by Dr Rahim Said
Some years back, it was midnight when the phone rang. Our daughter, calling from New York City, sounded anxious.
“Dad, there are strange beings following me. A tarot card reader told me not to talk about what she said for six hours. I’ll call you back.” Click. The line went dead.
My wife and I sat silently, sleep slipping away as we waited, nerves on edge. Children have a way of scaring their parents—ours was no exception. As a child, she loved playing peekaboo pranks. We just hoped, prayed, that this was one of those moments.
At 6 a.m., the phone rang again.
“I met a tarot card reader. She told me I have two protectors who follow me everywhere. She said they’re super beings assigned to protect me. I’m scared. Should I be?”
We reassured her. “If they’re there to protect you, then you have free bodyguards. And in New York City, those don’t come cheap.” We tried to keep the mood light, but she gave a nervous laugh—she knew how much we sacrificed so she could study in that expensive city.
Then she hesitated before saying, “The tarot reader said an old lady with long white hair assigned these protectors. When she died, she wanted to pass her legacy to the strongest of her great-grandchildren. Apparently, I’m the chosen one. Do you know anything about this family tradition?”
The question caught me off guard. I promised to check.
Who could I ask? How was our daughter caught in a story that seemed to stretch back generations?
Then a thought struck me. The woman my daughter described—the old lady with long white hair—sounded eerily like my grandmother.
I called my younger brothers, who still lived in the kampung and were more in tune with Malay beliefs and traditional practices. One of them didn’t even seem surprised.
“Our great-grandmother was a bidan, a traditional midwife,” he said. “We come from a long line of them. In the past, science had its limits, so midwives often relied on the spirit world to ensure safe deliveries. Some families had helpers—spiritual guardians, jinns that were tamed and bound to their service.”
He went on. “When our grandmother passed, our mother refused to inherit the role. The jinn were left without a master. But before she died, Grandma told them to wait for the strongest of her bloodline.”
My daughter had always been tall, athletic—she played basketball before we encouraged her to switch to tennis in the hopes of earning a scholarship. Could this be why the spirits had chosen her?
I asked my brother what she should do.
“Ignore them,” he said. “I’ll call them back to the kampung. Their place is with the family’s roots, not in a foreign city.”
The next day, we told our daughter that her great-grandmother must have loved her very much—to send her own guardians to watch over her.
But even now, with all my Western logic, I cannot explain how a tarot card reader, who knew nothing of our family’s past, could describe my grandmother so precisely.
Some mysteries refuse to be unravelled.
WE