Every so often, he peers through his telescope, scavenged by a distant relative from the house of a dying British surveyor and bon vivant, and brought to Hanumarathnam in recognition of his talents. Where his ancestors relied on handed-down documents, he, always interested in other traditions’ teachings, supplements his Vedic calculations with measurements he has learned to make using telescopic observations.
He brings the stars close, through the lenses; he looks in their eyes. To those who merely admire the heavens, as they admire a new building in the city or another man’s wife, alterations in the sky are mere degrees of difference. They are interesting to observe, chart, identify. They are fine to forget. But, as all experiences, however fleeting or superficial, leave residues, so the moment-by-moment turning of heavenly bodies has momentous repercussions.
Hanumarathnam, all too fully aware of the ability of the heavens to sustain life, bring death and cause all the ups and downs in between, cannot simply stare in dumbfounded awe for a couple of seconds at the beauty of the skies and then go down to supper and sleep. What he sees writ is destinies untold.
Dawn breaks upon him. He has been sitting still a long time. Dew trickles down his neck, as if the morning sees he’s not sweating and thinks he should.
He has read that he will die.
Sooner, that is, rather than later. His weak quadrant has an astrological alignment with his son’s birth time, and this has darkened the shadow of death. The discus of the little boy’s stars will cut Hanumarathnam’s lifeline within three years.
At the eleventh-day naming ceremonies, Hanumarathnam goes through the motions. It’s not conspicuous: everyone is just going through the motions, as people do at these things. But Sivakami notices and is concerned: Hanumarathnam has not tried to get close to his son. With his daughter, he is still all fond smiles and lifting and swinging, though Sivakami perceives a sadness there too.
Why not the boy? Why not the boy? Sivakami wonders as she waits out the remainder of the thirty-one days’ seclusion. After a girl baby, seclusion lasts forty-one days, so Sivakami has another reason to be grateful for a boy: she couldn’t have borne this strange worry as long as that. Finally, Hanumarathnam comes to escort her home.
He makes his wife comfortable with the baby, who is a bit of a fusser, in the back of the bullock cart. Maybe that’s it, she thinks, the whimpering and whinging. It doesn’t bother her, but maybe that’s why his father keeps his distance. Or the baby’s looks: they don’t make her feel strange, but maybe they do his father? Sivakami is feeling sensitive: her eldest and youngest sisters-in-law had made a few remarks-the sort that sound kind-hearted but sting. “He’s obviously so alert, must be very intelligent, and what do good looks really matter for anyway?” and, with a little shudder, “Oh! Those eyes just look right through a person, don’t they?”
Hanumarathnam sits up front with his lovely daughter, showing her the sights, until her eyes are heavy. Then she leaves him to come and lie in back with her mother, where she insists on keeping one hand on the baby, as though the cart were a big cradle for both of them. Thangam has said nothing about her new little brother, but it is clear that she doesn’t share the world’s repulsion. Daily, since his birth, she has brought him gifts, sweets Sivakami pretends to feed him, for Thangam’s sake, and pretty leaves he crushes in a fist. She would squat on small haunches watching him almost without blinking, for half an hour at a time, until an aunt startled her by calling her name. If anyone asked her about him, though, she gave no answer but her vague, incurious gaze, and since the questions rarely needed answers-“You must be so proud, a big sister, eh, Thangam?”-the asker just pinched her cheek and turned away.
When Hanumarathnam brings Thangam to the back, he looks at the baby without speaking, and then returns to the front to sit with the servant who has come along as driver. Sivakami’s mind keeps running on in speculation: maybe he thinks the boy doesn’t look like him? But who can tell with a mashed-up barely one-month-old? She is feeling ill now, much as Hanumarathnam did on this journey just after his son’s birth. It is a variety of motion sickness, caused not by the rock-bump-sway of the animals and cart, but by the ringing and ricocheting of her thoughts as they tumble along and drag her behind.
They reach home by nightfall. That night, he sleeps, she doesn’t.
In the morning, they go through more motions. Sivakami watches Hanumarathnam: his movements look stiff, his face unnatural. She can feel the pressure of whatever he is thinking on her temples, on her chest, but she cannot guess at it and finally cannot bear it any longer. When he comes into the main hall for his mid-morning meal, the baby is napping and Thangam has gone next door to play with the still-childless Rukmini. Sivakami crumples to the floor and cracks out a plea through clenched teeth and tears, “Oh, my lord, my lord. What is happening? What is wrong?”
He immediately drops to his own knees, lifting Sivakami’s face to his and thinking how he loves her.
“Little one… I…” Where should he begin? With which small fact or hope? “I’m sorry, I…”
Sivakami is watching his face, her lips parted, trying to read what he is not telling her. He turns away so as to be able to tell her himself.
“I told your father when I proposed that…” He glances back and away again. “Let me explain. You know that if something is written in the weakest quadrant of one’s horoscope, it is extremely unlikely, yes?”
“Okay…” She has never heard this before, but the interpretation of horoscopes was never of particular interest to her.
“Your father and uncles knew that, and for the sake of honesty, I told them that my death in the ninth year of my marriage was written in that very weakest quadrant.”
Sivakami sits back on her haunches, no longer weeping, looking resolute and skeptical. “But…”
He will not be hurried. “Often, the birth of a son changes the relation of the stars, can even erase the shadow of death from the father’s horoscope.”
“Our son cannot have done that,” she says, sad and matter-of-fact.
“My calculations following our son’s birth show that Yama’s water buffalo has advanced from the weakest quadrant to the strongest,” he quietly agrees. “The god of death will surely come to take my soul in the third year of the boy’s life.”
“Ayoh!” Sivakami cries now. “Ayoh, Rama!”
“It is not the child’s fault…” Hanumaratham says as though it could be. “But he has killed me.”
She is now leaning on a pillar, he kneeling in front of the Ramar triptych, the glare of the street just out of sight through the front doors, reflecting into the hall along with the distant sound of daily life, but they don’t stay like that for long.
Sivakami soon pulls herself to her feet, and her feet carry her mechanically to the well. She washes her face, the face she has had and known for more than sixteen years-a long time, by some standards. She feels hard new lines drawn there by her husband and son. What will be written on those lines? Maybe they can read what she can‘t, these men who know so much. She returns to the hall and asks, “And so. What now?”
Her husband sees what she has felt on her face. He thinks, Look, two children, and no trace, now, of the girl. She has become a woman. How wonderful, how miraculous, that we go through these stages, walking the path of our lives one foot in front of the other, one in front of the other, this is how we live, this is how to live. He comforts himself with circular, cloudy thinking, the sort that makes respectable conversation in the face of grief. As if he’s rehearsing to attend his own funeral.
For now, though, he is still living, and so is Sivakami, and so are their two children, whose needs must be met, so the requirements of life put their feet one in front of the other. They eat and sleep and conduct business even though their life has been poured into a rice-sorting basket and tossed two foot, four foot, six foot in the air.