August 2022:
My mother is smiling to herself while old Bollywood music quietly plays off my Baba’s new computer. As my Nannos hum Hindi lyrics, I scratch away at a lottery ticket with a dulling quarter.
“I won five dollars,” I say.
My aunt calls from across the dining table, “Hey, I knew today would be our lucky day.”
Twelve lottery tickets later and never breaking even, eleven family members and I sat and pretended like 15 dollars in cash—all we were able to acquire from the tickets—could make up for the debt of death.
As I sit beside my Nanno, she whispers, “I’m scared, Rania.” Incessantly fiddling with her purple acrylic glasses, she tells me a story from the Quran and assures me that miracles do happen. I want to grab her brown tongue with my seventeen-year-old hands and scream THINGS AREN’T GOING TO CHANGE, but I don’t because deep down I still believe they will too.
I inch closer to my Nanno as she wipes my tears with a paper towel. Together, we are unconditionally afraid of our reality. Nearly a year after my mother’s re-diagnosis, it had never occurred to me that she wouldn’t survive. I only became attuned to this reality two weeks before she passed away.
After her death, I found myself still wondering what I believed in. I didn’t know, and I still don’t know, how to disentangle her tragic passing from the faith I had been raised with. My family lived by luck and signs—evil eyes watching from the walls, verses from the Quran above doorways, the scent of burnt sage lingering in the air. We believed in omens, in luck, in the possibility that something greater was always at work. So when my mother got sick, we doubled down. We convinced ourselves that in the face of so much bad luck, maybe we could usher in some good. I clung to every ritual, every whispered prayer, convinced that the story of our family—the story of her—was not going to end. I was inextricably blinded by hope—but hope for what? A miracle? I still don’t know.
***
January 2024:
I’m sitting in a restaurant in Palm Beach with three close friends. The air is balmy and humid, and I feel heat sticking to my skin as we take turns pressing pieces of bread into a plate of olive oil. Behind us, a table of older women roars with laughter. Their presence is warm and comforting, a reminder that the kind of happiness and love shared between friends can be everlasting. I smile as I imagine my friends and I growing old together.
The seemingly oldest woman at the table approaches us. Her stature is grand, and the crinkles drawn upon her glassy skin speak stories of a life lived in chaos and love. I immediately want to be her. Staring at her from head to toe, I can’t help but notice that she is draped in a complete Dolce & Gabbana cheetah print ensemble. I find myself longing to be her even more. We make eye contact, and she singles me out of our group.
“Young lady, you will be so gorgeous one day.”
I melt. Her words ricocheted through me, shaking every nerve as they traveled. When she left, my friends and I laughed as we dubbed her ‘cheetah grandmother.’ And yet some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges between me and the older woman standing across from me. I immediately text my aunt and say, I saw my mom tonight, with gray hair and dressed head to toe in cheetah print.
Many religions, including Christianity and Islam, believe in some sort of afterlife and that communication with the deceased is possible. Since my mother’s passing, I’ve been reluctant to abrasively declare things as ‘signs’ that her presence still lingers. I often thought I would never be lucky enough to feel her comforting soul again. But the cheetah grandmother, as absurd as she and the moment that followed was, was the first time that I felt like I could once again grasp the energy of the spectacular, beautiful, eclectic thunderstorm that was my mother.
***
April 2024:
As Ella and I enter, the bell above the tarot card reader’s door chimes a flat, tinny note. On our ascent to the third floor of the Chicago walk-up, the scent of incense hangs heavy in the air—a cloying sweetness that clings to the back of my throat like cheap perfume. The incense’s tendrils of smoke lazily curl upwards. The walls are crammed with dusty tapestries and framed photographs of long-dead celebrities. Overhead, the bulb casts the room in a sticky yellow glow, bringing to life the peeling paint on the walls and the chipped porcelain figurines of the Buddha.
The woman behind the velvet-draped table doesn’t look up immediately. Her mane of silver hair is pulled back in a tight, slick bun, and her hands, weathered by time and touched by magic, rearrange a deck of worn cards.
She finally lifts her head. Her face is a road map of wrinkles, each line etched with a story I suspect I wouldn’t understand. Her eyes are a startling blue, like chips of ice under the single bare bulb hanging overhead. Red lipstick overlines her lips and tiny flakes of dried mascara reside underneath her eyes.
“Girls, welcome. My name is Patty,” the woman rasps, her voice like the rustling of dry leaves. She gestures to the chairs across from her, their red velvet worn thin in patches. Introducing ourselves, we sit side by side in what look to be her dining room chairs.
Patty shuffles the cards, a practiced movement that spoke of countless visitors seeking answers in her hands’ worn imagery. She spreads them out on the table face down, a mosaic of faded colors and cryptic symbols. They look more like relics from a forgotten game than instruments of divination.
“Rania, pick three cards. Face down. With your left hand.”
I reach out to select my cards. The room holds its breath; the anticipation palpable in stillness. As she reads the cards, I scour my surroundings. The art on the wall still has a HomeGoods price tag in the corner. I consider how this is probably all supposed to make me feel uneasy. We ended up here on a spur of the moment impulse.
She begins to flip the cards over one by one. The Hanged Man, the Tower, the Lovers—a jumble of pronouncements that seem both specific and utterly meaningless.
Patty tells me everything I want to hear: “Success, love, children, fulfillment.” And I am happy. She tells Ella that she loves like she’s in a fairytale, and she tells me that I love like a rock star. I convince myself it’s because I’m wearing a blue metallic jacket.
“You stand at the threshold of transformation,” she intones, her words hanging in the air.
“The path before you is veiled in uncertainty, but within the darkness lies the light of revelation.”
Looking at me, she asks, “Tell me, child, what troubles you?”
Suddenly, I feel absurdly young and lost in this cluttered room.
Patty smiles, a thin, knowing smile. “Ah, the future I suspect. The most perilous of forces. What provokes your anxieties?” she adds.
“Will I be healthy for my whole life?” I mutter. My discomfort is apparent. I watch her smile slowly fade. I think of my aunt and little cousins who are haunted by similar anxiety, wondering if they will outlive 50, my mother’s forever age.
Her eyes, so blue and so earnest, meet mine. “Dear, you are going to live through your 90s. I promise.”
Leaving the shop later, with the scent of incense clinging to my clothes like a bad memory, I’m not sure what to believe. Patty’s outrageous promises rattle in my head, a tangled mess of possibilities and seeming hope.
Faith promises something, but Patty, a self-trained tarot card reader with a 3.8-star Yelp rating, surely can’t promise me that. And yet, wasn’t it luck that made her flip the exact card I wanted to see? Maybe tarot readings were never about the truth—only about timing, about the slim probability that the universe might, for once, say or do the right thing.
Perhaps—I think as I step out into the muted Chicago night light, making my way home—the only truth in a tarot reader was the act of seeking in the first place. The muted hope that, by some stroke of luck, the answers we’re searching for might find their way to us.
I think that this kind of belief—whether in tarot, in luck, or in the small rituals that make uncertainty feel bearable—is less about finding or understanding concrete answers and more about embracing the desperate hope that the future, even an uncertain one, holds something better. And this version of spirituality—the faith in possibility, in chance, in the idea that something greater might be at play—is an institution that people can and do believe in.
***
My mother made a point of punctuating our lives with good luck charms—like evil eyes—from the plates we ate off of, the pillows we sat on, to even the wallpaper we looked at. I think she really did believe that symbols like these would save us, that fate could be swayed with enough faith.
I don’t know what I believe in. I don’t know whether it’s luck, energy, a figure, or a symbol. But maybe belief isn’t about certainty—it’s about the act of seeking, about reaching for something greater even when we don’t know what that is. Slowly but surely, I am learning to exist in that uncertainty. I’ll find purpose in what it means to believe in bigger forces, even after that faith has been shattered and reshaped time and time again.
It’s in moments like these—with cheetah grandmothers and dull quarters and tarot cards—where I feel something stirring. A stubborn ember of hope still flickers within me, holding onto all the versions of me—past, present, and meant-to-be. It’s a quieter, more tenacious kind of hope—a sense that things will unfold as they’re meant to and that acceptance holds a strange kind of power.
Because the best thing about luck is that it can always change. And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough to keep believing in.
Rania Jones ’27 (rjones@college.harvard.edu) goes nowhere without at least one evil eye.