My Horoscope Said Stay Home. I Didn't.
What followed was a strong argument for astrology.
My horoscope that morning said, in bold italics, "Avoid unnecessary travel. The stars counsel stillness." I have never once been successfully counseled into stillness by anyone, let alone a constellation, so I put on my good shoes and left the house by nine.
Some background. My aunt Renu forwards me my horoscope every morning at 6:15, the way other aunts forward pictures of dewdrops on roses. She has done this for eleven years without missing a single day, including the morning after her gallbladder surgery, when she typed it with one thumb from a hospital bed.
I am a Sagittarius, allegedly adventurous, allegedly lucky.
Aunt Renu treats the daily forecast like a bulletin from heaven's own meteorology department. I treat it like spam I am too guilty to block.
That Saturday I had exactly one plan: Dev's birthday dinner, all the way across the city, at a rooftop restaurant he had chosen specifically because it was inconvenient for every single person he loved. That is Dev in one sentence, honestly.
"The stars counsel stillness," I announced to my empty kitchen, and laughed.
The bus broke down four stops in.
Not dramatically. It simply sighed at a red light... and never inhaled again. The driver made his announcement in the tone of a man who had also read my horoscope. We all filed out into an evening that smelled like hot tar and imminent rain, which made no sense, because it does not rain here in November. Everyone knows it does not rain here in November.
It rained.
Not a romantic drizzle, either. A full, theatrical, curtains-down monsoon audition. I sprinted for an awning, and my left shoe, my good shoe, chose that exact moment to separate from its sole with a soft flapping sound, like the shoe itself was applauding the weather.
My phone was at nine percent. I texted Dev, "On my way, minor delays," which was true in the way that press releases are true. Then I walked forty minutes across the city with one shoe held together by willpower and a rubber band donated by a paan seller who watched my whole situation unfold with open, unhurried joy.
The hostess at the rooftop restaurant was very kind. She informed me that the rooftop had flooded, the party had relocated, and the new address had been shared, she believed, on the phone.
I looked at my phone... My phone was a black rectangle. It had died somewhere around minute thirty one of the walk, presumably of embarrassment.
I stood under the restaurant's awning, dripping, one shoe flapping, and considered crying in a dignified, municipal sort of way.
Instead I ducked into the only other lit doorway on the street: a place that was half bookshop, half cafe, and entirely out of my way. A brass bell rang over the door. Inside, it smelled like old paper and cardamom, which I now believe is what libraries smell like in heaven.
There were maybe fourteen people arranged on folding chairs, and a woman at the front holding a glass jar. A handwritten sign near the register said OPEN MIC, 8 PM, POETS AND THE POETRY-CURIOUS. I was neither, I told myself. I was a wet man who wanted chai. I ordered one with the last damp note in my wallet and sat in the back row to steam quietly.
A woman about my mother's age read a poem about her grandmother's steel almirah, and the specific sound of its key turning, and how nobody in the family could bring themselves to oil the hinge after she died, because the squeak was the last of her voice left in the house.
I cried into my chai. Nobody was surprised. I looked like a man who had been through things.
Here is what you need to know: I had not written anything in six years.
In college I filled notebooks. Then a job happened, and then a better job, and the notebooks moved to a shelf, and then to a box, and the version of me who wrote things got quieter and quieter... until I stopped hearing him over the traffic entirely.
The woman with the jar, the host, came around between readers. The jar was full of folded chits, a whole collection of prompts for anyone brave enough or cornered enough. "Pick one," she said. "The rain has already ruined your evening. We cannot make it worse."
I picked one. It said: "Write about the last time you ignored good advice."
I laughed loudly enough that three poets turned around.
I wrote fourteen lines on a paper napkin. They were about Aunt Renu, and the stars, and a shoe held together with a rubber band, and how stillness is a kind of advice that only sounds wise to people who already have somewhere comfortable to sit.
My hand shook a little. The napkin drank the ink like it had also been waiting six years.
The host would not let me leave without reading it. That is not fully accurate. She looked at me and said, "You wrote something," and I discovered, to my complete surprise, that I wanted to be caught.
People laughed in the right places. At the end there was that specific pause, one full breath, before the applause, and the applause sounded exactly like the rain on the awning, and I stood there in my ruined shoe thinking... oh. There you are.
Fate does not mind being disobeyed. It just reroutes you through the rain until you arrive somewhere you did not know you were owed.
A college kid lent me a charger. By the time my phone gasped back to life, Dev's dinner had ended. He had eaten my share of the cake, he informed me, "as a punishment and an honor."
The next morning Aunt Renu called at 6:20, deeply apologetic. She had, for the first time in eleven years, made a mistake. "Beta, I sent you Capricorn," she said. "You are not Capricorn. God forbid."
My actual horoscope for that Saturday, the real one, the Sagittarius one, said: "A detour returns you to an old love."
I am not saying I believe in astrology now. I am saying I believe in Aunt Renu, and in buses that give up at exactly the right red light, and I am no longer sure those are different beliefs.
I typed up the napkin poem that week, trimmed the two lines that were showing off, and entered it into a monthly poetry contest, because the host from the bookshop said the worst that could happen was nothing, and nothing had already been happening for six years. It did not win... The one I wrote the following month did not win either. The third one came back with a small handwritten note from a judge, which I have now read approximately four hundred times.
I write on Sunday mornings now, before the traffic starts. Most of what comes out keeps circling new beginnings, which is funny for a man who only began again by accident, in wet socks, under protest.
The napkin lives folded in my wallet, the ink blurred at the edges where the rain got in. The horoscopes still arrive at 6:15 every morning, dewdrops and all.
I read every single one now.
Not for instructions. For invitations.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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