The Seer:
An Indian man, perhaps a Sikh, came up to me on the street last week. He saw me and walked up to me saying, “Lucky face, lucky face”.

The Past:
He said by the shape of my forehead, I had been a monk in a previous life.
He waved his hand in circles over his face and said I have very good karma.
Strange what he said about being a monk, since pursuing that has always been unrealistically in the back of my mind. To be told I was a monk in a past life explains the attraction in this life.

The Future:
At first he said something good will happen to me next month, later he specified it would happen in April. He said that the past two years were bad for me, but something good would happen soon. The last two years bad? I hadn’t thought about it, the past two years I’ve been working. Working? I’ve been working to live, living just to survive, a life that I had always considered not worth living. The past two years I’ve been doing what I’ve always feared and despised. God have the last two years sucked!!

On Money:
He said I was good at making money, but not good at saving money.
When he said that, I thought he was dead wrong. If anything, I’m not so hot on making money, but I’m plenty good at saving it. Later on, it occurred to me that the 'rents brought me to a Chinese fortune teller in Queens a year an a half ago, he said the same thing: that friends would take advantage of my generosity, and I wouldn’t really make money until I was 42. Or was it 44? Not that I intend to live that long, but strange that two people said the same thing.

On Temper:
He said I have a bad temper, and I must control it. Bad temper? I don’t think I have a bad temper now. But who am I fooling? I was socialized to have a bad temper from my family, I’ve just learned how to control it. That’s not to say it’s not there, I just don’t act on the feelings that lead to what can be described as a bad temper.

On Bad Luck:
He said that Tuesdays were unlucky for me and I should not cut my nails or cut my hair on Tuesdays. It was Tuesday that I met this man, and I had been needing to cut my fingernails for three days but kept forgetting. I was annoyed by the thought of having to wait another day to cut my fingernails. I ended up waiting until midnight that night, and then cut them.

On What To Do:
He said that I must wake up before sunrise everyday because the sun is my master, and that I must pray to God everyday. I took pause at that because of the ambiguity in the terms “pray” and “God”, but at some point, he paused and said, “to Buddha”, and I was just like “whoa!”. (I equate Western "prayer" with "meditation", or sitting).
He said that on Sundays, I must buy food to give away to people who need it.

The Gimmick:
He scribbled something on a small piece of paper he had, and he crumpled it up and put it into my palm, he then told me to name a flower. I thought Chrysanthemum, but I said Rose. He then asked me how many brothers I had, I said two. He then told me to open up the paper, and on the paper were written “Rose/2”.

The Catch?
He then asked me how much money I could give him and to write the amount on a piece of paper. I wrote $2. He implored me to give $20, I told him I could not afford that. He told me to give him $10.
He wrote down the name of his temple in Hong Kong, and he told me if I went to Hong Kong, to go to the temple, and at the temple I could give him the remaining $10. For some reason that impressed me.

On the Chance Meeting
And it was totally just by chance that we were on the same sidewalk at that time. The time that I left from work to go to lunch and where I went was determined by outside intervening sources. All morning, I had been thinking of getting a salad from Specialty's. A bit before 1 o'clock, Eric stopped by my cube, and the end of our chat determined when I left for lunch ("I guess I'll go get lunch now"), and then he said something about Quizno's, and that put that in my mind. When I got to Quizno's they didn't have what I wanted so I turned around and headed out. I was there for less than 30 seconds. I turned right out the door to go to Speciality's and I saw an Indian man in a turban. I felt sympathy and compassion towards him, thinking that it couldn’t be easy being in this country at this point in time, looking like that, with all the terrorist scares and all, but then he approached me saying, “Lucky face, lucky face.”