I went to Turkey a few years ago with a colleague named Chris. We’d been sent there to train secondary school teachers in a school on the outskirts of Istanbul. While I was there, I decided to go and see an old friend of mine, a young Turkish woman named Fatos, who I hadn’t seen for several years. I called her and we agreed to meet in a hotel in the center of Istanbul. Chris came too, and the three of us had a very nice dinner together.
After dinner we ordered Turkish coffee and we talked for a while, until Fatos suddenly asked me, “would you like me to read your coffee cup?” I refused politely because, to be honest, I don’t really believe in clairvoyants and fortune-telling. But Chris immediately said he would be happy for her to read his coffee cup…
Fatos began to look very carefully at the coffee grounds in Chris’s cup and to tell him what she could see. I remember that the first thing she said was that she could see “sacks of money” – and this was very accurate because Chris had worked in Saudi Arabia for several years and had earned a lot of money there. She also said that she could see “a blond lady.” Well, Carla, Chris’s girl friend at the lime, was blond, so chat was spot on, too. But then Fatos suddenly looked very serious and she said, “ I can see somebody in your family who is sick, very sick, at this moment.” I remember thinking, “ Oh, no! Don’t ruin a nice evening!” But Chris is a very laid-back kind o f person, and he didn’t seem to be too worried by what she’d said. He just said, “ Well, as far as I know the people in my family are OK.” Chris is an only child and his mother lived with her sister. They were both in their seventies. Fatos said one or two more things and then we asked the waiter for the check and said our goodbyes. It was a slightly weird end to what had been a very enjoyable evening. I can remember feeling relieved that I had said “ no” when Fatos asked me if she could read my coffee cup.
Chris and I got a taxi back to our hotel. The next day Chris had a free morning because it was my turn to do the teacher training session in the hotel, so he went out early to go sightseeing in Istanbul.
Around nine o’clock I got a call on my cell phone. It was Chris’s girlfriend, Carla, calling. She told me that she needed to talk to Chris immediately, but that he wasn’t answering his cell phone. I could tell by her voice that she had some very bad news for him, and I immediately thought o f what Fatos had said the night before and I felt a shiver run down my spine. I asked Carla what had happened and she told me that Chris’s aunt had died suddenly in the night.
So, was it just a spooky coincidence, or did Fatos really see what she said she saw in the coffee cup? I spoke to her before I left Istanbul and I told her that Chris’s aunt had died the night that we had dinner. She wasn’t at all surprised and she just said, “ Yes, I saw in the cup that someone in his family was near death, but I didn’t want to frighten him so I just said that the person was very sick.”
All I can say is that I always used to be very skeptical about fortunetelling but now, well, I’m not so sure.
