Purva Phalguni: the hammock, the gist

Purva Phalguni: the hammock

The eleventh of the moon's twenty-seven stations is drawn in the handbooks as the two front legs of a bed, and the essay takes that seriously: rest as something you are owed a share of, not something you have to earn first.

This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.

The Sanskrit word behind the name means reddish. The same word, in the same dictionary entry, also means weak, feeble, pithless and worthless. That is the name attached to the patch of sky whose symbol is a place to lie down.

Indian astronomy divides the sky into twenty-seven slices called nakshatras, one for roughly each night the moon takes to travel round. Most of them are named after an object: a horse's head, a razor, a cart. Two of them, next to each other, are a bed. This essay is about the first of the pair, Purva Phalguni, which is the two legs at the front.

Its stars are Zosma and Chertan, in the back of the constellation of the Lion. Zosma is the brighter, easily seen from a city street, and lies just under sixty light years away. Chertan is fainter and about a hundred and sixty light years off. They stand just over five degrees apart, roughly three fingers held up at arm's length, one almost directly above the other. Arabic astronomers paired them too, as the two small ribs.

You do not need an alarm clock for this one. The Lion is an evening constellation in spring. From Delhi the pair is at its highest a little after midnight in mid-March and around ten at night in mid-April, almost straight overhead.

The figure attached to this station is Bhaga. His name means share, or portion: the part that is yours. The same word gives bhagya, usually translated as destiny, and bhagavan, lord, and it turns up far outside India, in Old Persian and in the Slavic word for god.

The essay uses that to make its argument. A share is not a wage. Nobody is paid a share for work completed; it is yours because you are one of the people at the table. A bed is where you were born, where you get over every illness, and where a third of your life goes, and it is still the one piece of furniture people apologise for using. The essay ends with questions instead of answers: what is my portion, am I taking it, and do I believe rest is owed to me or that it has to be earned first.

Words decoded

nakshatra (नक्षत्र): one of twenty-seven slices of sky, one for roughly
Purva Phalguni (पूर्व फाल्गुनी): the eleventh slice; purva means
Zosma and Chertan: the two stars that mark this slice, in the hind part of
magnitude: the brightness scale astronomers use; it runs backwards, so a
light year: the distance light travels in a year, so a star sixty light
right ascension: the sky's east-west coordinate, which decides what time
phalgu (फल्गु): the Sanskrit word behind the name; it means reddish, and
Bhaga (भग): the figure attached to this slice; the name means share or
muhurta: the branch of the tradition that picks times for starting things
ugra (उग्र): "fierce", the group the handbooks file this station in,

Why anyone should careAlmost everyone has been taught to treat rest as something owed to other people first and to themselves last, and to say sorry for taking it. An old list of stars quietly disagrees: it gives rest two of its twenty-seven places and puts the god of fair shares in charge of one of them. You do not have to believe the stars do anything to find that a useful thing to have been handed.

Read it properly, 8 min Purva Phalguni: the hammock