A child's chart

In many families a chart is drawn up for a baby within its first two weeks, and somebody reads it out. The baby is asleep. Everybody listening is an adult.

Most of it is technical and nobody follows it. One part is different: a short line about what this child will be like. Sharp. A hard start that clears. The one who will study far away. That line is what stays.

The essay then follows one invented boy, a composite rather than anybody's real son. At four the line is a warning given to visitors at the door. At seven it explains a bad term at school, and nobody looks further. At fifteen he uses it himself in an argument, because it is the only account of himself anybody has handed him. At nineteen nobody remembers it came off a sheet of paper.

Raman Patel is careful here. The line did not make the child anything. What differs is the order things happened in. Repetition wears the sentence down too, until one adjective is left, used by people who have no idea they are quoting anybody.

Then the consulting room. A parent who brings a child's chart usually has one of three things: a problem that needs a doctor or a teacher, a decision she has to make, or a question about herself she cannot say out loud. An hour can work on the last two, and nothing at all on the first.

The rule for the astrologer is short. Anything said about a child gets repeated to that child within the week, shortened, at a table with other people at it. The test is whether a sentence survives that repeating.

The long family negotiation that follows belongs to another writer on this blog, so the essay hands it over rather than settling it. What belongs to the hour is one narrow request, made of the astrologer rather than of a relative: ask which parts he would not want repeated to a nine-year-old, and ask for the careful wording written down.