The Lost Diamond

I held the business card in my hand, at eye level for a while. White background with black letters, a synonym for the sobriety that characterizes my life. It said “BRANDON NAGHA” on the first line, and immediately below, in smaller letters, it identified me as a “Shaman and Investigator.” The card ended with my phone number. Quite sober.

“Shaman.” Was I a shaman? How about using “spiritualist” instead of shaman? I wondered. Or “mentalist.” No, not mentalist. Shaman sounded like a tribal witch doctor, someone who played the roles of a doctor and a meteorologist, a psychologist, a fortune-teller, a priest, and a spiritual counselor. “Spiritualist” I felt it was more limited, it sounded to me close to “medium”, to the Ouija game.

“Whatever, shaman is fine.” I thought.

I called the print shop to approve one of the proof cards they had sent me, the simplest one of all. They told me they had an exclusive offer if I ordered ten thousand cards. Ten thousand cards...! Ten thousand times the words “shaman” and “investigator”... no thanks. I told them I only needed a hundred. But that was considerably less than the minimum the business was willing to print. After twenty minutes of negotiations, I ended up telling them to charge me the price for the minimum quantity they printed, 2,500 cards, but to send me only a hundred, and to recycle the rest to make toilet paper. The frugality with which I conducted my life prevented me from having more than I needed. I couldn’t see the point of opulence, whether it was in the way my house was decorated, the vehicle I have, or the number of business cards I ordered from the print shop.

I have my principles, and I defend them, even when they don’t align with popular opinion. Under these principles, for example, I never hesitated to reject jobs that I didn’t consider appropriate, even when it might have seemed beneficial on the surface.

There were people who wanted to hire me because they had lost their dog, or because they had a sick relative and wanted me to cure him, or they even wanted to take revenge on someone else and thought I could give them something to make the other person do badly in business or die. The word “shaman” sparked the imagination of many who approached me, requesting all sorts of illogical things. Sometimes, they offer me a generous sum of money in exchange for my work, but money is a circulating good that can either come in abundance or disappear completely. It never attracted me more than what was minimal and necessary.