La Chappelle aka Little Jaffna is a Sri Lankan neighborhood in Northern Paris chock full of samosas, butcher shops, and shady underground palm readers. Peppered throughout the neighborhood is a secret community of Sri Lankan fortune tellers who will determine your fate from their clandestine locations in the backs of souvenir shops and beauty salons.

In the seemingly unconnected windows of storefronts around the neighborhood are identical signs written in Tamil, with a drawing of a hand, a phone number, and an address. The signs are everywhere from local shops to travel agencies to supermarkets. If you take a closer look at the signs you’ll notice all of them have the same two or three phone numbers, but each carries the address of the place it is pasted on. They look like this:

After a lot of undercover research that mostly involved acting like a nerdy journalism student and pestering every shop assistant of La Chappelle, I gathered that: a) these were ads for local fortune tellers; b) they consulted in a dedicated room at the back of each boutique, and c) the same couple of soothsayers run around from venue to venue (hence the identical phone numbers).

I decided to give it a go, so I called up the number of a poster pasted on a phone shop. I was given an appointment ten minutes later (my magician was busy predicting the future at an eyebrow bar down the road). As I walked in, the staff and my fortune teller looked at me suspiciously. They seemed upset by my presence, but soon realized that I wasn’t leaving without hearing my future, so they decided to get it over with.

I was taken to the back of the shop with my man (who didn’t give me his name) and was asked to take off my shoes. I walked into a tiny room where a mini temple had been built and decorated with a bunch of religious bling and posters of Sri Lanka. The place was bare of the worst stereotypes of fortune telling junk—no tarot cards or silly crystal balls.

The shrine atmosphere was created through the flickering lights of candles, incense, gold trinkets dripping from the walls, and Ganesha figures popping up in every corner of the room. I felt like Alice walking through a Sri Lankan looking glass: the phone shop was far behind me, in a different dimension; I was in a sanctuary somewhere between a Bollywood movie and a local 99 cent store.

Cameras aren’t allowed inside the shrines. I took this photo by running up to the window of a souvenir shop-cum-temple, sticking my camera up to the glass, snapping the shot, and sprinting away.

“What you want?” and “What you do?” were the first two inquisitive and sort of rude questions. He quickly warmed up to me after realizing I spoke English though. He looked at my face, asked me to open my hands, and said “Good face, good heart” (pfew). Then he took a closer look at my palm and said “little money come in, lot of money go out.” He never told me what he meant by that, so I decided to take it as a divinatory message from my bank telling me to stop buying rounds at the local café until I get a proper job (or someone to pay for my drinks and/or find a rich boyfriend).

Unfortunately, I didn’t get much more than that—the palm reader hinted that he wanted to get rid of me and said “not worry, much luck, much happiness” (that’s fortune teller for “time is up, so piss off”).

I stood up and tried to pay but he wouldn’t take my money. Later I figured out that there is no obligatory fee, but a system of donations, like church or Panera. As I left, the staff and men outside looked at me half amused, half telling me to leave as fast as possible.

I wasn’t completely satisfied with my fortune being “you spend too much money,” so I tried a few more numbers on the mysterious posters but was either hung up on, told in English that they spoke no English, or received a simple “No no no, not possible, sorry.”

I realized that this was a business aimed at the local community and at those following the Ganesha faith—in other words, a religious, targeted service, not to be confused with tacky amusement parks’ fortune tellers who rip you off and promise you billions.

Why are they so secretive, you ask? First of all, they don’t need you nor care about you. They have their clientele and you’re not part of it. Secondly, there is no way in hell these little businesses are declared and paying taxes. So you, being white and immature, are suspicious-looking.

But there is technically no rule forbidding you to consult one of these back-alley fortune tellers. So if you want to give it a try, be as charming as possible—the staff of the venue and the teller just have to trust your face. Come in and look innocent… even borderline retarded. Just don’t look like an undercover tax inspector.

ALICE PFEIFFER