100 Interviews

#74: FAHRUSHA - “A psychic.”

“Love,” Fahrusha answers when I ask what clients want to know about the most. I press on; what do they want to know?

“Someone they love doesn’t love them or they can’t find love,” she lists off. “They want to know who will be ‘the one’ or want me to describe ‘the one’ or want to know, ‘How will I meet ‘the one’?’”

I contacted Fahrusha because her name appeared in a New York Magazine article about the top psychics in New York City. She’s also been quoted in The New York Times and on Fox News’ website. Her prices are reasonable compared to the others on the magazine’s list; $150 per hour, $85 per half (some charged double that). I go to her apartment on the Lower East Side after work on a Wednesday and she asks that I take my shoes off before I enter her reading room. Once inside, the first thing I notice is that the room is very, very pink.

Even the woman herself is wearing a pink long sleeve t-shirt with a pink jewel necklace. She says the color creates a positive vibe.

Fahrusha is around middle age with long dark red hair. She’s got the crystal jewelry and beaded top I was expecting but there are no flowing robes or gypsy scarves. She specializes in tarot and reading palms, which she uses to answer specific questions. She can also read photos and handwriting, to tell certain things about the people behind them.

“Some psychics are better at certain things,” she explains. For instance, women are generally more clairvoyant than men for some reason.

“Oh, like The X-Men?” I ask, immediately regretting that decision. Fahrusha stares at me for a second. “Uh, you know, because they all have different…powers.”

Thankfully, she kindly replies: “Sure, like The X-Men.”

Her reading room is stuffed with books on tarot and the supernatural and there’s a desk with a chair for Fahrusha and one for the client, as well as a single bed with a pink cover. When I sit, she offers me tea and Chinese ginger candy and as we speak, she shuffles a well-worn, much-used Tarot deck.

“Being a psychic is like singing,” she says. “Everybody can sing ‘Happy Birthday’ but it’s just a matter of how well.”

Psychic ability runs in Fahrusha’s family. Growing up in New Jersey, her father would sometimes point out dead people he could see in the room with them. There’s an old family tale of her grandmother who went to answer her door only to return to a dead infant (the assumption is she’d let in “death”). Fahrusha says as a child she experienced sleep paralysis and visions. Luckily, she says, her parents were open to the idea of psychic phenomena and encouraged a dialogue about her experiences (something she rightfully points out not all parents would do). She describes her family not as wacked-out hippie spiritualists but blue collar, lower/middle class. Her father worked on pipes for the Navy, for example.

At age 16, Fahrusha (still going by her real name, Roseanna) began doing readings for her friends and some of their older sisters to make extra money. But she stopped just before college after a couple of her male friends passed away. She didn’t want to go to bed at night for fear of spirits speaking into her ear and visiting her at night.

“I wasn’t grounded enough for the experiences,” she says, explaining that their deaths rattled her. “It was unbalancing me. I don’t want to see dead people and have them scare the living bejeezus out of me. Some people have become obsessed with contacting the dead and gone off the deep end.”

Instead, she says she “put a light around” herself and took up acting and Middle Eastern dancing. She graduated from Louisiana State University with a masters in Fine Arts. She explains that you can close yourself off to psychic experiences (even going as far as to tell ghosts to leave you alone can help you can control the intensity somewhat). For a while, the psychic experiences ebbed more than flowed. But soon, she found her way back. Fahrusha was hired to belly dance at a party on a cruise ship. The hosts asked if she by chance also read fortunes.

“It was like the floodgates opened,” she says. “It was annoying to me at first. I wanted to pursue dancing but it just kept snowballing on itself. I never really promoted it.”

Through word of mouth and party agents, Fahrusha gained enough notoriety to book private clients. I ask if she just didn’t like doing parties, but Fahrusha says part of it is that people in the city are not hiring the way they used to because of the economy. Fahrusha doesn’t mind only taking private clients though because parties are “extremely fatiguing” — doing so many readings in a row is a lot on the brain. During the peak of the Christmas season, she would read fortunes at at least one party every day. After doing so many in a row, Fahrusha, normally a vegetarian, says she would crave meat as a “desire by my own being to ground myself.”

Her name, Fahrusha, comes from a combination of “fehreshte” which means fairy spirit in Farsi and “farasha” which means butterfly in Arabic. She started using it when she was professionally Middle Eastern dancing.

“Being my own name doesn’t sound so exotic,” she explains. “It also gives a certain amount of aesthetic distance from my personal life, a space between my life and my brand.”

Describing a typical day running a psychic business out of her apartment is difficult too. Every week is different depending on which repeat clients she’s seeing or if she has new clients. (“I don’t encourage people to come back frequently because it’s not healthy,” she says.)

Before her day begins, Fahrusha meditates, spending two to five minutes on each person. She repeats their full name in her head getting a feel for them.

“I don’t know everything and I don’t claim to,” she says when I ask what a typical meeting with a new client is like. “They expect me to know their middle name and where their mother was born but I don’t know.”

Then she pauses, watching me write in my notebook: “You’re going to own a PR firm,” she says suddenly. I look up, confused. “I just think you’re going to do PR.” I ask how these things come to her and she shrugs, “It just pops into my head. Just like that.”

Now that she’s told me this though, I can just make every effort to never go into public relations. It’s a simple matter of fate vs. free will, I say.

“I believe in some degree of free will,” Fahrusha responds. “Some things are fated because people are unable to break out of their normal behavior.”

She explains that perhaps her job as a psychic is to help make people aware of the “multiverse” or the other options their lives can take. However, she says that the quicker and more specific the change (“breaking the chain of fate”), the better chance there is of being able to change your fate. But Fahrusha does believe certain people’s paths are set in stone, based on their trajectories.

For example, reading someone’s palm gives an overview of their life, including basic things about their character, their life path, how many soul mates they have, their intelligence, any skills, how good they are with money. But Fahrusha says the palms reading can only tell her about the direction the person is going at the time of the reading. She says someone with a short lifeline won’t necessarily die next week; it’s possible for them to grow “healing lines” if theirs seems broken or short.

“I’ve never said to somebody, you’re probably going to die next week,” she says. “But yes, many times, yes, I can tell if their lives are going to be foreshortened in that regard.”

The idea makes me cringe. Are we all just walking around with a death stamp on our heads? I get an image of an old woman behind a crystal ball, pointing a gnarled finger at me and proclaiming me cursed.

“It’s rare that someone is cursed,” she says, not worrying about being particularly reassuring. Then she says, “You keep asking me that because you’re afraid of that happening to you.” I laugh nervously but she’s right.

In terms of predicting the bad stuff, what about the biggest psychic cliche — that they should be able to predict disasters like 9/11 or the tsunami?

“Things get quiet,” she says. “If the sound goes dead inside my head, I know something is going to happen. The day before 9/11 was very quiet. The day before the tsunami was very quiet. But what can you do with that?”

There’s nothing specific to be done about that, I suppose. Is she supposed to call the White House and tell them the voices in her head have stopped? I can’t imagine anyone taking that seriously. To change the subject, I ask how reading pictures works.

“If you bring me a picture of your boyfriend, I can tell you if it’s in his MO to cheat,” she says. “I can’t tell you who he’s cheating with or if he already is, no.”

My mind goes to my cheating ex and I can definitely see how someone in an unhealthy relationship might seek out a psychic for answers. The whole thing seems like therapy but with a more direct approach delivered than a simple diagnosis. If the person you’re with is impossible to communicate with, perhaps asking “the universe” could bring some comfort. I also think of my grandmother who passed when I was 14. A few years later, I had a dream where she told me some information that I couldn’t have known (I ran it by family members who confirmed it). I’ve never quite known what to make of that. Could bringing her photo to Fahrusha bring me some closure? It’s all very tempting.

Fahrusha says ghosts are very rarely the actual person — more often they are energy paths from a traumatic event that happened in a place. When someone comes to her asking if their dead brother is still “with” them, Fahrusha says she hopes not.

“We hope they went somewhere else, somewhere better,” she says. It’s a perspective I’ve never considered.

Personally, I don’t necessarily believe or disbelieve in psychic ability. Then again, I also have a distinct memory of a trinket belonging to my great-grandfather floating across my bedroom when I was seven or eight years old, but I could have imagined or dreamed that. However, plenty of intelligent people put stock in the supernatural. My mother, for example, an educated career woman, believes that finding a penny on the sidewalk is a communication from dead relatives. “Grandma says ‘hello,’” she’ll say, bending to pick up the coin. It’s at once comforting and a bit infuriating. How can she be so sure? Is she? Does it matter?

Fahrusha tells me that when she first met the man who would become her husband and they were just friends, she wanted to run into him out and have an excuse to chat. One weekday, she decided that he would be at the South Street seaport, where he worked on the weekends. There was no reason for him to be there on his off day.

“I went down there and there he was. I ran into him,” she says. “He was buying furniture, looking for a couch but there’s no furniture stores there. It was my intention. I intended Jimmy to be there.” Then she says, “If you’re looking for your soul mate, imagine them in Times Square and he’ll be there.” She pauses, considering her words, “You have to really believe it.”

I tell her I’m not sure I buy that, however my mother would love the idea.

Fahrusha nods, “I understand a healthy skepticism, but your intentions have to be pure, not necessarily moral but just clear and without difficult emotions or complications,” she says. “Conflicting or negative emotions can come up and block the good thing. And then that’s worse than not going into it at all.”