ASTROLOGY SUCKS!

ASTROLOGY SUCKS!

The red neon lights of the billboard was one of the attractions of the ‘Astrology Research Centre’ located in the basement of a building in the heart of Lajpat Nagar. Sunny Boy had thus reached his destination and I, as his companion, was lost between alternating states of wonderment and bewilderment.

We had travelled across twenty Metro Stations to get to that place. Reminiscences from the past hour included the six counts of tussles to get in and out of the train, the careless bumps, the rude pushes, the urgent nudges and the undisciplined jostling within the bogey besides the accelerated Brownian motion of the horde of super-busy people in the platforms. Such an industrious rush hour surely increased our blood pressures.

Sunny Boy pulled out the scroll in his pocket and verified the name on display. Below it was inscribed ‘Italian Red Coral – 9 Carats’. That was the prize he so dedicatedly sought and which accounted for the adventures of the day.

We pushed in a ginormous door made of designer glass and wood and found that a group of people awaited our entry to welcome us. There were two heavyweight Bouncers in charcoal colored uniform that also matched their skin tones. They flanked an elderly frail guardsman whose rifle weighed too heavy for him. There was also one female receptionist standing within her counter to the right of us. She had to her credit playfully big eyes and a pretty face but in all probability her austere dietary habits may have caused her to possess a body that looked more painfully malnourished than attractive. Yet she captured our attention for some time because it took us a while to notice two other diminutive boys or rather, urchins, who must have worked there with menial jobs. The lady apparently had an important position within the counter in one corner of the large room, the other three corners of which were adorned by exotic flowering plants of foreign origin within illuminated tubs. The room as a whole was an example of excellent interior designing with premium woodwork, extravagant furniture and elegant lighting and the price of the room was beyond our calculations. However, that was just the ante-room. We knew that, unseen to us, in his grand room inside, the famed astrologer could be consulted for a fee of 25 thousand!

My dear friend Sunny Boy however spared me such suffering. He possessed the prescription of an equally rich astrologer from another state of India. Sunny handed over the scroll to Kareena, who was the receptionist, and whose name we knew by that time because Sunny was a smooth-talker. She thus did a good job in engaging her customer for a profitable deal. She declared, ‘There are differently priced gems by that name and for every carat, you can pay any of 1000, 2000, 5000 or 10,000 bucks according to the quality’

I just observed in disbelief that Sunny Boy bought a nine carat stone doling out 45 thousand to appease his superstitious elder brother who morbidly believed that a ring in his finger could fight the demons of heavenly bodies to bring happiness in life more than a bank balance of the money expended!

Sunny Boy no longer had a sunny face when we exited that black hole of wealth!