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Nakshatra files · The gist

Rohini, and the moon who would not keep the rota

An old story about the moon favouring one wife out of twenty-seven turns out to be a neat description of two things anyone can see in the sky, and the star at the centre of it is easy to find.

The essay7 minThe gist2 min

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

In the story, the moon is cursed to waste away for a fortnight and recover for a fortnight because he would not stop favouring his fourth wife. That curse is a description of the phases of the moon, and the twenty-seven wives are the twenty-seven nights of its lap around the sky.

The moon married twenty-seven sisters in one day, and their father Daksha expected the rota kept: one wife a night, no favourites. Those twenty-seven nights are the twenty-seven nakshatras, the slices of sky the moon crosses on its way round. Rohini is the fourth, and the moon would not leave her. Warned twice and unmoved, he was cursed with a wasting sickness. In the version the writer likes best, Shiva cannot cancel the curse, only halve it: so the moon wastes for a fortnight and recovers for a fortnight, forever.

Read as bookkeeping, that is tidy. Sky-watchers could see two things they could not explain. The moon shrinks and returns on a fixed schedule. And it comes back to the same star every twenty-seven and a bit days. Both get stitched to the one thing every family has to hand: an argument about favouritism.

Rohini is Aldebaran, the brightest star in the pattern called the Bull. It is an orange giant, cool as stars go, which is why the colour, and it lies about sixty-five light years away. The name simply means the red one: somebody looked up, saw the colour, and said so. Some of that red is hers and some is our own air: everything low in the sky reddens, which is why sunsets go orange.

To see her, set an alarm for three and face east. By four she stands about three fists above the horizon, measured with your own fist at arm's length.

Behind her lies a lopsided V of fainter stars, the Hyades. Every photograph makes her look like the brightest of that group. She is not a member at all: the V is a hundred and fifty light years off and she is at sixty-five, in front of it, lined up by chance.

The writer refuses the usual paragraph about how charming Rohini people are and who they should marry. What she takes from it instead is a question you can hold. What am I hungry for? What am I spending to have it? Did I decide that trade, or merely drift into it?

Words decoded

nakshatra (नक्षत्र)
one of twenty-seven slices of the sky, one for roughly each night of the moon's lap around it
Rohini (रोहिणी)
the fourth slice; the name simply means "the red one"
Aldebaran
the orange star that marks Rohini, brightest in the constellation of the Bull
orange giant
a big star with a relatively cool surface, which is why it looks orange rather than white
light year
the distance light travels in a year, the usual way of measuring how far off a star is
Hyades
the loose V of fainter stars behind Aldebaran, a real cluster she only appears to belong to
Why anyone should careThe story is not a warning about being born under a red star. It puts appetite and its cost in the same sentence and leaves the deciding to you, which is a different thing from being told what will happen.
Read it properly, 7 min Rohini, and the moon who would not keep the rota