Nadi dosha, and the marriages it ends

Before many Indian marriages, the two families compare the boy's and the girl's birth details. The comparison uses eight headings and gives a score out of thirty-six. One heading, called nadi, is worth eight points, more than any other, and this piece is about that one.

Here is how nadi works. There are twenty-seven birth stars, which are equal slices of the path the moon travels. Write the first three across a page. Write the next three in the row below, going the other way. Keep turning at the end of each row, the way a field is ploughed, until all twenty-seven are down. You get nine rows and three columns. Those columns are the three nadis.

If the two people's birth stars are in the same column, the heading scores nothing. If they are in different columns, it scores all eight. That is the whole test.

The word nadi means a channel or tube in the body, and also the pulse. The three columns are usually matched to the three humours of Ayurveda: wind, bile and phlegm. Modern astrology websites say that sharing a column brings illness, childlessness, poverty, even death. They state this flatly. None of them shows a verse from any text.

Nikhil Verma went looking for one. He found an older list of eight agreements in the marriage chapter of the Narada Purana, with no points attached to anything. But the passage that should contain the nadi rule turns out to be a modern translator's footnote, printed where the verses were not translated. He says so rather than pretending otherwise.

Every website that raises the flag also lists conditions that cancel it. Nothing says when those conditions are to be checked. A family that wants the match asks. A family that does not want it already has its reason. The same list produces whichever answer the room wanted, and everyone can believe the sky decided.