The kundli in the locker

Say at home that you want to see your kundli and the room changes. Somebody turns the television down, and then everyone is talking about where it is kept and who has the key.

In many Indian houses there is a document about you that you have never read. A kundli, also called a janma patrika, is a chart of where the sun, the moon and the planets stood at the moment and place you were born. It is usually a roll of paper tied with thread, or a booklet in cloth.

Notice where it is kept. Not with the old bills, but with the property papers, or in the bank locker beside the gold. That shelf is for things that cannot be replaced.

Somebody had it made in your first days. An astrologer worked the positions out by hand from an almanac of that year, and somebody paid him. Often the person who arranged it was a grandparent. Old household manuals put the naming of a baby on the tenth day, and in many families the astrologer supplied the first letter of the name, taken from the star the moon stood in. Your name may have come out of that document.

You were 11 days old and had no opinion about it. Whatever else the chart is, it is the oldest piece of writing anywhere that is about you.

Two feelings sit inside the keeping. One is affection for a baby who had done nothing yet. The other is closer to fear: within living memory families lost infants, and a chart was something to do in a week when little could be done. None of that decides whether the claims in it are true. You can leave that open and still ask to see it.

If you ask, ask on an ordinary evening, and say why: it is about me. Do not trade a promise to believe, or to disbelieve, for the right to look. Ask about the object before the contents, then listen to the end. Listening is not agreeing, and you owe nobody a verdict that night.