Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
them. On April 26, 1907, the
Times
wrote of the presence in Bombay
of an 'AMERICAN FORTUNE TELLER':
Madame Zaria, the American Fortune Teller now staying at the
Taj Mahal Hotel, is experiencing a wonderful success in her
effort to elucidate the intentions and designs of Dame Fortune.
As Madame Zaria's stay in Bombay is short she should be
consulted at once.
Madame Zaria's stay in Bombay was shorter than even she
imagined, and her relationship with Dame Fortune apparently less
than successful: she died the following day, after an accident with a
horse-drawn carriage.
Madame Zaria's inability to foretell her own untimely end had
not discouraged the
Times
from its faith in the hermetic arts. This
was an era when respectable public figures like W. B. Yeats, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, and even members of the royal family
dabbled openly in supernatural pastimes that, half a century later,
would be openly derided as ignorance and superstition when practised
by Indians. A few decades later still, of course, a New Age brought
such fads back into fashion in the West.
One house palmist still resides at the Taj. When I consulted him,
he proved disturbingly accurate about my past, while woefully
wrong about my future. India has never had any shortage of
practitioners of the mystic, and you therefore cannot help but
wonder why, at the beginning of the century, these dabblers approved
by the
Times
- and always lodged at the Taj - were Westerners.
On March 4, 1923, the newspaper proclaimed the arrival of a
fresh shipment of European occultism:
A ROYAL PALMIST:
Few students of the occult sciences have had such a remarkable
career as Dr. Carl L. Perin who might claim to be the king of
palmists. Dr. Perin is at present on a visit to Bombay and living
at the Taj Mahal Hotel, where he was seen by one of our
representatives and gave some details of his achievements . . . He
had read the hands of HM The King Emperor, Queen Victoria,
