Your chart, their hopes

The person who consults your birth chart most often is not you. In a great many Indian houses it is your mother, before six in the morning, on a day you never hear about.

That chart is called a kundli: a diagram of where the sun, moon and planets stood at the moment and place a child was born. Somebody keeps it, usually locked away, and this piece is about that somebody.

Picture a mother awake at ten past five. She takes it out of the cupboard, copies the date, the time and the town onto the back of an envelope, and puts it back. At half past seven she rings the family priest and asks whether next month is all right. She writes his answer on the envelope, puts it in a drawer, and makes tea. The person the whole morning was about was asleep in another city.

Why do parents do this? Fear needs something to do. When a child is four, a worried parent can fetch a sweater or find a doctor. When the child is 27, there is almost nothing left to do. Feed them. Offer money they say they do not need. Give advice they receive with visible patience. That call is eight small actions, and doing eight things steadies a person who was otherwise lying in the dark.

The calls come in clusters: exam results, a job in another city, a visa, an illness. That is not because parents grow more religious as you grow older. It is because they grow less informed. They used to read your face at dinner. Now they get a Sunday phone call in which you say you are fine.

So when the message arrives, that the priest said not to sign anything this month, there is usually a plainer sentence under it: I am frightened and I do not know how to say so. Arguing about astrology never reaches that sentence. Answering the worry does, and so does handing over ordinary information: your landlord's name, the route you take home, the date the result is due.