The Toss of a Lemon by Padma Viswanathan Read Free Book Online Page B

far more proper for him to leave, saying nothing, and return for the eleventh-day ceremonies as though he’d never come before; she tells herself he was too excited the first time and couldn’t restrain himself, but now he’s more mature. She tells herself he’s overwhelmed with emotion because she delivered a boy. She doesn’t tell herself that none of these excuses suffices.
    Hanumarathnam is fleeing. He speeds, to the degree that he can in a bullock cart, toward his home and his instruments: his home, where he can think straight, and his instruments, which will tell him, finally, his fate.
    He reaches Cholapatti as the sun is setting, at that time of day when what is known appears unknown. A sickened feeling in the pit of his stomach has nothing to do with village roads and the swaying cart. He says nothing about it to himself because that would be fatalism: a person irresponsibly deciding, on some caprice, that a terrible fate awaits him. Such a man will be continually preoccupied with his doom until something, anything, happens so he can say, “Aha! You see! I am doomed, it was not my imagination!”
    Hanumarathnam has no patience with such whimsy. Destiny can be read precisely, scientifically, and this is precisely, scientifically, what he intends to do. Only after that, if necessary, will he fall into despair. Or sink into relief: he keeps himself optimistic.
    On the Cholapatti rooftop, he works through the night. He notes his son’s birth time and birth location in tables, then creates other tables to repeat the calculations from different angles and starting points, checking them one against another, consulting charts and books. Every equation takes him back in time, so changed is the sky already from the moment whose influences he is enumerating as the night moves past the moon.
    Every so often, he peers through his telescope, scavenged by a distant relative from the house of a dying British surveyor and bon vivant, and brought to Hanumarathnam in recognition of his talents. Where his ancestors relied on handed-down documents, he, always interested in other traditions’ teachings, supplements his Vedic calculations with measurements he has learned to make using telescopic observations.
    He brings the stars close, through the lenses; he looks in their eyes. To those who merely admire the heavens, as they admire a new building in the city or another man’s wife, alterations in the sky are mere degrees of difference. They are interesting to observe, chart, identify. They are fine to forget. But, as all experiences, however fleeting or superficial, leave residues, so the moment-by-moment turning of heavenly bodies has momentous repercussions.
    Hanumarathnam, all too fully aware of the ability of the heavens to sustain life, bring death and cause all the ups and downs in between, cannot simply stare in dumbfounded awe for a couple of seconds at the beauty of the skies and then go down to supper and sleep. What he sees writ is destinies untold.
    Dawn breaks upon him. He has been sitting still a long time. Dew trickles down his neck, as if the morning sees he’s not sweating and thinks he should.
    He has read that he will die.
    Sooner, that is, rather than later. His weak quadrant has an astrological alignment with his son’s birth time, and this has darkened the shadow of death. The discus of the little boy’s stars will cut Hanumarathnam’s lifeline within three years.
    At the eleventh-day naming ceremonies, Hanumarathnam goes through the motions. It’s not conspicuous: everyone is just going through the motions, as people do at these things. But Sivakami notices and is concerned : Hanumarathnam has not tried to get close to his son. With his daughter, he is still all fond smiles and lifting and swinging, though Sivakami perceives a sadness there too.
    Why not the boy? Why not the boy? Sivakami wonders as she waits out the remainder of the thirty-one days’ seclusion. After a girl baby, seclusion lasts