What to bring

A birth chart is worked out from three things: the date, the place and the time of a birth. Most people know their time only because a relative once told them. The number gets repeated at family gatherings until it sounds like a fact.

So the essay sends you to the drawer where your family keeps its documents. Three papers may be in there.

First, hospital paper. The labour room register recommended to hospitals in India has a line for the date and time of delivery, and a separate one for the date and time of admission. Two times, one page. A relative copying in a hurry can copy the wrong one.

Second, the municipal birth certificate. The national birth report form asks only for the day, month and year. Some states add a time; many do not. Registration is meant to happen within 21 days; an entry made a year or more later came out of somebody's memory. Do not count on the hospital either: doctors are only asked to keep patient records for three years.

Third, the family horoscope, called a janma patrika. Older ones record the birth not by the clock but by how much time had passed since sunrise, counted in units called ghatis of 24 minutes each. That converts, but only if you know the place. And the time on it may have been adjusted by whoever drew it up, which makes it a conclusion rather than something anybody watched.

Clocks add their own doubt. Times written by hand drift to the fives and zeros. Bombay kept its own clock, about 39 minutes behind Indian Standard Time, until 1955.

So write the number down with its history attached. "About 3:40 in the afternoon, from the discharge slip, in my mother's handwriting" is more useful than "15:40". A stated range is a fact. A false precision is not.

Then write one page of your own: the decision in one line, with its two options and its deadline, a few dated facts, and what you have already decided privately. Leave the screenshots from three apps at home.