The Astrologer Was Right and I Hate It
I went to mock him and left carrying an accurate prophecy.
I went to the astrologer to humiliate him, and I brought a notebook so I could write down everything he got wrong. I still have the notebook. It is the most embarrassing document I own, and I keep it in the same drawer as my school report cards, which tells you what shelf of shame we are dealing with.
This was two winters ago. My engagement had ended in October, quietly... the way a fridge stops humming, and by December my mother had decided the problem was planetary. She booked the appointment herself. "Just once," she said. "For me." In our family, "for me" is a legal instrument with no known expiry date.
So I went. But I went as a scientist. I had spent that whole week reading about cold reading, Barnum statements, the tricks of the trade. I knew he would say things like "you have great potential that others do not always see," and I would smile, and take notes, and later write a devastating little account of it for my friends. I was twenty-nine and I believed my skepticism made me interesting. This is a common illness and there is no vaccine.
The astrologer lived on the second floor of a building that smelled of frying papad. There was a power cut, because of course there was, so the whole consultation happened by candlelight, one fat red candle on a steel plate, the flame leaning whenever the door downstairs opened. He was younger than I expected, maybe fifty, reading my birth chart off a tablet with a cracked screen. A parrot in a cage in the corner made a sound like a kettle every few minutes. Nobody acknowledged the parrot.
He said the potential thing almost immediately. I wrote it down and gave it a smug little tick. He said I had a strong Saturn, that I overthink, that my stomach suffers when my mind does. Tick, tick, tick. Applicable to every human being who has ever stood in a queue.
Then he looked up from the tablet, and the candle did that leaning thing, and he said three sentences that I wrote down word for word because I was so sure I would be laughing at them by spring.
One: "You will fight with a man about water, and in the middle of the fight you will laugh."
Two: "In November, someone will offer you money and you will refuse it, and you will be right to refuse."
Three: "Before the year ends, strangers will read your words, and you will cry about it in a kitchen."
I remember thinking the third one was lazy. Everybody writes something. He probably says it to every customer with soft hands. I paid him, collected my mother's approval, and went home to be superior about it.
The water fight happened in March.
My landlord and I stood on the terrace screaming at each other about the overhead tank, which his nephew had "repaired" into a fountain, and mid-sentence, mid-fury, with my arm still raised in the gesture of a man describing an incompetent nephew, I remembered the prophecy and started laughing. Actually laughing, on the terrace, wet to the knees. The landlord thought I was having a breakdown and lowered the rent conversation by two decibels. I told myself... coincidence. People fight about water constantly. This is India. Tick, but an asterisk on the tick.
November was harder to file away. My old company called. They offered me my previous job back with a raise that made me sit down, and something in my stomach, my strong Saturn stomach, said no. I refused on a Tuesday... feeling insane. In January the company lost its biggest client and let go of the entire team I would have joined. My former manager texted me one word: "lucky." I stared at that text for a long time... Then I took out the notebook, read sentence two, and put it back in the drawer the way you put back something hot.
But it is the third one I hate him for.
Here is what happened. In the flat sad middle of that year, unemployed by choice and single by fridge-hum, I wrote a poem about my grandmother's hands, how she used to test if milk had boiled by holding her palm above the pan, how the last time I saw her in the hospital I held that same palm and it was the coldest thing in the room. I had never shown anyone my poems. But I had just read an essay about why safe poems lose, and it annoyed me because it was right about me specifically, so at one in the morning, out of spite against an essay, I entered the poem into a monthly poetry contest and went to sleep certain nothing would come of it.
The poem was published on the winners' page in December. On the last Sunday of the year, a stranger emailed me. She said she had read it aloud to her mother in a chemo waiting room, because her mother also used to test milk with her palm, and that they had both laughed... and then not laughed.
I read that email standing in my kitchen, holding a pan of milk I then let boil over completely, crying the ugly hiccup cry, in December, in a kitchen, exactly as forecast, like weather.
I want to be clear that I am still a skeptic. I can construct the rational explanation and it is a good one: he made many predictions, I remembered the hits, the third prophecy was self-fulfilling because it planted the idea. Fine. Granted. But then I went back to him, in spring, partly to demand an explanation and partly because the parrot deserved a follow-up visit, and I told him, with some resentment, that his astrology prediction came true. All three, actually.
He did not even look triumphant. He tapped his cracked tablet and said, "I tell many people that strangers will read their words. Almost nobody goes home and writes anything. You did. So who fulfilled the prophecy, beta, me or you?"
He did not predict my future. He dared me into it, and I was too proud to refuse a dare.
I have thought about that more than I have thought about most things I learned in college. Maybe that is all a prophecy is: permission with jewelry on. Somebody looks at you by candlelight and says your life will contain something, and the saying of it loosens a screw you had tightened yourself. My grandmother's poem existed in me for six years before a fraud, or a saint, or a bored man with a parrot, told me strangers would read my words. I still cannot decide which he was. I have written about her since, and about the grief I spent those six years politely declining, and every poem feels like paying an old electricity bill.
Last month there was another power cut in my building. I lit a candle, a plain white one, and set it on a steel plate because apparently that is who I am now. And I sat there in my dark kitchen watching the flame lean, and I caught myself, I swear to you, silently asking it a question about next year.
The candle did not answer.
But I noticed I had brought a notebook, and I hate him for that too.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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