Palmistry lessons with Badrish

I climb thirteen stories to a temple nestled in the mountains and there is a sense of peace up here in the sky such as I have never felt before. I look out at the jungle and the city spread below and I feel small and inconsequential. Not so long ago, that thought would have filled me with a wild sense of unruly panic but today it felt good for in reality I am small and inconsequential: one living breathing part of this throbbing, heaving world and that is a beautiful thing. The city is bursting with trinkets and coloured fabrics and smoky incense and crumbling bookshops fat with books and I could wander around it running my fingers along the fringes of life forever.

I am having palmistry lessons from a self-proclaimed mystic named Badrish, who claims that he was saved from suicide by a vision of god and a rainbow light, and that he has the divine power of healing. I want him to heal me. He draws me a map of the alignment of the planets at the time of my birth from a complicated book written in an alphabet that is alien to me, and advises me of the right gem stones to carry and which auspicious days I ought to look out for. Every day I sit in his austere room as he tells me stories of my future, of his past, of the people he is currently healing and he teaches me mantras and gives me lessons about life, playing the part of each character with theatrical gestures and different voices. He explains the movements of the planets I was born under in alignment with the mounds of skin on my palms and I scribble it all down in a gold gilded notebook, tasting witchcraft on my tongue.

Sometimes there are power cuts and we sit on the balcony in the light overlooking the street, as the neighbours make us chai in metal cups and he smokes his five o'clock cigarette. He spits his dreams and disasters onto the pavement below us and talks about his wife and his children and life in the mountains. Today he told me one of the best ways to release negative energy is to dance, and that everyone should dance every day. He is a shambling shaman with a wicked glint in his eye and a lot of patience, and every hour I spend with him is strange and wonderful.

The first day of my twenty second year on this earth dawns, and I suck up the fear that tugs relentlessly at the ends of my hair and jump onto the back of a motorbike belonging to a magic man from the mountains and we career wildly along the chaotic roads of India to visit a temple. We weave through the streets where real people live and dance and cry and sweat and love, where bags of grains and seeds and rice bulge into the road and plastic flowers spill into the dirt and a wedding band dresses in red sequin jackets carry imitation gold pillars to the venue on their heads.

We make water offerings at a Shiva temple, as people chant and play instruments and weave garlands of fresh flowers as offerings to god and the faith and humility of people is so strong that it gives my slowly healing soul warm hope beneath her bandages. The man from the mountains tells me that this temple was not made by man and that it simply exists, that throughout history various people have tried to destroy it and yet they cannot. People put god before everything here and while I am not blessed with such belief I can't help but envy the trust that they have in a higher order, in karma and the idea that everything will happen naturally the way it is supposed to.

I ride past the river and up into the mountains for green tea, where I am given another blessing and sit in the sun with a yoga teacher and muse about life until it is time to collect my astrology chart from Badrish. He pulls a necklace made of white stones from his bag, a gift for my birthday to symbolize peace of mind. He knows that I am hurting, he can see it in my hand and he repeats a mantra and tells me that I have no need to feel the way the way that I do, that the world is good and I want to cry. He sits cross-legged on the bed in his bare room and I watch his face crinkle like a brown paper bag as he says a prayer for me and I feel for the first time in a long time that everything will be okay.

I subject myself to a traditional ayurvedic panchakarma massage where my naked body is rubbed with a rough bag of wheat and a lady sits on my head and teases the knots and the strings and the balls of wool and the thick black smoke and the tension of a thousand unanswered questions out of my tender muscles. I sit with new friends at a table overlooking the Ganga, as the reflection of the candles on my birthday cake dance on the water like falling souls and I let it all wash over me, tasting honey on my skin.

Swamiji, the leader of my ashram made a speech during the evening aarti about how birthdays here are not merely celebrations: they mark a rebirth into a new life and a new frame of mind, free of all the pain and the burdens of the past and one infused instead with the spirit of this place.

Angels appear in a multitude of guises here and every conversation forces words from my fingertips like bursting lava melting the pages of my notebooks and after a period of such stony silence it is like summer rain upon my body, my barren mind finally flowing with the monsoon season like streams of coloured ribbon unfurling from the tops of mountains, saturating my pages with tongues of fire and great bulging blooms, setting the worlds in my head alight.

I meet a lost soul in a juice bar who is carved from the same molten rock as I am, who completely embodies everything I have ever felt about the world. She feels just as trapped as I do by the tight shackles of societal convention and she has thrown them off and emerged sparkling. When people ask her what she is 'doing' she fires the question back at them and finds more often than not that they are short, of time and of love and of happiness and of living.

She gives me the courage to vocalize thoughts that have been swimming through my blood for a long time and I realise that all of the pressure that piles on my head in London like a hat full of bricks is completel;y self imposed. The dark brown stain of an empty day, the panic rising in my chest at my own confusion and my repeated failure to create, to produce, to build is  merely a result of my own state of mind. It is perfectly okay to take things slowly, to drink a coffee or to read a book, to walk in the park and to enjoy all the small moments of your day. Life is not about achieving things or making money or climbing climbing climbing that ridiculous ladder that actually, ultimately doesn't lead to anywhere. It is more beneficial to stop for breath and enjoy the view, to enjoy the here and now, to gulp the air and to see what is happening around you. This may sound obvious but this viewpoint has been hidden for me by purple storm clouds like bruises of expectation and ambition flowering constantly under my sun-starved skin.

I take a laughter yoga class and spend a morning lying hysterical on the floor, miaowing like a cat with a room of strangers and chanting Hare Krishna and throwing my hands in the air and the teacher sings us a happiness mantra before telling us that everything: our bodies, this world, our material possessions, other people, are all transient and yet the soul is eternal. These fleeting illusions will not make us happy. Happiness is something that comes from inside. Once you learn to be happy, choose to be soul-happy in any situation, giggling with sheer joy at the wild accident of beautiful life, then you will be happy and only then can you make others happy.

I can't believe I couldn't see it before but this dazzling realisation courses through my veins and makes my skin tingle with light. Instead of toxic smoke now I am coughing up gold dust.
I spend a languid afternoon gorging myself on the present moment and watching Ma Ganga flutter her eyelashes from a tree house far above her, when a great plume of smoke billows from Laxman Jhula bridge and creates an ethereal cloud above the water. A backpacker at the adjacent table tells us that it is the ashes of a spent human being scattered from the bridge. The wind takes the broken body into her bower and carries her gently into the mountains as Mother Ganga opens her mouth wide and swallows the crumbs whole but the soul lives on and beautiful life falls into beautiful life and the world turns and turns and instead of being dizzy I am moving with her.