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Nawal Gani can tell your fortune from a cup of coffee.
“They don’t ask me anything. And I don’t ask them anything. They come. I give them my coffee to drink. Ask them to leave a little behind. Then I tell them to blow into the cup and wish for something. I then take the cup from them, tilt it over the saucer and wait. Once the coffee in the cup has dried, I begin to read.”
This is a legacy from her mother Raja Abdul Gani who used to earlier hand people cups of java and read their futures for over half a century until she lost her eyesight a few years ago. But she still reads people’s futures by holding their hand and summoning her spirit guides at her quaint little house on the second floor of the Egyptian Block (“We own the whole block”) on Haines Road.
Mrs Raja Gani smiles from behind her gold teeth and mascaraed eyelashes and tells you, “This is god’s gift to me.” Apparently, at a family dinner, which she went to when she was eight, Raja Gani picked up a cup of coffee and disclosed, “Somebody is going to come home tonight. He has been missing for a long time. But he is still alive. He will come home and knock at the door. A lady will cry hysterically and another will faint.” Nobody took her seriously but sure enough, at midnight, a man knocked at the door. He turned out to be a relative of theirs called Ibrahim who they thought had died at war.
“Since that day, people would bribe me with chocolates and other presents just so I would read their coffee cups. Every dinner I would go to, I would find all of them quickly drinking their coffee and leaving their cups upturned hoping I would read their futures.”
Mrs Gani would read for her family and her family’s family and their family and a distant relative and their distant relative. Until one day, she finally decided to start charging. So, now you have to cough up Rs 1000 for her cup of coffee and a reading.
“I run a nursery school called Mother Care for poor children. I give them free uniforms and books. I also run a tailoring unit for poor women and the Cantonment Youth Educational Welfare Organisation. I need money for all my social work. Which is why I decided to start charging people. All this money goes into these projects.”
People come from all over to drink Mrs Gani’s concoction — decoction, rather —“From then prime ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, to cricketers Kapil Dev and Ravi Shastri… I can’t remember. Once I do a reading I can never remember anything about the person or what I have said.
“Once this lady came to me in tight pants and a short top. Only afterwards and thanks to my children I realised she was Sushmita Sen.”
And the magic is not in the coffee. “Even my maid can make the coffee. It’s what’s in your heart that matters.”
Her daughter Nawal does not read tea because “coffee is a 24-hour Arab tradition. Nobody drinks tea.” Instead, you have to drink very sweet black coffee, which leaves behind some very striking filigree-like patterns. “Fish means money, Snake means enemy, tree stands for fame, roads for travel, birds (dark and brooding) for bad news, and light birds with spread wings for good news.
So, when it’s bad news… “I never give them the bad news. It is not right. I just throw little hints at them. You know, like please avoid travelling for a while, or you must pray. Because people wish things upon themselves and that is why they happen. They wish what happens to them. I mustn’t let that happen. I never let that happen.”
So, for an ordinary cup of Mysore coffee and a gift from God, visit the duo at #2nd Floor, Egyptian block, 26 Haines Road; Ph: 2536-9416, 98860-21641.