02/05/2025
The Martian Girl and the Wooden-Floored Shop
In 1998, I spent a summer in Murree — a tourist hill station in Pakistan where clouds wander through the streets, and every second shop seems to promise either magic or memories. I was a hand reader then, renting a tiny, creaky shop on Mall Road, just above a colonial-era building whose wooden floor moaned like an old man with every step. The shop seemed like it could collapse at any moment, but I loved it. It had character — and a table with two chairs out front where I’d read palms for curious passersby.
Above my shop was the public library. A quiet place with an even quieter librarian who never really liked me. Maybe he thought I was some street magician, or maybe he just didn’t like the idea of hands revealing truths that books sometimes couldn’t. He avoided eye contact. We never exchanged more than polite nods.
One day, while sitting with a neighboring gem seller — a friend of mine — an American girl walked in. She must have been around 18 or 19, beautiful, curious, and full of traveler’s energy. She examined a few stones, and I, ever ready to make conversation, asked her about the rings on her fingers. “Do you know what they mean?” I asked. She didn’t. So I explained — the meaning of each finger, the energy they carry, the language of wearing a ring.
She grew interested. I told her I read palms. She agreed to a reading.
We walked to my wooden-floored shop, where I read her hand with the same honesty I offered everyone. She was surprised — even moved — and we talked more. I told her about hypnosis, and to my amazement, she had already been hypnotized before, during her time studying in China. She was traveling back to America now, but Pakistan had caught her curiosity, and she'd made a detour.
I offered to hypnotize her again, and she agreed. In that quiet session, I took her back — not to some past life, but to a simple, imagined homecoming. I described her parents welcoming her after two years. The scent of the house, the joy in their eyes, the relief, the laughter. It moved her. When I brought her out of the trance, she had tears in her eyes.
I asked, “Did I touch something too deep?”
She smiled, a little embarrassed. “It’s not sadness. It’s just… fear, maybe. Or maybe something else.”
For the next few days, she walked beside me through the streets of Murree. People noticed. A young foreign girl in a local boy’s company — not something you saw every day. She left eventually, as all travelers must. But something had changed.
After she was gone, I walked into the library again. The same librarian who once avoided me suddenly smiled, nodded, and said, “Oh, the Martian boy is here.” I wasn’t sure if he meant Martian as in alien, or martian as in from Murree — but either way, something had shifted. The same people who had ignored me now greeted me. They respected what I did. Maybe it was because she had respected it first.
I wasn’t a magician. I wasn’t special. But in those few days, through an unexpected friendship and a strange kind of acceptance, I became visible.
