The Creepy Ouija Board

When I was younger, I had this strange need - yeah, it was no mere wish, it was a need – to know my future. Interestingly, I made friends with a bunch of people who also had this “need.” One day, in the hostel, me and aforementioned psycho – er, I mean, wannabe psychics discovered melted candle wax on the floor. The drops appeared to have fallen around a perfect square. This gave us an idea. Why not try the Ouija board. Yeah, summon some spirits and ask them, hey what’s gonna happen like, you knowww, five years from now? Sounded like fun. Sure, we were gonna conjure beings that sometimes wore bloody rags and feature in our nightmares, but what the hell, it’s for a “noble” (read - weird) cause. So we discussed this with some other horrified (justifiably) hostel girls, who advised us against it. But we went ahead anyway, with a perfect piece of cardboard and candles and everything. We waited for the power to go off (we were melodramatic back then (perhaps still are)). We kept calling out and calling out, but much like our love-lives, the Ouija board seemed like a dead, soggy, candle-wax covered, prayer-diffused end. We resigned to our fates (or the lack of their knowledge) and went to bed. A couple of weeks later, a new fad arose – palmistry. With about a month to go for final exams, we buried our noses deep into - not “Engineering Physics”, but – “Guide to the hand” by Cheiro. We discovered lines we had never seen before, created theories of our own, read and wrote down, read more and wrote down some more. Until we had mastered close to a zero in Engineering Physics… Palmistry kept us company through most of our semesters. It was fun. And for a while perhaps we really wanted to believe in it. But then we decided, there has to be a better way. So we thought, perhaps a professional could help us (one of the girls did visit a “professional palmist” eventually. She never revealed to us what he said). But then, something sad happened. A friend of someone I knew was told by a professional that he would die at a certain age. The friend took the words to heart, and got so scared, that on his birthday, he hung himself. He surely rendered the words of the psychic true, but should he have done that? Had he not consulted this guy, had he not known about what the psychic said (whose sobriety and sanity both are to be questions, cos who tells a person at what age they are gonna die???) would he not have lived longer? I certainly think so. If we so desperately want to know our futures, wouldn’t we wish to change what we already know? Avoid any untoward incident. Why get sucked right into the black hole? Why kill yourself just cos some guy said you would!? There is really no “one future.” There probably are many. Action and equal reaction and all that. As for tomorrow, unless you are referring to procrastination, there is no reason to really think about it.
“Sochna kya, jo bhi hoga dekha jayega” Copyright Petrichor and Clouds 2013 at petrichorandclouds.blogspot.com Please do not reproduce the material published here.