Bhakoot, the quiet veto

The horoscopes were seen, there was some bhakoot problem.

Read that sentence again and listen to the tense. Everything in it has already happened. That is how bhakūṭa (भकूट) travels, and it is what separates the word from the other flags in this trade. Manglik is a word people pick up at weddings before they know what it means. Kaal sarp arrives with a serpent's name attached and a temple that takes bookings. Nadi, the heading immediately above this one, at least gets argued about in public, and it needs its own accounting. Bhakoot arrives late, in a room where the file is already shut, and nobody in that room has looked the word up, because until that week nobody in it had heard it.

So here is the rule, before anybody needs it.

Bhakoot is the seventh of the eight headings in the marriage-matching grid, and it carries seven points out of thirty-six. I have set the grid out heading by heading in the piece on the thirty-six points, and I will not lay it out twice. What matters here is the input. Bhakoot reads two numbers. It takes the rāśi (राशि), the moon sign, of each person. The zodiac is cut into twelve equal signs, and your moon sign is the one the moon stood in when you were born. Bhakoot counts the distance from one person's sign to the other's, both ways round.

One rule about the counting: your own sign is number one. So the sign next door to yours is the second from it, not the first. And the same gap reads as a different number from each side, which is why these arrangements are written as pairs. If her sign is the second from his, his is the twelfth from hers.

Counted that way, there are only seven arrangements a couple can be in, and four of them score the full seven points: both in the same sign, directly opposite (7-7), 3-11, and 4-10. Three score nothing at all: 2-12, which means the two signs are next door to each other, 5-9, and 6-8. Seven or zero, and the zero is what people call bhakoot doṣa (दोष), a defect.

The three failing arrangements have names and separate claims attached. The next-door pairing, 2-12, is dvirdvādaśa (द्विर्द्वादश), and it is said to bring money trouble and heavy expense. The 6-8 pairing is ṣaḍaṣṭaka (षडष्टक), the one usually called worst, said to bring illness, quarrels and separation. The 5-9 pairing is navapañcama (नवपञ्चम), said to bear on children. Drik Panchang, whose tables many Indian matching reports follow, describes the heading as covering "children, wealth, comforts, good luck and growth of the family". That is simply the three named troubles turned the right way up.

The 5-9 zero is the odd one out. Two signs in that relation stand a third of the circle apart, the angle this discipline calls a trine and treats as favourable nearly everywhere else it appears. Here it scores nothing. I have not found any account of that reversal which does more than restate it.

The escape clause is a heading you already scored

The zero can be cancelled, and there are two standard ways. If both moon signs are owned by the same planet, the defect is not counted. If the two owners are natural friends on the fixed planetary friendship table, it is cancelled or at least reduced, depending on whose handbook you have.

Take the first seriously, because it is small enough to check yourself. Five pairs of signs share an owner: Aries and Scorpio under Mars, Taurus and Libra under Venus, Gemini and Virgo under Mercury, Sagittarius and Pisces under Jupiter, Capricorn and Aquarius under Saturn. Of those five pairs, two stand six signs apart (Aries with Scorpio, Taurus with Libra) and one stands next door (Capricorn with Aquarius). The remaining two are 4-10, which was never going to fail this test anyway. So the same-owner rule reaches exactly three pairings on the whole board. A real clause, and a narrow one.

The second cancellation is not narrow, and it is not new information either. Look at the condition it turns on: whether the owners of the two moon signs are friends. That is the fifth heading of the same grid, graha maitrī (ग्रह मैत्री), worth five points, and it is scored on exactly that question, off exactly that table. Full marks there mean the two owners are friends or are the same planet, which is the same condition that waives the seven-point zero here.

Put the two headings side by side. Twelve of the thirty-six points, a third of the score, hang on one comparison between two planets. When the comparison comes out friendly, a couple is paid twice for it: five points, and a seven-point defect quietly withdrawn. When it comes out unfriendly, they are charged twice. Nothing else in either chart gets a vote on the matter. The escape clause is not a second opinion. It is the first opinion, repeated.

This is a different complaint from the one I made about the Mars flag. There the cancellations are real and plentiful, and my objection was to the order in which they are disclosed, which I went through in the mangal dosha piece. Here the cancellation is not being withheld from you. It is being counted twice in front of you.

When the rule still had directions

There is a manual of muhūrta (मुहूर्त), the choosing of times to act, called the Kālaprakāśikā (कालप्रकाशिका). Its author names himself Narasimha, son of Varadarya; its age I cannot pin down. N. P. Subramania Iyer put it into English in 1917 and printed the Sanskrit alongside. It belongs to the southern practice, so it does not use the eight headings at all. Instead it lists ten things to check in a match, and sign distance is the sixth of them. What follows is paraphrase, not quotation.

Every distance in that list has two readings, one for each direction. If the groom's moon sign is the second from the bride's, the text calls it fatal, and says the reverse arrangement lengthens life. Third from her: misery one way, a happy life the other. Fourth: poverty one way, wealth the other. Fifth: widowhood one way, protection from it the other. Sixth: loss of sons one way, sons the other. Directly opposite is good outright.

Then the exceptions, which are stranger still. The trouble with the second sign is lifted if the groom's sign happens to be an even-numbered one, and stands if it is odd. The trouble with the sixth is lifted for six named pairs of signs. They are Aries with Virgo, Gemini with Scorpio, Leo with Capricorn, Libra with Pisces, Sagittarius with Taurus, and Aquarius with Cancer. Set that list beside the zodiac and the pattern shows. In every one of the six, the bride's sign is an odd-numbered one.

Notice which pairs are missing from that list. Taurus with Libra is not there. Aries with Scorpio is not there. Those are two of the three pairings the modern same-owner rule rescues. One system lets them through on the strength of a shared owner. The other refuses them, on the strength of an odd or even number. These are two different systems, under no obligation to agree. That is the point. A couple's file does not know which one is on the desk.

In that same list, sign distance is the sixth consideration and the owners of the two signs are the seventh, judged separately and on their own merits. Neither cancels the other. The two questions that the eight-heading grid rolls into one are, in that manual, two questions.

So: a version of this test that had directions, named exceptions and a separate second question sits beside a version that returns seven or nothing. Whether the older one was better I cannot settle, and I am not claiming the older writers had it right. I am pointing at a shape. The rule got simpler in the one direction that makes it usable by people who are not reading it.

Which brings me to the quiet.

Follow the incentive, and ask who each of these terms has to convince. Kaal sarp has to reach the frightened person directly, because that person pays for the rite, so it needs a name that carries and an address to send them to. The gemstone needs a shop and a customer standing in it. Those fears advertise because they are sold to the people who hold them.

Bhakoot is not sold to the person it lands on. It is supplied to the family doing the choosing, and it does its work before the two people have met. A veto needs no publicity. It needs only to be available when somebody wants a reason, and this one is free on every large matrimonial site, computed in the same second as the total and printed as a line item with a zero beside it.

That is also why you hear it late. A flag aimed at the person who carries it has to be explained to them, which takes a name and years of repetition. A flag aimed at the person closing the file has to be explained to nobody. The word surfaces afterwards, when somebody has to say something out loud, and it serves well there because it sounds technical and nobody present can question it.

So the moment to want a say in this one is early, while the report is still a document and nobody has yet had to defend anything in it. The line is in the report from the first day, seventh heading, seven points or none, arriving with the rest of the score. Read it then, when reading it costs nothing and asking about it embarrasses no one.

Later there is only the sentence, and the sentence is not addressed to you. It is said once, in the past tense, in a room that has already finished, and then the subject changes.