in joint families. You grew up thinking of your
cousins as closer than just a cousin. You tie rocky
to them or these promised threads that promised love and protection,
and you treat your cousins like their siblings because they
are in a way. And the fact that Origin is
(53:15):
here with me now, despite the oceans between us, despite
the time that's passed. But having said that, this is
my first experience with astrology as well, So I was
actually warned not to dabble in these kind of um subjects.
(53:36):
Is subjecting you to things you've been avoiding, you know, Yeah,
at tempting me with taboo subjects. Shame, shame that he's
a bad influence in my life. Origin has told me
what he's been through, but I can't imagine it it
is too horrifying, and I admire him so much, how
(53:56):
he somehow pulled together his family and picked up the
shards of his life, and how he keeps moving forward
with such grace and humility. If my days in China
I were a blur of endless car rides, the final
pit stops were always a seat at the hotel bar.
Sometimes it was me and Mark, sometimes it was Argin
(54:17):
and me, and occasionally it was the three of us
sitting in a dimly lit patio shooting away mosquitoes as
we sited on these fresh lime sodas. On the tougher days,
I'd cut the soda with gin and bomb a cigarette
off of Argin. And on one of those nights, Argent
told us about his stud Suddy, the seven and a
(54:38):
half years of bad luck brought on by Saturn that
everyone experiences at some point according to badic astrology, and
his seven and a half years. He tells us we're
considered especially bad. Oh well, I experienced a double sub
cready almost uh mine pretty much game, So I'm really
(55:01):
ship luckily, really ship luck. Until this moment, Argin has
never once talked about how difficult this period has been.
He's talked about it. Matter of factly, he's talked about
embracing the future, but this is the first time he
lets us in on just how hard is life on
But my n ended law skill and I'm still trying
(55:25):
to understand the difference, the difference. Yeah, I'm trying to
figure out what went right, and I know there are
certain things that have changed, but I can't. I can't
feel it in a physical form. That's crazy. I didn't
really because this is India. Argent jokingly links his misfortune
(55:45):
back to what he must have done in his past lives.
Obviously did much more than I mean. Argent is not
believe in astrology. I never asked him to get a reading,
but it's ttrology has happened to him. The shadow of
that seven and a half years of bad luck. It's
(56:05):
been lurking in the back of his mind. There's another
moment that I can't stop thinking about. From the bar
after I turned off my recorder, Mark says that too
often when a story isn't going right, the impulse is
to speed up to book as many interviews as you can.
It's that old sailor's adage. If you can't tie a
(56:27):
good knot tie a lot of them, but Mark encourages
the opposite. He says, I need to slow down. He says,
if I'm going to resolve anything about my life about
my dad, it is not going to be with him
or Urgin, and it's not going to be through astrology.
Astrology was never the point. And he tells me to
(56:49):
make a pilgrimage to where I feel most connected to
my family and to my past, to just sit with
that experience. And I think about that. I really do,
but I don't listen because I'm not thinking clearly. I
(57:10):
haven't been thinking clearly this whole time, this whole show. Instead,
I asked Sufish to raise me across the state. I
drag argin along, I collect interviews that will not add
up to much, and then just one my time in
(57:34):
India is nearly up. I realized Mark is right, and
I spend sixteen hours in a car to find meaning
where I should have been looking all along. Ye, thank
(58:09):
you so much for not forgetting about our little show.
Skyline Drive as a production of Kaleidoscope and I Heart Podcast.
This show is hosted and written by me Mongish Artigulur.
And yes, I know this episode was so long, but
I'm about to make it longer with these credits. Mary
phill of Sandy is our supervising producer. How would we
get the show out without Mary? The answer is we
(58:31):
would not. Knee and Shah he is our delightful producer
and conducted the interview with Shorty. Mark Latto is my
excellent story editor and was such a trooper for suffering
with me in India in a city I knew nothing about,
though I did feed him lots of paratas. This episode
was also produced by the insanely talented Anna Rubinova. I
(58:51):
don't know how we could have got through this much
tape without her. Anna, you were a boon to the show.
The super sweet through Chevarrao hit the streets for this
episode and collected extra tape for me. This episode was
mixed by my pal at Soundboard. Oh my Gosh the Warning.
The warning was read by producer extraordinaire Nadia Raymond, who
won the first ever Audio Pulitzer along with the team
(59:13):
at This American Life. Nadia wants you to listen to
t A L's next episode, but I want you to
know she's a badass. I've got to thank my pal
Botany for the theme song and the composition. It's also
Azadi Records. How can I thank Azadi enough? Also my
friends Him on Show, Suri, Peter Matthew Bauer and Motor Sales.
And I can't forget my pal roge A k A
(59:34):
Lush Life for lending me his tunes as well. I
am dropping a second mixtape with more music from Skyline
Drive Volume two. It will be in the show links,
please go check it out. Additional production and research support
from my love Lizzie Jacobs, Someone Rock around the Clock,
Buck She and my beautiful cousin Arjun Bucci ar June
(59:55):
I love you. This show is executive produced from my Heart,
I'm my good pals Nicky Etour and Katrina Norvell and
a shout out to Nikki's baby girl Pearl and also
Enzo Enzo, I have not forgotten about you, buddy. Also
got to thank my incredible partners from Kaleidoscope, Oswald Listen,
Kate Osbourne, costos linos Viney Shore. You inspire me every day.
(01:00:19):
Um special thanks to Ali, Nathan Connal, Will and Bob
at my Heart for getting behind the show, Barkley Sorrow,
Vin Shanta, my kiddos, Henry and Ruby, my family everywhere,
and as always, a big big thank you to my
Amma and my dad Lolita and articular, I thank my
lucky stars for we have one more episode to go,
(01:00:42):
so thank you so much for listening. I can't tell
you how much it means to me to
Warning. The following episode includes discussion of magical leaves, prophecies, miracles,
big temples, bigger disappointments, black magic, fresh lime, soda, and
snake astronauts. Sensitive listeners, you've been warned. It's the middle
(00:35):
of August. I've been in India for two minutes and
everything is falling apart. I want the complaint number for
the universe. I want a manager on the line because
this is not what my astrologer, Dr Kumar told me.
What happened. So you're in the right track. Something very
profound is going to happen to you know. I mean
Dr Kumar did predict I'd be going to India for
(00:57):
this show. There are lots of things for you to accomplish,
including foreign travels, So go to India because that is
all the gn in wisdoms. And he also said this
you cannot feel, let's put it as there. Back in April,
(01:21):
I experienced a miracle of astrology. I had walked into
a random astrologer's office and queens and during my session,
the astrologer Dr Kumar had told me something horrible would happen,
and he was right. Exactly one month later, my father
passed away and it changed the trajectory of both this
(01:41):
show and my life. And for many people that would
be enough to make them believe in astrology, but it wasn't.
For me. Astrology had told me what would happen, but
I still had no idea what to do about it.
But there was one place that I really thought could
have and there's these little shops hidden across India that
(02:03):
practice nati astrology. The idea is, your fortune was written
on scrolls centuries ago, and if you can find your scroll,
it'll reveal everything, your past, your future, who's the person
you're supposed to be? Anyway, the moment I decided to
book the trip to see one of these shops, I
called my aunt Someone and asked her to be my fixer.
(02:26):
When I was in high school, Someone or Simonoka and
my uncle Giant let me live and intern with them
in Bombay for a summer. They were running this hot
advertising company called Heartbeat, which had just made huge waves
with this racy condom campaign. Of course, I sat in
(02:51):
on the decidedly less racy creative meetings, which I loved,
pitching ideas and jingles for things like washing rich jeans
and ceiling fans that summer gave high school me a
huge boost of confidence. It had this direct impact on
my co founding a magazine a few years later. But
(03:12):
also hanging with Samonica was just fun. She inspired silliness,
like sometimes she'll just decide it's more enjoyable to have
a conversation like you're singing opera to one another. Today's
shopping list from me coffee jam, a bag of tea,
something sweet, and spaghetti. This will be hot, boring, spreety.
(03:35):
So I'm eager to hang out with her again. Except
somewhere between Bombay's baggage claim and customs, I get this
call right now. I'm shivering away, so I'm so, I'm
really so sorry that you're you're ill. It was really
frustrating because I've arranged everything else. Samonica is waiting for
(03:57):
the doctor to call back, and it's very likely she
has Danae fever. Well, I've been using my mosquito repellent
like it's cologne, and so it's I'm playing it cool
on the phone, but this is me secretly terrified. Not
so much about the diseases though dan gay and COVID
(04:18):
are definitely not great, but more how I'm going to
manage these interviews. If they speak English, I'm fine going alone. Huh,
he only speaks Hindi. This is a problem because marry
Hindi a k a. My Hindi as ship. So I
(04:38):
panic and then I have an idea. What if first
Sun plays translator for me? And I realized this is
a ridiculous question. But for the Nadi guy, is there
any way I could take argin with me. Origin, who's
a few years younger than me, was always a golden child.
He was handsome, sensitive, artistic, and musical. But I lost
(05:01):
track of him in our twenties when he moved to
Dubai and started a career there. And then there was
this period where he fully disappeared, this dark spot which
our family doesn't really talk about. We'll have to ask him. Yeah,
you just call him, Yeah, that could be nice. The
(05:28):
rain pommels the city as I take a cabin, but
I'm happy to see the monsoon. It's both wet and
sunny outside, and everything smells green and earthy as the
rain continues to fall. In the lobby, the hotel doors
are open, and if you look just right between the
swaying ponds and the mist, you can spot the Arabian Sea.
(05:53):
I'm fiddling with my recording equipment when I spot Argent
walking in. I can't tell you how happy I am
to see him. We're both Brayre, both dads. Now, after
a quick embrace, I tell him about the chaos that's
welcomed me, how he saved me, because I feel like
(06:14):
that's my entire trip, is like everything's falling apart slowly.
You know. The charm of India is that even if
everything's breaking, now everything's fine. You know, everyone has a
very nice, relaxed kind of attitude like this happens. Yeah, Well,
you can't take life so seriously. There's a phrase in
India which loosely translates to don't worry things happen. You
(06:41):
hear it a lot because India is unbridled. No matter
how much you try to will it, it runs on
its own schedule. And that's wonderfully easy to embrace when
you're on vacation or not responsible for what happens. But
it's a little more difficult when you're on an impossible
quest to determine what you should and shouldn't believe for
the rest of your life, and you've given yourself two
(07:03):
weeks to do that. But that's why people come to
India right, to go on some sort of spiritual retreat
and find themselves. God, I'm such a cliche. The only
thing I can hope for now is that Dr Kumar
is going to be right twice. You cannot feel. Let's
put it as that. From Kaleidoscope and I Heart Podcasts.
(07:28):
I'm Mongayatika door, Welcome to Skyline Drive mhm h M
(08:12):
Chapter one, Straight from Shiva's mouth, Coming, Come, Come from holiday.
This is Bombay as a kid, Bombay is where I
(08:36):
used to start and end every trip to India, midnight
arrivals and two a m. Feasts with relatives who have
been waiting years to see us. The world was bigger
than harder to wrap your arms around, and flights to
India took twenty two hours with multiple layovers and refueling stops.
New York than Paris, than Cairo, than Delhi and only
(08:58):
then Bombay. And it was expensive. We'd save up until
we could go back, and every trip was an event.
This is the library. It's under my aunt's apartment in chamber,
and it's where I used to borrow old comics and
Mad magazines. This is the gym Kanna where I learned
to play snooker. This is Xaviers, where my dad studied
(09:23):
and then didn't in his more delinquent years. This is
the disco where I learned to dance, and Kaiber where
my parents went on their first day. Bombay has always
felt like my city in New York. People correct me
when I say Bombay, but Indians never do. Still, I
(09:45):
talkle between the names depending on my mood. Driving through
the city. It feels like an old friend whose path
is veered from your own, like you don't quite see
eye to eye anymore, but you're also not around each
other for long enough to make a thing of it.
(10:05):
The thing is, I still feel my dad here, like
a fog that descended on the city ages ago and
refused to burn off time. But I kind of just
got into this relationship, so I don't know, I'll do another.
And she was like a cool and Urgean and I
(10:26):
are standing on a street corner in the Santa Cruz
neighborhood of Bombay, and we're waiting to step into the
naughty shops that my aunt someone somehow located for us
from the outside. The place looks tiny and nondescript, something
you'd overlook if you weren't hunting for it. How would
you describe it since you're not from up There's a
fleet of rickshaws going by us, right and uh, and
(10:50):
the rain is stopped now, but there are tons of
puddles and lots of Even in central Bombay, cows owned
the road. We're gonna walk into this place to see
the naughty Do you know anything about natty? This will
be my first experience tools but there's a lot of
fortune telling that happens in India, and some of it
can be pretty alternative. The chalats are much more number Yeah,
(11:15):
so I'm hoping this is a great experience. The funny
thing about these naughty shops is that as soon as
people tell you to go to one, they'll also tell
you how many fake ones there are. But this place
is well regarded, so I'm hopeful. We walked through the doorway,
leave our shoes in a dusty two ft by two
(11:36):
foot vestibule, and then enter reception barefoot. I don't know
what I was expecting, like maybe a wall full of scrolls,
or maybe big brass sculptures of little known deities and
saints or maybe just some wal art. Instead, we're standing
in a tiny, poorly lit box, a couple of benches
pressed up against the walls, and a desk facing the door.
(12:00):
We give our name to the man pottering at the desk,
and then we just wait five ten minutes of my
complete Of course, of course, the naughty reader whose peeks
out from behind the wall to tell us he's doing
his borning prayers. He asked us if we like water
or tea while we wait? How incredible would it be
if the first astrologer I met in India located an
(12:23):
instruction manual for the rest of my life? What if
the leaves hiding in his archive actually contained my life's purpose?
I am genuinely giddy. The prayers take longer than ten minutes,
but sub child, hey, it all works. We get ushered
into an even tinier room, though this one actually has personality.
(12:45):
It's bright lime green, with a couple of temple calendars
on the wall. And then Mukish walks in with an
armful of wooden bundles. So these are a whole bunch
of scrolls. Actually days have Ki places the scrolls on
his desk and let's his inspect them. Oh wow, it's engraved.
(13:06):
It's beautiful. I've been calling them scrolls, but that feels
like the wrong word. Have you ever seen those pantone
booklets with pages that fan out? These are almost like
an ancient version of that, but longer, made of very
thin sheets. Each scroll is maybe three to four inches
wide and about a foot and a half long, and
they're stacked and bound with maybe thirty or forty per booklet.
(13:30):
As we marvel at the tiny lines of text etched
across them, explains the origins and these are These are
palm leaves, just leaves, he tells us, were etched in
the eighteenth century when a family made copies of the
original millennia old predictions. The engravings were laborious and the
script is tiny. But these scrolls have lasted because the
(13:51):
caretakers meticulously rubbed them with oil once a year to
preserve them. Here's argin translator, this is coming from the Southerner,
who community the oldest language in the world, and it's
coming from the Star tradition does as other oldest keepers
of knowledge according to in India. Kish also tells us
(14:13):
that these Nati shastras, or sacred prophecies have a mythological prominence.
Lord Shiva, in his infinite wisdom, shared this knowledge with
the goddess Parvati, his wife, and then she passed it
on to Lord Brahma, who passed the knowledge from the
gods to the sages and then finally to the priests.
And to me, it sounds like a game of celestial telephone.
(14:37):
But Kaish, she tells us these scrolls are actually less
prone to human error than traditional astrology because the words
inscribed here comes straight from God, so he is only
the reader. That the information is directly available and cannot
be soiled by human Touchess Kish tells us he's been
(14:59):
doing this for twenty nine years. He shows his photos
on his phone of him with clients people he asked
us not to share, but they include some of India's
biggest politicians and most famous scientists. He stresses that he's
a humble man. He is just a reader providing answers
for people in need, and I believe him. Then he
(15:20):
gently reaches for my thumb, rolls it across a pad
of ink, and he presses it onto a sheet of paper.
He gave us a methodology directly relating to the thumbing
for which there are under any divisions. Basically, the worlds
on my finger will give the librarians a clue as
to where my leaf might be. There are thousands and
(15:42):
thousands of these bundles of scrolls in the back, and
they're all carefully organized. Sometimes, he says, the process can
take fifteen minutes. Sometimes it takes months. He also comments
on my aunt's absence. He says, part of the reason
she felt ill was that she wasn't meant to be
here today. You can only show up in this room
if it's your destiny. Sometimes people have car accidents trying
(16:05):
to get here. Others apparently get dane. But since I've
made it into this room, he tells me, this is fate.
If there's also such that at the end of the day,
this is a yeah, there will be problems. He said
that you must remain in your mind and your heart
quiet because problems will come, problems will go, so try
(16:31):
and stay calm. But it is distiny. I stare at
the income I thumb, remembering this weird fact for my
days at mental flass that koalas have fingerprints that could
be mistaken for humans. And I laughed at myself wondering
if my scroll could be mistaken for Aquala's. If walks
back in and tells me that I'll enjoy napping in
(16:52):
trees for eighteen hours a day, or if in my
older age, I'll really love feasting on eucalyptus, then I'll
know exactly what went wrong. It's the type of dumb
joke that i'd share with someone, but it's too dumb
to make in this room. Over the next three weeks
that I'm in India, Cash will look and he'll keep
(17:14):
touching pace, but he won't find my scroll. Chapter two.
(17:34):
The thing that matters local local swagger, the wan local local,
local local year swagger, or the want local local language
(17:57):
is curious and how it informs and reflects I deals.
The way my family talks is gentle. The dialect we
speak is sing songyy. My old roommate Losako used to
tell me it was like butter when she heard me
talking to my mom on the phone. But if it's
sweet and overly polite, it's also not direct. My dad
(18:19):
didn't often talk about the sad things or the hard things.
Often he'd skip over the specifics and allude to difficulties
in terms that were vague but capacious. So if you
were to discuss my cousin Argent, he might say it
was so hard what he went through. It's really good.
(18:39):
He's back now, which is insufficient. My cousin Argent is
back now, And of course I've heard the whispers, but
he told me his story. I'm also going to try
and get you up in the right show. It involves
him building townships and the Ivory Coast and yeah, and
(19:02):
then coming back to Dubai to help sort a multimillion
dollar deal. I actually shifted to the Middle East. Everyone
was like, what's wrong with you? It involves a reneged
transaction and him taking the fall for someone else's carelessness.
They hold up and I said, can I come back
now that let's send the old money to clear everything.
(19:22):
Come on back. There's no problem. You send the money.
You've cleared everything and came back and I got arrested.
It's him being thrown and some of the region's worst
and most violent prisons yea, and pretending to be a
Buddhist so he wouldn't be killed for being a Hindu.
(19:42):
Many of them are of them. It is a story
of trauma, kind of spiritual psychologically and finding a Guru
who nurtured his resiliency. The gu so we can't identify
within you whether you're ready or you're still holding back.
(20:04):
And it's the story of a miracle. When they came
out for fifty days without medication, there was no practical
reason in the world I should have done and another
I sentence disappeared. The appellet me go because they didn't
(20:25):
know what they were doing. I'm the person that didn't
have any courtphnities. Some of our chats I taped some
of them. I didn't, But I know he could have
died in prison from beatings or malaria or anything. He
could have been there forever, except somehow a mystic told
him his court records would disappear, and they did, and
(20:47):
the mystic assured him the jails would release him on
house arrest, and they did. And then the Guru told
him to go. So he hid, and he waited, and
he waited until in darkness he was stuffed into the
bed of a truck, crammed in with other terrified bodies,
and trafficked across borders until he found his way home.
(21:10):
And now it is him being here in India with
me and see that come out life once again. You
know that many have done that. It's a way to
tell a story without telling a story. It is vague
and capacious and insufficient. But he is back now and
(21:34):
it's the thing that matters. Don't Chapter three. Believe me?
(22:00):
Despite Lukisha's reputation, I had struck out in Bombay, but
luckily I had come with a backup plan to make
a pilgrimage to Chennai. The truth is, I don't know
anything about Chennai. I've never been, and mostly people in
my family have warned me there's no reason to go,
not because of anything cultural or political. It just comes
(22:21):
down to the weather. Everyone complains about the intense heat
and humanity, but Chennai, which is located in the South
Indian state of Tamil Nadu, is special in terms of Nadi.
According to the story, when the rishi's or holy men
received the wisdom of the gods, they transcribed it onto
leaves and those leaves were protected by generations of South
(22:41):
Indian kings and at some point these manuscripts ended up
in a library in Thuanjore, also in Tamil Nadu, and
while some of the copies were loaned out to other
cities like Delhi or Mumbai. The majority of the authentic
Nadi centers stay at local within driving distance of Chennai.
My friend and story editor Mark has agreed to come
(23:02):
with me, which is a really nice security blanket, and
I also invite Argent. Should I get you a ticket
to come meet us there, I would love that perfect.
For a minute, we thought Mark wasn't going to make
it to India. His visa got backlogged. There was a
moment where I wanted to tell him not to worry
ChEls day, but even I lost faith by this point.
(23:26):
Then thanks to God or the Indian embassy or possibly
Dr Kumar, it was approved right before he was set
to leave. It'll be fun, I think. I think the
three of us hanging out will be fun. Yeah, that
so cool? Okay Greek. When we land, where welcomed by
(24:06):
our drivers, satish, and an entire town plastered in chess
olympiad posters featuring a cartoon horse and a dooti because
apparently Chennai is India's chess capital. Besides the posters, which
are honestly everywhere, I'm a little surprised by how little
of the language I can follow. I don't speak a
lick of Tamil, the local language here, and neither does Argent.
(24:28):
And the six or seven languages we can cabble together
between the two of us don't help us in the slightest.
So it's funny how alien I feel in the country
where I'm normally so at home. Speaking of aliens, I
should probably tell you about the strangest person on meeting
my entire journey between Mumbai and Chennai. I had stopped
off in Bangalore, a town filled with relatives. On one
(24:52):
of those days, my aunt Sheila or Shila Uaca introduces
me to a medicine man who supposedly channels the spirit
of St. Augustia and shake's metal keys as he goes
through a trance to identify what's wrong with your body.
Sant Augustina, aside from being the Sidtha or enlightened soul
who's supposedly brought the naughty leaves to humans by taking
dictation from the gods, is also a patron saint of healing.
(25:16):
I tried to go into this meeting with an open mind,
but the healer is a character probably in his sixties,
spry and cocky with a mischievous smile. If I was
trying to cast a South Asian leprechron for an Indian
Lucky Charms commercial, he'd be on my short list. And
even though his accent is unbelievably thick, like so thick
(25:38):
that I'm working overtime to understand each and every word,
I am captivated by his experience with black magic. What
they do somewhere, I mean man about people know. As
he tells it, a neighbor put a voodoo like curse
(25:58):
on him, and he kept losing weight and balding, and
losing weight and balding, and no one could tell him
what was wrong with him, until when he was sickly
thin and had been robbed of all his glorious plumage,
he found a talisman buried in his backyard. It was
wrapped in rags and hair and blood, all the telltale
(26:19):
signs of black magic. And when he burned it and
reversed the curse, his neighbors had some of the worst
luck ever. They lost their money, their health, even their home.
He grins wide when he tells me about this instant karma.
I honestly don't know what to make of this guy.
On one hand, my aunt told me that after years
of not being able to conceive, it was this man
(26:42):
who gave her the herbs and tinctures to finally carry
a child. Her story is really powerful, and I've heard
so many others that he's helped or cured. But he
also tells me with absolute certainty that Tamil is the
greatest language bar none, because it's the oldest, which is true,
and the most powerful, which I don't quite understand, but okay,
(27:05):
and the most sophisticated, which I start to chuckle at
because now there are a lot of descriptors being used,
and I'm sensing a real air of Tamila hubris here.
But then he brings his argument all together by saying,
and this is the strangest part, it only makes sense
that Tamil is the language that aliens communicate with all
(27:28):
speak Tamil. You need to come plain. When I look
at him quizzically trying to understand how exactly we moved
from astrology to aliens, he just assures me he's right.
Then he smiles at me like I'm an idiot, because
obviously aliens speak Tamil. Okay, It's just that, like chapter four,
(28:05):
Snake astronauts. Gotta take a lot, take a lot, please
name us Kanji. Yeah yeah, that's you're gonna record your
(28:29):
six Yeah. Sorry. I think I had two of Boost
coffee at six am, and it feels so much earlier.
We drive off the hotel lot straight into traffic and
(28:51):
I can only tell where past the city limits when
the cartoon force posters disappear. Up until this point, it
felt like every advertisement was about chess. But now the
billboards are for toothpaste and soaps and clothes and wedding
rings and Argent and I both notice how strange it
is that everyone in the ads is incredibly light skinned,
(29:12):
and what a mind funk that must be. But then
I stopped paying close attention. The drive starts to feel
like every drive I've taken between cities in India, stretches
of rickety shops, stretches of vibrant villages with kids playing
outside long dusty in between started with fields and factories,
(29:33):
banks and petrol stations. There's these trees that lined the
roads with red and white trunks painted that way to
prevent termites. And also the show poachers that the forestry
services keeping. Watch Mark and I are both feeling the
chat night, but Origin's two coffees have definitely kicked in.
He peppers those with questions about life in the States,
(29:54):
about recent Supreme Court cases. He talks about India and
all the miracles he's witnessed that have made him a
true believer, and then he says this, I feels the texts.
You'll understand that there's a lot of interaction between snake
(30:15):
culture and human culture, and there's a lot of snake Okay,
so I'm going to pause right here to say, I
don't know what's going on with all the snake talk,
but they keep coming up again and again, and it
feels like it should mean something. The way George in
(30:39):
our last episode saw a snake as a sign that
he could be good to himself, that he could shed
his trauma and transform. The way my mom experienced snakes
is a curse, something she had to transcend with mysterious prayers.
And now Argent is talking about how he read early
Hindu texts about snakes is the superior beings, carriers of
(31:01):
a greater wisdom. And he starts talking about one account
you read from a mystic who claims to have seen
these astral snakes. He said that he's Guru got him
to me one of the incoming astronauts, space snake astronauts. Yeah,
(31:28):
it feels unlivable. It's just the idea of a snake astronaut. Yeah, well,
I mean like a traveler. He doesn't wear it. You
didn't have to wear a space ship. And when you
read the book, he says, it's it's not possible for
(31:52):
me to explain what exactly I saw, but the snakes
are very different than what you all imagine, and you
and the whole I can describe to you. Is it
blue and glowing? In my cursory understanding of Hindu and
Buddhist cosmology, these serpent like beings rule over three planes
(32:15):
filled with multiple planets, and they're worshiped as the keepers
of both incredible treasure and concealed wisdom treasure texts. As
one book puts up. As we drive further away from Chennai,
I feel like they're this harbinger of what we're about
to learn. The snakes don't rule over the rule over
(32:36):
a different set of planets, and they're supposed to be
very opulent creatures. Is this in this book versus a
different book? Mark who has been quiet this whole time
perks up at this talk of snake astronauts. He has
so many questions about the origins and about how much
Argent could actually believe in this, but he mostly just
(32:59):
smirks and saves his commentary for later. Yeah, that's that's
the problem that I have, hang off. That's the issue
whether or not they were space suits. First of all,
let me imagine that suits. Before long we realize we're
(33:23):
in Kanji Forum. The temple town is famous for its
beautiful shrines in architecture, along with its saris, which are
gorgeous bolts of rich silk embroidered with thread dipped in gold.
I set up to look at the surroundings, noticing these
little altars side by side with banana stands. All of
a sudden, so these turns in and we pull up
(33:45):
to one of the most gorgeous temples I've ever seen.
It towers over the city, and I craned my neck
to see where it's crown touches the sky. I later
learned it's called Acomberry Short temple. Records of its initials
struck or date back to and it is stunning like
a sixty meter tall zigarette, except instead of a giant,
(34:09):
blocky pyramid. It has eleven stories of relief work with
intricately carved pillars and depictions of myths and avatars. If
the greatest churches and cathedrals are meant to fill you
with awe, to make you feel humbled in the presence
of a greater beauty, then this temple does the trick.
(34:30):
I can't wait to see the inside, to meet the
temple leaf readers. But as soon as I try to
hop out, so these motions me to stay inside. He
steps out and gestures and a man nearby, and the
man just shakes his head. It's clear we're in the
wrong place. So Sing jumps back in, and then we
drive and drive. Fifteen minutes later, we're parked in this
(34:54):
dusty lot in front of a cinder block wall that
feels like it's in the middle of nowhere. If there
wasn't this big yellow sign outside declaring that this was
a house of astrology, I would have assumed it was
a storage facility, or maybe a clinic. Whatever it is,
it's no eleven story carved temple. Chapter five, The Waiting Game.
(35:36):
We swap mosquitoes and reapply repellent. We make idle conversation.
We look at our phones and like kids in a car,
asking over and over are we there yet? I walked
from the patio into the little reception area to see
if we can get started. Origin goes in a few
times too. After a few hours of waiting, they finally
(35:59):
take my thumb prints Mongish, Yeah, I mean, I mean
born in America. Follow me. My father's name is Scomish.
All Indians and not even They put us in the
queue and then we wait some more. Every ten or
(36:22):
fifteen minutes, someone's name is called, and one of the men.
Because it is weirdly almost all men here, a mix
of middle aged business owners and young people who look
anxious to get married, they start disappearing inside. When it's
finally our turn, we follow the receptionists to the second level.
Despite the thatch roof, it's actually way more modern up
(36:43):
here and welcoming. They're these sliding doors with little enclosures
where people are doing one on ones, and our June,
Mark and I all squeeze into a room. When our
man finally walks in, he's wearing viv with the these
three stripes across his four head, applied with sacred ash
often associated with priests. He also has a big pile
(37:05):
of scrolls in his arm. Now this is going to
be hard to follow, but he asked if I speak Tamil,
and then in broken English, he tells us he needs
to find my palm leaf first. He indicates how the
scrolls are like a card catalog. Your thumbprint helps you
find your scroll. Your scroll helps you find your full horoscope,
which is also hidden somewhere in the stacks in the back.
(37:27):
I am really pay one bombing, Okay, tell me, I
am really you were name pole, their mother, and name
fool that we're not going to leave, but still bomb
the counpound. Our reader starts reading the Tamil off the scroll.
He asked, your father's dead and your mother's living. I respond, yes,
(37:47):
I want to be the bother. They're looking for an
exact match, the perfect card in the card catalog, and
each time the details of the scroll don't line up
with my life, he slaps it to the back of
the bundle and moves on to the next You were
married and living with your wife, Yes, your mother had
two marriages. Ever, no smack. The leaf goes into the
(38:10):
back of the pile. Sometimes when he starts reading a
leaf and sees it doesn't match. He doesn't even ask,
He just moves it to the back and the sword
and keeps going. He asks if I'm forty five, and
I just laugh. I am enjoying all of this, feeling
like there's real momentum, and I tell him no, I'm
forty two. We keep going and some of it gets confusing,
(38:32):
like he asked if I have two sons. I have
two children. I mean I have a son and one
kid who's non binary. He slaps into the back of
the pile. But I'm a little dizzy, trying to stay
on top of his accent and trying to make sure
(38:53):
I'm answering the questions correctly, until he says this what
he wants to set it. I have one sister, no brother, married, yes, Margy,
but engagement yes, even married, living into the way, yes,
but I don't want to do one sister, yes, sister Marie,
(39:14):
unmarried it you have married a living in the way mother,
the mother living you were in flavor jaboking and dingo.
That is it. He has found it. After fifteen hours
of being on planes, two weeks of hunting through stacks
in Mumbai, another hour long flight a two hour drive
and three hours of waiting on a humid patio that
(39:36):
would give most steam rooms and inferiority complex. We see
this man for twenty minutes and he just finds it.
Argent thinks I'm blessed. Mark looks more skeptical, and the
three of us we filed downstairs. That's what happens. So
(39:56):
to part is done, which is yet to be matched.
We won day when to get a matched in bombing,
we didn't. They couldn't find him. Yeah, and now you've
got the real thing. Now the part will be that
you will be broadcasting to America your future ship. Chapter six,
(40:27):
The Son of a Milkman. So you cut at the
lock a seed you must. We wait outside a little
more and then we're called in and walked through this
(40:48):
long hallway to a room in the back which faces
onto a courtyard. The complex is bigger than I've realized,
with places to do poujas and with rooms to rent.
As we sit down, Mr Kumar, the same man from reception,
double checks that this is the right file. He goes
through some details about my thumb, that I'm a Brahmin,
(41:11):
that I was born on me first, and then he
reads my filet. I'm listening keenly, but nothing he says
here is interesting. He says, my mother may get ill,
but medicines will help. He says, my sister's engagement has
(41:32):
already taken place, and in the near future she will
get married. But here's the thing. While we're sitting in
this room, I have one of those kaiser so's a
moments from the usual suspects in the whole scroll section,
(41:52):
I've given away all my details. Is your mom's name Chitra, No,
it's Lolita. Is your father living, No, he's passed. Is
your sister married, Well, she's engaged. And as I realized this,
everything from here on becomes tainted. Like the predictions are
so mundane. You'll have a good life, you'll get sick,
(42:14):
you'll have medicine and get better. Your children will have
a good education, you'll make decent money, you'll have good
relationships with others. I mean, it's just a mishmash of
vague things that happened to everyone and details I've already confirmed.
In some ways, the most surprising thing he says is
this line. I laughed, because in some ways this is
(42:38):
both the most ridiculous thing and the most specific thing
about me today. I have never had a new car
or a luxurious one since high school. I've just driven
a series of beaters and men. I would love a
car that starts when you wanted to. Anyway. The rest
of the reading is more of the same, m h,
(43:01):
you want things. Basically, he's up selling us here. What
I got was the starter pack. We've already paid for
that part, and we put down a healthy tip on
top on his insistence. Or you don't take like Google
pay or anything like. Okay, okay, I'll figure that out.
(43:23):
And now if I want to know more about any
specific part of my life, the section of the leaf
that deals with my career, or my health, or my
kids or one of like nine more things, we will
need to pay more. You okay. I step outside to
(43:45):
chat with Mark. It's confused. The truth is I was
more than confused. I was feeling deflated after that experience
in Mumbai. We had spent so much time trying to
figure out the perfect, knotty place to visit. I'd come
all this way and dragged Mark and Argin here because
(44:09):
this is where I thought I had the best chance
of finding my fortune, and then nothing, because I kind
of yeah, I expect grand relations. There's a line I
didn't catch on tape, but it's stuck with me. Mark says,
(44:30):
you already got your miracle of astrology. You can't expect
a second one. You can't expect it every time. When
I go back in the reader opens the chapter about
my last life. He says I had been born the
son of a milkman in the milk business, you know,
in a typical milk vendor family. Was no was He
(45:03):
tells me that I slept around, and I think he's
saying that I gave my wife STDs. I also treated
my parents horribly and didn't support them. I cheated my
business partners. And I am nodding vigorously and enjoying this
because this part is kind of the realest to me,
(45:23):
Like every time someone tells me they've seen a psychic
or a reader and had some revelation in a dream,
they're always a king or queen in their past life.
And to me, it's like, there are not that many
kings in history. How can all of us have been kings?
So weirdly, this is finally a storyline I can buy into.
(45:45):
Being here smiling at the story it reminds me of
this thing. The writer Short Vendrum, who grew up in Chennai,
once wrote how she loves to read and reread her
horoscope because to her it's like a very sue being
work of fan fiction. And she told me about how
sometimes the horoscope feels accurate and sometimes it doesn't. She
(46:08):
will be a girl of a restless nature. She will
be a girl of a self destructive timidity her moods.
But if she puts it during times of upheaval, it
reassures me to read these type in pages to be
reminded that one long dead man took the measure of
my life and said it was not all bad. She
will brood over the memories of the past. She will
(46:30):
brood on fancied slight, very unflattering, but also like really specific,
and I'm afraid to say, like super accurate. I do
love this Milkman stuff, not because I believe it, but
because I love that someone has created in new mythology
for me, a new origin story for the problems I'm facing.
(46:51):
And now they've given me a new way to remedy
those problems too, albeit through a few too many visits
to temples. For my liking Still it is pure fun,
but when I think about it later, it won't scratch
the itch I actually have, because, like Stripy, I wanted
(47:12):
to walk into the shop and let someone take the
measure of my life. I'd hope that they would find
my leaf and look into my eyes and with complete
certainty tell me that my life wouldn't be all bad.
And although I made the journey here, and although those
words were said in the end, I just couldn't believe them.
(47:40):
Chapter seven, spinning to be thirty in the morning, content
team stuck inside, obviously stuck in my head. Can't do ship.
(48:00):
I've got to go back to now. Let me make
this sens a statement. To drive home from the Naughty
Shop is somehow so long, and I feel the clock ticking.
We have maybe five days left on this trip, and
I have not felt the magic here. Nothing has brought
me closer to believing Argent senses my tension Mark too.
(48:25):
I tell Mark, maybe we should raise to our Nasi
in Northern India. Even though my astrologer friend Keith warned
me it was like a Disneyland of astrology. If we
wanted to do someone totally crazy that you could actually
like I fly to like the Naves. There's a university
there and a lot of astrology PhD s and also conment,
(48:48):
so maybe there's some fun to be had. Or we
could do what the Naughty Reader told me to do
for penance for my sins as a milkman, I could
go to an offering at a Hanuman temple, and I
have a specific like one in mind. My aunt and
family whipped in this place and hopefully where my grandfather
finds Jim House. I don't know. I mean, I am
(49:12):
just throwing ideas at the wall. We stopped for lunch
at this place, our drivers at these loves where they
serve giant heaping plates of rice on banana leaves with
curries and chutney's ladled on top. We eat with our
hands in the traditional style, shoveling the piping hot food
into our mouths. I pairmine with the thumbs up an
(49:32):
Indian coke of sorts, and while the food fills our bellies,
it doesn't calm my nerves, and I grow increasingly irritated
about my journey to the Naughty Shop. A few days later,
when I start reviewing my tape, I realized I've missed
a crucial detail. A woman I had interviewed previously named
(49:53):
Moutids had walked into a naughty shop a skeptic and
walked out a believer, not because of what she heard
from the reader exactly, but because of what she saw.
I was looking very disinterested though. That man asked me, man,
can you read them? I said yes, very good, I
could take them. Then he started showing the bomb leave
(50:14):
to me after point then he said, that's your father's
name started with A. They said yes, and then I
could see the name written that of my mother in law.
That was when it take me really, you know, I thought, Okay,
there's something here. They're not bluffing. Then I feel like
(50:35):
an idiot. I hadn't thought to photograph my leaf. I mean,
I don't know if they would have let me, but
maybe there was a miracle lurking in there. Not in
the prophecy, which I thought was so vague, but in
the sorting system. Was there something beautiful I had missed.
When Mark and I talked about it later at our
(50:57):
hotel bar, Mark has a different perspective on the play.
It's basically like a magic correct Then we couldn't see
the word Yeah, it was like hearing the was like
hearing a magic correct. As he puts it, it doesn't
matter if it's real, because the shop is in the
business of hope. And I think about how he's right, Like,
(51:17):
there's so many people that come in such desperate situations, right, Like,
if you hear you're going to have a comfortable life,
You're gonna get a new car, and you're gonna like,
you know, like four to five years. You got to
watch around here. Yeah, I mean like like that probably
like sustains a lot of people, right, that would be
such a big deal to a certain kind of First
(51:46):
Chapter eight, Double Dose. Months later, my memories of Chennai
are blair, early morning, strong coffee, ceiling fans that are
no match for the heat. But mostly it's just car ride.
Hours in the car with Origin talking about philosophy and
(52:07):
science and our childhood's the moments we were too proud,
the moments that humbled us, and how we got here.
If Bombay felt like an old friend whose path had
diverged from my own, then Argin was like a close
friend I had lost and then found again. And it's
funny that he's here with me because I've forgotten that
(52:29):
Origin had been warned by his group that he should not,
at any cost dabble in astrology, something I'm reminded of
when my wife Lizzie calls, wait, I'll pull you answer, Well,
he's my brother at the end of the day, and
I wasn't going to abandon him. But there's a phrase
(52:53):
I grew up using in India cousin brother and cousin
sister in joint families. You grew up thinking of your
cousins as closer than just a cousin. You tie rocky
to them or these promised threads that promised love and protection,
and you treat your cousins like their siblings because they
are in a way. And the fact that Origin is
(53:15):
here with me now, despite the oceans between us, despite
the time that's passed. But having said that, this is
my first experience with astrology as well, So I was
actually warned not to dabble in these kind of um subjects.
(53:36):
Is subjecting you to things you've been avoiding, you know, Yeah,
at tempting me with taboo subjects. Shame, shame that he's
a bad influence in my life. Origin has told me
what he's been through, but I can't imagine it it
is too horrifying, and I admire him so much, how
(53:56):
he somehow pulled together his family and picked up the
shards of his life, and how he keeps moving forward
with such grace and humility. If my days in China
I were a blur of endless car rides, the final
pit stops were always a seat at the hotel bar.
Sometimes it was me and Mark, sometimes it was Argin
(54:17):
and me, and occasionally it was the three of us
sitting in a dimly lit patio shooting away mosquitoes as
we sited on these fresh lime sodas. On the tougher days,
I'd cut the soda with gin and bomb a cigarette
off of Argin. And on one of those nights, Argent
told us about his stud Suddy, the seven and a
(54:38):
half years of bad luck brought on by Saturn that
everyone experiences at some point according to badic astrology, and
his seven and a half years. He tells us we're
considered especially bad. Oh well, I experienced a double sub
cready almost uh mine pretty much game, So I'm really
(55:01):
ship luckily, really ship luck. Until this moment, Argin has
never once talked about how difficult this period has been.
He's talked about it. Matter of factly, he's talked about
embracing the future, but this is the first time he
lets us in on just how hard is life on
But my n ended law skill and I'm still trying
(55:25):
to understand the difference, the difference. Yeah, I'm trying to
figure out what went right, and I know there are
certain things that have changed, but I can't. I can't
feel it in a physical form. That's crazy. I didn't
really because this is India. Argent jokingly links his misfortune
(55:45):
back to what he must have done in his past lives.
Obviously did much more than I mean. Argent is not
believe in astrology. I never asked him to get a reading,
but it's ttrology has happened to him. The shadow of
that seven and a half years of bad luck. It's
(56:05):
been lurking in the back of his mind. There's another
moment that I can't stop thinking about. From the bar
after I turned off my recorder, Mark says that too
often when a story isn't going right, the impulse is
to speed up to book as many interviews as you can.
It's that old sailor's adage. If you can't tie a
(56:27):
good knot tie a lot of them, but Mark encourages
the opposite. He says, I need to slow down. He says,
if I'm going to resolve anything about my life about
my dad, it is not going to be with him
or Urgin, and it's not going to be through astrology.
Astrology was never the point. And he tells me to
(56:49):
make a pilgrimage to where I feel most connected to
my family and to my past, to just sit with
that experience. And I think about that. I really do,
but I don't listen because I'm not thinking clearly. I
(57:10):
haven't been thinking clearly this whole time, this whole show. Instead,
I asked Sufish to raise me across the state. I
drag argin along, I collect interviews that will not add
up to much, and then just one my time in
(57:34):
India is nearly up. I realized Mark is right, and
I spend sixteen hours in a car to find meaning
where I should have been looking all along. Ye, thank
(58:09):
you so much for not forgetting about our little show.
Skyline Drive as a production of Kaleidoscope and I Heart Podcast.
This show is hosted and written by me Mongish Artigulur.
And yes, I know this episode was so long, but
I'm about to make it longer with these credits. Mary
phill of Sandy is our supervising producer. How would we
get the show out without Mary? The answer is we
(58:31):
would not. Knee and Shah he is our delightful producer
and conducted the interview with Shorty. Mark Latto is my
excellent story editor and was such a trooper for suffering
with me in India in a city I knew nothing about,
though I did feed him lots of paratas. This episode
was also produced by the insanely talented Anna Rubinova. I
(58:51):
don't know how we could have got through this much
tape without her. Anna, you were a boon to the show.
The super sweet through Chevarrao hit the streets for this
episode and collected extra tape for me. This episode was
mixed by my pal at Soundboard. Oh my Gosh the Warning.
The warning was read by producer extraordinaire Nadia Raymond, who
won the first ever Audio Pulitzer along with the team
(59:13):
at This American Life. Nadia wants you to listen to
t A L's next episode, but I want you to
know she's a badass. I've got to thank my pal
Botany for the theme song and the composition. It's also
Azadi Records. How can I thank Azadi enough? Also my
friends Him on Show, Suri, Peter Matthew Bauer and Motor Sales.
And I can't forget my pal roge A k A
(59:34):
Lush Life for lending me his tunes as well. I
am dropping a second mixtape with more music from Skyline
Drive Volume two. It will be in the show links,
please go check it out. Additional production and research support
from my love Lizzie Jacobs, Someone Rock around the Clock,
Buck She and my beautiful cousin Arjun Bucci ar June
(59:55):
I love you. This show is executive produced from my Heart,
I'm my good pals Nicky Etour and Katrina Norvell and
a shout out to Nikki's baby girl Pearl and also
Enzo Enzo, I have not forgotten about you, buddy. Also
got to thank my incredible partners from Kaleidoscope, Oswald Listen,
Kate Osbourne, costos linos Viney Shore. You inspire me every day.
(01:00:19):
Um special thanks to Ali, Nathan Connal, Will and Bob
at my Heart for getting behind the show, Barkley Sorrow,
Vin Shanta, my kiddos, Henry and Ruby, my family everywhere,
and as always, a big big thank you to my
Amma and my dad Lolita and articular, I thank my
lucky stars for we have one more episode to go,
(01:00:42):
so thank you so much for listening. I can't tell
you how much it means to me to
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