“Prophecy”

The night of Dev’s twenty-second birthday, he was invited to sit with the elders after dinner. The summons was conveyed by Bhakti Bai, the maid, who called Dev into the kitchen once the dinner plates had been cleared, and placed in his hands a tray of glasses filled with water. “They’ve asked for you,” she said.

Dev glanced at the tray of crystal he was holding. It was time for things to open, he thought, windows and doors. His head swam with the onion stink of the kitchen. Then there was a force at his back, pushing him toward the blazing chatter beyond the doorway. “Be good now,” Bhakti Bai said.

In the living room, the graying heads of Dev’s uncles turned right to left in conversation, their words crude and fast, heavy with the consonants of money talk. “Four lakhs!” his grandfather said, and it sounded as if he were calling for an assassination. Dev set the tray on the coffee table and took a seat, welcoming the noise. Countless nights he had lingered in his socks behind the main wall of the living room, listening to the men. Standing there, he’d been invisible to his uncles but obvious to Bhakti Bai, who would click her tongue in irritation at the room’s rising volume, the inevitable trumpeting of men without women.

“I’ve heard it before,” Dev’s father said now. “Cow urine has healing properties. In ancient times, they used to drink it.”

“Yes, yes, just a splash in your morning chai and it’s a wonder,” an uncle agreed.

The men roared at the silliness, or perhaps the seriousness, of the idea. Dev wasn’t sure. He channelled his own endorsement into an ambivalent up-down of his right foot. His presence did not appear to have been noted, and he wondered whether they had decided in advance to ignore him. Sitting beside his father, Dev took comfort in the sound of Bhakti Bai preparing the nightly tea and biscuits. When she finally emerged to see Dev among the men, he knew, her tray would give a rattle, and the old woman, who had fed and bathed him as an infant, would send him a wink of good luck.

“Devansh,” his father said, in greeting or annoyance, or both.

Then came the tray, the sweet clamor of cups and saucers.

“Next, you lot will be drinking the Prime Minister’s piss,” Dev said. “You believe any nonsense you hear.”

“You definitely need to start drinking someone’s piss,” his father said, leaving no beat for the room’s laughter. “This idiot got a degree only because I bribed the dean’s entire family. Every cousin and third cousin of his in Bombay I’ve had to take to dinner!”

Here, the men were allowed to laugh. Dev shook his head gamely, letting the hard sounds of his uncles’ voices make him once more a child confined to his bed, parsing the deep rumble beyond his door, picturing the flat completely dark except for this one glowing, booming room. How he had loved imagining the men breaking out the ruby-shaded rum that sat in the cabinet and laughing with all their bad teeth, as if they hadn’t spent every dinner of his life as absolutely and untouchably sober as headstones. This was how they prepared a son of the house to shoulder responsibility, he thought. They used the oldest trick in the book: the trick of making a child believe there was something thrilling occurring in the house at the very moment that he was ordered to go to bed.

Beyond the walls now, he knew that his mother would be comforting his little brother, just as she used to creep quietly along the hall to check on Dev.

“Let’s see what Dev thinks,” his grandfather said, sitting up straighter in his seat. “We’ve spoken in the past of Tiger’s incompetence, and I think it wise to encourage his move abroad, so that he can leave the business and do something of his own. I am speaking too honestly, perhaps, but his carelessness with the property in Cuffe Parade has seriously set us back.”

“I’ve mentioned it before,” his father said. “Dev can easily take over for Tiger.” The uncles nodded in agreement.

Inside Dev, something sank and then rose. He wasn’t sure why his older brother wasn’t at the meeting to defend himself. Dev was used to Tiger giving him a devilish nudge and smirk every night after dinner, as he sauntered into the room while Dev and his younger brother waited outside, uninvited. How infuriating he’d found Tiger’s air of superiority. Each time his brother glanced at him, Dev felt as if he’d been pointed and laughed at. Sometimes this was actually the case. Now Dev wondered if Tiger already knew of his fate, or if he would blast through the door, briefcase in hand, wagging a finger at Dev, who was at that moment considering whether to betray him.

“You must have heard him say that he’s not very happy at the company,” Dev said. “I mean, this was never what he wanted to do with his life.”

To create the illusion of truth, Dev stood and poured himself a cup of tea. Tiger did not appear at the door, a portal quickly closing.

“Well, if he’s unhappy . . . ,” an uncle said.

The men exchanged thoughtful looks at this new information, slurping their tea. This went on for a few minutes, until Dev’s grandfather urged the men to a decision with what looked like an accidental knock of his cane.

“O.K.,” his father said, the word repeated by another relative, then another.

A voice called for Bhakti Bai to bring out the open bottle of Blue Label along with six glasses. Again came her measured footsteps, and with them Dev’s first encounter with the impossible, leathery taste of whiskey. He tried to contain his reaction to the flavor but couldn’t keep from gagging behind his hand when no one was watching.

Dev was in the office six days a week. The family business was real estate. For Dev, this meant meetings at development sites all over Bombay, and the crossing of items off checklists—running water, fire extinguisher, functional lock, windows that opened. “Ay, come see this tap,” someone would yell, and Dev would become one of two bodies before a mirror, watching brownish water sputter from a silver mouth.

The office had a low ceiling, which meant that Dev had to duck each time he walked through a doorway. To avoid this minor annoyance, he remained seated for most of the day. Over time, the sitting became a nuisance for his back, which had grown tender and tight. He developed a slight hunch, for which he chastised himself meanly whenever he passed his own reflection. Look at you! Ugly thing! Horrible liar!

“I need a better advocate, Craig.”

Cartoon by Liana Finck

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A chiropractor recommended that he begin taking daily walks on his lunch break.

It saddened Dev to think how exciting it had all been at first, the belt, the tucked-in shirt, the steel tiffins that were sent after him for lunch and dinner. Bhakti Bai had teasingly started calling him “sir.” This was only after she ran a dishevelling hand through his neatly parted hair, clicking her tongue at the sight of him, saying that he looked more and more like his father every day. But it was the slog of work that had made Dev grow up. His exhaustion had vaporized his image of himself as a child. As a boy, he’d lived with a big, unmovable frown pasted across his face, a frown of marble and pride, for he was always being bested in some competition for his uncles’ attention and trying to win it back by dripping red medicine on his shirt and spinning a story about his older brother’s violent rages. Now Tiger had found a way to move to America, and all that remained of him in the flat was a silver-framed photograph from the day he left: shirt buttoned to the collar, suitcase in hand, staring intently from the entrance to the airport. Nights when Dev returned home from work late, the photograph often jarred him. It sat on the entry console beside a bowl of fresh marigolds, a little shrine created by his mother, as though there had been a war, and Tiger, once handsome and capable, had been found amid the rubble. Since that day, no one had heard from him.

The ironic hand of the universe had done its work; these days, it was Dev who suffered from all the resentment he had accused his brother of feeling. Dev found there was little pleasure to be had from his labor, and the few liberties he was given did not make up for the lack of time he had to himself. Even the money, which he was never allowed to touch directly, had become as elusive and abstract as a philosophy. The uncles had asked him to trust that he would be supported for his hard work. They told him there was no reason for a boy his age to have access to money of that sort.

“This was never what I wanted to do with my life,” Dev would complain to Bhakti Bai once his uncles had returned to their respective flats to sleep. The line came to him each time he had had to force a key into a stiff new lock or flush a toilet to insure that it worked. He wanted more than anything to hold his earnings, to measure them against his misery. “Why?” he asked her. “Why do they behave this way?”

“So they can keep you under their roof forever,” she said definitively. “Not roof, sorry. Foot. Under their foot.”

Some days, Dev would find notes from Bhakti Bai in his tiffin. Scrawled in her neat, blockish hand were bizarre truisms like Humility is the most honorable dress for a man. Unless he is going swimming.

He knew she put them there to make him laugh.

Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but make sure to curse your grandfather when you fall and die.

I had no shoes and complained until I saw a man with no cucumber.

Dev saved these notes in a drawer in his desk. A reminder of the comfort that awaited him if he managed to cross the threshold of his office door at a reasonable hour and return to the silence of his family’s apartment.

There were weekly meetings in his grandfather’s office on the top floor, which all male family members were expected to attend. At these meetings, Dev’s grandfather would give the group an overview of the mistakes made that week, followed by a stern pronouncement that such mistakes ought not to be repeated. “Am I making myself clear?” the old man would ask.

In Dev’s one-year tenure, these mistakes had seemed to grow in seriousness. Fudged numbers on balance sheets, apartments rented without smoke alarms, and one summer night, while Dev slept, a newly renovated high-rise in Pali Hill went up in flames.

What fire does not destroy, it makes very crispy.

Dev understood that he was not the only one suffering through the hours at work. The accidents were evidence of how difficult it was for everyone to live under someone’s foot.

After the weekly meetings, Dev would walk around Ballard Estate to straighten out his back. He liked to see other young professionals taking their smoke breaks against the old buildings, and the chaatwala who always called to him in greeting, though he had never once visited the stall.

Yearning for a cigarette one Friday, he approached a group of women, whom he guessed to be his age or a little older, drinking coffee out of ceramic mugs in the street. He recognized the logo on the mugs as that of the fashion magazine that rented the floor above his office. One of the girls, dressed in a red kurta and jeans, brought a lighter to the cigarette between her lips.

“Can I have one of those?” he asked her.

She did not smile or even move a hand to her pack, which he saw sitting in her open purse.

“Who do you work for?” she asked.

“Shetty and Sons.”

“And you’re one of the sons?”

“Grandson,” he said. “But I won’t be there long.”

He thought she must have liked his answer, because only then did she hold out the pack for him to take a cigarette.

“Your family—real cocksuckers,” she said. “My ex lived in one of your buildings, and one day the bloody toilet flooded the whole flat. When he asked your father or whoever to come and fix it, they didn’t send anyone for eleven days. We had to just live like that, begging each morning to piss in the neighbor’s flat.”

Dev listened, amused. He was glad to hear someone else criticize his workplace but even gladder that she had revealed something so personal about herself without his prompting. She had been in love once, he thought, turning over the fact. And she uses the loo. She was in love once, and in her lover’s flat she would use the loo.

He held the cigarette still as she leaned toward him with her lighter.

“Cocksucking,” he said from behind a thin cloud of smoke. “It’s the family business. I didn’t have much of a choice. So you can’t hold it against me.”

From the high shot of her laugh, he could tell that he had surprised her.

Her name was Jagriti.

She had come to Bombay to work at the fashion magazine. She already had an M.B.A., which she had paid for, she liked to remind Dev, all by herself. She worked in accounting, but the office was open plan, so she was able to sit close enough to the stylists and writers to be dazzled by their new clothes and convent-school English. She was twenty-seven to Dev’s twenty-three.

Early on, Jagriti made it clear to Dev what kind of woman she was not. Her theory of womanhood was a cake with two halves. The first half concerned the women of their parents’ generation—demure, without opinions, bright-skinned beauties lounging on daybeds with nothing to say, like pampered pets. These women had been told that their primary concern was the upkeep of the home. The babies, the décor, the maids and their gossip. Jagriti would not become one of these women, she said. No long robes, no being forced to wear a bra in her own living room out of concern for what the in-laws said, no alienation from the machinery that pumped the household with money.

When her father died, Jagriti said, he left her mother in so much debt that they’d had to live in ashrams for a few years. She recalled consoling her mother as she removed the warm gold hoops from her ears, the bangles from her wrists. Her mother handed the jewelry over to a liquidator in exchange for cash. They had been well off once, she said, but her father’s death had also spelled the death of their comforts. At the liquidator’s shop, Jagriti had watched her mother’s hands go limp in her lap. Her mother’s hands were pale and soft, she said, like two small animals shorn of their fur. She had never before seen her mother without gold on her fingers.

“Understood?” she asked.

Dev nodded.

The modern Indian woman, Jagriti said, was no better. The modern woman had grown up seeing these mothers, how helpless they became if their husbands vanished, like dolls with plastic eyes glued open in shock. The daughters of women like that believed they’d be safe if they avoided their mothers’ prisons—love and motherhood. Jagriti had grown up believing that girls who wanted babies were idiots. For years, she had refused to hold the children of her friends, thinking that she looked intellectual and superior when she swatted a baby away, or continued with her conversation while a child wailed in her friend’s lap. But she knew now that this was the reaction of a woman who had been too afraid to imagine something better for herself. She admitted that, these days, when she woke up, she sometimes longed to greet a small thing wriggling in a cot beside her. But she wanted to do it all differently, with less misery. She wanted to have a baby without entering the prison of motherhood. She had yet to figure it all out, but she knew that one day she would have to decide. This was how a life was made: a woman woke up and decided. But she would decide in her own time, she said, and, if Dev wanted to rush any of her decisions, he could go off and hang himself right now.

“Understood?”

Dev nodded.

He tried to grasp her ideas, to validate them. He had been the type of man to notice the world and its behaviors but never to examine these images in the light, extracting his own desires and opinions, the way Jagriti had. It was clear to him that she was much smarter than he was, that he would have to read all the books on her shelves to become something like her equal, and he decided to start that very night, packing a hardback by Adrienne Rich into his briefcase for his lunch break the next day.

On Saturdays, while Dev worked, Jagriti took guitar lessons. Sunday mornings, before breakfast, he read, leaning against the pillows in Jagriti’s bed, while she practiced the song she had learned the day before. On a rainy Sunday that Dev would remember as the beginning of their days together, he watched from above the open spine of his book as Jagriti positioned her guitar between her arms. She sat on a footstool wearing a white camisole and a pair of tube socks. She was about to play a Bob Dylan song, she said. Did he know any Dylan?

Dev shook his head.

“Uncultured,” she declared. Then, in the quick voice she used when she was teaching him something, she said, “He was very popular in America in the sixties.”

The song was called “Mama, You Been on My Mind.” As Jagriti played, an easy thought came to Dev, an idea washing over his mind without resistance. He loved her. He imagined the melodrama of telling her after her serenade, the sure cadence of his voice, the usual boldness of her expression—would she even be surprised? All the while, his eyes locked upon a curling hair stuck to the blanket on her bed. From her pubic area, he mused, and continued to watch her strum; a drop of sweat prepared to dive from the high bridge of her nose. O.K., he thought, he was an adult, he was in love, and he would tell her.

When she finished the song, she waited a moment, watching him. He thought maybe she was waiting for him to say it. He closed his book.

“I love that song,” he said. “I love how you play.”

She looked down at her strings, as if she had understood what went unsaid. The drop of sweat had fallen. “That’s it?”

No, no, there was more: he wanted to say that he would never need her forgiveness, never say an unforgivable thing, never make her remove the gold from her wrists and ears, never die, never leave her on her own, though even if he did—he knew she would interrupt—she would be absolutely fine. He’d felt it all in him since that morning; no, even earlier. He was thinking like a poet: I loved you from the first cigarette, he wanted to say.

“What’re you doing? The next trash pickup isn’t for another two million years.”

Cartoon by Michael Maslin

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“What do you want me to say?” he asked.

“Don’t take that tone with me,” she said. “You think I can’t see what you’re thinking?”

He pulled the collar of his T-shirt up to dab at the sweat that had dampened the back of his neck. “Tell me then. What am I thinking?”

“You’re thinking of making me a bride, aren’t you?”

His limbs utterly rigid, he watched as she placed her guitar carefully against its stand before climbing, knee by knee, to where he waited for her, in bed.

The astrologer was a gaunt man in office wear. He slipped off his shoes at the door, then groaned as he descended to his knees to sit cross-legged on the floor.

Once he seemed comfortable, the astrologer looked up at the men’s faces, searching, Dev thought, for a face shining with love. He felt his cheeks begin to collect heat. He wanted to be known.

“Who is the groom?” the astrologer asked.

“I am,” Dev said.

“Sit, sit,” the astrologer said. “All of you, sit.”

Seated, Dev felt he was seeing his own life through the astrologer’s eyes. He saw the silk sofas the color of toffee, the intricately carved silver sculptures that Bhakti Bai polished weekly, the flag-size painting on which the eyes of visitors rested when they did not want to look at one another. On the canvas, two fat children watched as a third, blue-skinned comrade gleefully stole melted butter from a pot. All these hoarded souvenirs, familiar as banana peels, the peels of Dev’s heart—how well he knew their chips and stains, these artifacts that had watched him his entire life. What could this man in his starched shirt tell him that he did not already know?

The astrologer had brought with him a stack of thick books with colorful covers. Folded within the books were sheets of blank paper on which the astrologer drew checkerboard-like structures as the men watched. He wrote small notations in each of the squares, his face preserved in the scowl he had worn at the front door, revealing nothing. On the second piece of paper, Dev saw that the astrologer’s pencil had noted Jagriti’s name and the time of her birth—a detail that Dev had faithfully collected and delivered to his father the week before.

He and the men of his family had been seated almost precisely the way they were now when Dev had announced his intention to propose. The men had raised their glasses to his news, and then Dev’s father had spoken. First, they would consult the family astrologer, he said, and only if the man approved of the match would Dev be allowed to go through with the proposal.

Dev hadn’t thought that his father was serious, or that his parents even believed in such things. All he’d known of astrology until that moment was that a holy man had blessed him the day he was born, assuring his mother that he would have a long, happy life. He had never questioned how the astrologer had derived this information, or what right the man had had to lead Dev’s mother to believe him. But the symphonic nod of heads that had followed his father’s pronouncement told him that his family’s belief in astrology was genuine. Here was another ritual that had been withheld from him and his brothers until they were old enough, it seemed.

“All O.K., boss?” his father asked now.

The astrologer nodded.

They spent an hour watching as the man flipped through his books, made markings, added and subtracted numbers from a score of thirty-six, the significance of which went unexplained. Time found its way inside Dev as he waited, pushing against his skin, humming along his bones, extracting whatever appetite he’d carried before the day began. His stomach was now small and vestigial, a flat stone. It was a longer hour than after the dinner on Dev’s twenty-second birthday, when he’d waited in the kitchen, hands in his pockets, hoping to be invited in.

The astrologer cleared his throat, and the sound rattled through Dev. He stood up.

“I don’t advise that you go through with this match,” the astrologer said, plopping closed each of his books. “Major issue with the girl.”

“What issue?” his father asked.

“She will not have a son?” his grandfather asked.

“I cannot say. It is against my ethics.”

The astrologer stood, too, meeting Dev’s eyes. “Please take your time to think,” he said, his warm hand on Dev’s shoulder. “Do not rush. The boy sometimes acts without thinking.”

“We won’t take a risk,” his father said.

This seemed to appease the astrologer, who shot Dev a weak glance.

Then the man was at the door, accepting a weary handshake from Dev’s grandfather. Dev could no longer stand. On the couch, he brought a finger of whiskey to his lips. At the sound of the door closing, Dev slung back his drink.

That weekend, Dev and Jagriti picked up the books at Crossword. They wanted to know what the astrologer had seen. The only way to find out was to study the practice themselves.

They signed up for an astrology course offered after hours at an old church near Ballard Estate. Students, mainly middle-aged men in clothing of another trade, khaki police wear or white-collared shirts, would amble in after the Narcotics Anonymous meetings with their fresh textbooks.

Earlier that week, in the moments between the astrologer’s verdict and his exit from the apartment, Dev had grown curious about the extent of the man’s involvement in his family’s life. He followed him out to the parking lot and spotted him in his car. He knocked on the car window tearfully, his hands joined to indicate his sincerity.

“How long has my family been consulting you?” he asked, when the man had rolled down his window.

The man laughed. “Long, long time. I saw you when you were just born.”

There had been more than two decades of predictions, consultations for every decision, big or small: when to advertise the new building in Churchgate; when to absorb the next son into the business; when to purchase new land; when to hire a new accountant; who would die first; what would kill each one of them; diseases; suicides; deaths before fifty; grandchildren; whether the children would marry well; whether the grandchildren would marry well.

Before the astrologer was skilled enough to offer his own readings, Dev’s family had consulted the man’s father. Even theirs was a family business, the astrologer said.

Evenings, Jagriti and Dev would discuss their learnings.

On the days when they were overcome with gloom, they would consider the other couples they knew, all these marriages that had been approved but still were miserable.

“My parents had sex only three times. To reproduce,” Dev said.

“Once, my father was trying to throw a hot iron at my mother,” Jagriti said. “To defend her, I pushed the needle end of a safety pin right into his stomach, where I thought the testicles were.”

“Bhakti Bai’s marriage was approved by an astrologer, too. When she was nine.”

Jagriti shook her head. What a cruel country, he knew she was thinking.

There were combinations of planets, houses, and times that supposedly determined how one’s life unfolded. On their first day of class, the teacher asked them to accept that no one could change what was going to happen in their lives. They could control only their reactions to it.

“These things are set in stone. Decided by God,” the teacher said. “But sometimes a door opens, and we act in a way that is contradictory to our charts. This we also call God.”

Neither of them fully believed in the things they learned, at first. They wondered whether the classes were teaching them not how to predict events but how to prepare their minds for inevitable pain. Every prediction they made for the sample charts was dismal. Children died, parents died, rich men lost their fortunes, poor men became poorer. The world was structured to produce mostly unfortunate stories. But the gravity of these lessons slowly forced a new levity into their lives. They felt as if a layer of magic had descended on everything that had once seemed so serious. Jagriti said that it was their duty, while they were still alive, to clutch the small moments of joy they were lucky enough to get.

On Jagriti’s thirtieth birthday, she insisted that they skip astrology class and go, instead, on a walk to Marine Drive. It had been one of the only private places for them to go when they first met. They would sit on the ledge, their feet dangling over the rocks, listening to the gray water. They would laugh at the other young couples with nowhere else to go, saying sweetie-this and honey-that. It had been the location of their first kiss and, later, the first place they had got carried away enough, hands between legs, that they had decided, with a look, to take their activities to Jagriti’s place.

Jagriti’s birthday fell on a colder day than usual, though Bombay rarely called for more than a light sweater. Dev rolled down the cuffs of his shirt to keep warm. He tried to sit up straight on the ledge, wrapping an arm around Jagriti in her soft new pashmina shawl, a gift she had received from her mother up in Nashik. It was nine in the evening, and the crowd of lovers on the rocks had thinned to only one or two sets of writhing bodies.

“What are you thinking about, Bobby?” Dev asked. The nickname came from Jagriti’s guitar repertoire of Dylan tracks.

Jagriti took Dev’s wrist between her hands. She traced a finger around the dial of his watch. “I want you to marry me,” she said.

“I’m just checking to see if your kid is playing with all the crap I brought him.”

Cartoon by Joe Dator

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The night before, they had stayed up late trying to read their own charts. It was something their astrology teacher had warned them against doing. He had compared it to the hypochondria often experienced by first-year medical students, who diagnose themselves with every new illness they learn about.

In Jagriti’s bedroom, both of them stomach-down on her lilac sheets, they had started by searching her chart for the major events of her life. The death of her father, her mother’s sudden poverty, Jagriti’s master’s degree. It was all there. Next, they looked for planetary placements with unknown meanings. The first unknown—a Saturn in her fourth house—revealed that she would run a tight ship at home. She would be the accountant there, too, ruling with an iron fist. They had laughed about this, the idea of her asking Dev what lollipop he had purchased with a missing five rupees.

The second unknown—a complex configuration of planets in her eighth house—suggested that Jagriti would never have children. Immediately, Dev knew that this was what the astrologer had seen.

Now the ocean grew louder. Dev felt a drop of rain on the back of his neck. He thought of a note Bhakti Bai had left in his tiffin soon after he had met Jagriti. God sends a woman into your life to see if you have any balls. A sudden drizzle speckled the rocks below them.

Slowly, with all the obedience and tenderness he could muster, Dev pushed aside the hair that fell over Jagriti’s ear, and kissed it.

It was a courthouse marriage, unfussy and full of sun. Dev asked Bhakti Bai to be their witness, and Jagriti, dressed in a sparkling ivory sari she had borrowed from the clothes closet at the fashion magazine, invited her mother down from Nashik. As she signed her name, Jagriti began to laugh, and Dev decided, from her giddy look, that she was thinking about him naked. He’d used the company card to book them a room at the Oberoi hotel for the weekend, to celebrate. They had plans to go right to bed in the middle of the afternoon, clinking cool glasses of gin-and-tonic. It was all settled before lunchtime.

The following night, Dev sat down to dinner with his family, a letter from Bhakti Bai in his breast pocket.

Dev Baba, my darling boy— It is not that I will tell anyone what you have done but you must know what kind of people your parents are. They could strip you of everything, leave you penniless. Just look at your older brother. He was made to leave a pauper after years of hard work. Let his story be a warning to you. They throw away their children too easily—that is why the children themselves never look back. It is true that you have gone and married a girl nobody approved of. It is not worth bickering about why they disapproved. I’m sure it was more than just the astrology. It was her age, her dead father, her poor mother. That is how they are—only one misplaced mole and they consider a person unworthy. You have two options—you either ask for their forgiveness and forever accept the hand they will play in your life or ask for the money you have earned and go on to make your own life with your wife. I know that you youngsters think India has changed and we are getting so modern now but these changes you see on the television and in your books have not spread to the inside of families. I send you all my blessings but you will need to free yourself.

Dev intended to take Bhakti Bai’s advice—to ask for his wages and leave the family business. He didn’t know what he wanted to do next, but he trusted that an idea would come to him soon enough. He knew that his father and his uncles would not miss him, for his younger brother was now nearly twenty-two. He imagined a seamless trade, one son for another.

For dinner that night, Bhakti Bai had prepared Dev’s favorites. Steaming butter chicken with a dollop of heavy cream in the middle and a pot of black dal, thick with too much ghee, just as she’d made it when he was a child.

Sitting at the dining table with his uncles and his parents, Dev began to see the men’s faces as weathered and bitter, like old flowers. He found that it was his father’s face he disliked the most, with his purple lips and fleshy earlobes. For once, he knew for certain that he wanted to be nothing like any of them.

After dinner, he immediately took his seat on the couch, having already told the men that he wanted to hold a meeting. As he waited for them to settle into their places, his little brother entered the room and quietly sat beside him on the bronze sofa.

“I have something to ask of you,” Dev said to the room. He spoke steadily, confident within the heat of his decision.

Hours later, Devansh Shetty, a free man, his eyes rubbed raw, slogged up to Nariman Point on foot, until he felt the cold air from the open door of the Oberoi hotel. Inside, a suited man was playing something jazzy and unmelodious on the piano. Children and high-heeled women lingered to listen. Dev took a seat at the lobby bar and ordered himself some celebratory whiskey. When the waiter offered him an extra napkin, he understood that he’d forgotten to wipe his tears before he came in.

“Thank you, boss,” he said.

The pianist bowed his head for applause and began another tune. This one was more luxurious, major-keyed, bittersweetly slow. Dev asked the waiter if he could find him a pen and some paper.

Bhakti Bai,

Bobby and I will be forever grateful to you. As you suggested, I decided to ask to leave the company. You know, I really do regret what I did to Tiger. I missed hearing him in the house when I came home from work. He was always laughing with you in the kitchen, forcing you to add too much sugar and butter to everything. I’m sure he misses you.

They told me I would not be given any compensation for the time I worked at the company. They said it is family money and I have earned into the collective pot. If I chose to leave, I would leave with nothing. They want to make an example of me, I suppose.

Bobby will handle things until I get back on my feet. I am indebted to you, always.

As the years passed, they moved farther out of the city, where real estate was cheaper. Developers were building new complexes with gyms and indoor swimming pools, in Kandivali and in Santacruz. Jagriti and Dev moved to one such building, where the amenities included an indoor playground for children.

Jagriti went into labor eight weeks early. She drove herself to the hospital, not wanting to wait for Dev, who would be returning from work in the city. She told him this later, when they were finally together in the hospital. The doctor on call had confirmed that something was wrong, and she was rushed to emergency surgery.

By the time Dev got to the hospital, the baby was already born. She was premature, the size of his outstretched palm, covered with wires and held in a plastic box that was supposed to keep her alive. As Jagriti slept, her hair damp and curled with sweat, Dev drew out his daughter’s chart on a piece of paper. He didn’t want to know much, just that she would have a life. He placed the planets in the relevant houses. He and Jagriti had already made it through one open window. Now he wanted to see the universe permit another.

Nurses and doctors rushed past him in the hallway, unfazed by the sight of a man in distress. Hunched over a chair, Dev studied the sky as it had been three hours earlier, the moment his daughter was born. Mars in her first house, Venus in her second. A temper, he thought. A girl with a temper. But would she live to exercise it? Wild with worry about the accuracy of his reading, Dev called the family astrologer to confirm his prediction. He paced the hallway as the man’s phone rang. When the astrologer’s voice finally broke through the speaker, tears welled in Dev’s eyes.

Their daughter would live a long and healthy life, the astrologer said. She would be a real talker. She would never shut up.

The phone still at his ear, Dev crouched to the floor, his head cradled in the crook of his elbow. In the room behind him, Jagriti slept. He went back in and took a seat beside his wife, holding her calloused fingertips in his hands.

When my parents were alive, they thought that they had dodged the harsh hand of fate. The problem with stories is that a good one can convince you of anything.

I was fourteen when my mother died. For a long time, my father believed it was her early death that the astrologer had foreseen—that my mother, as a novice, had misread her birth chart.

With time, my father learned to live with his grief. He went for long walks in the park. He learned to play the guitar. He died peacefully in his sleep. By then, he had become an advocate of not having answers. I was forbidden to read any of his astrology books; in the end, he gave them to a local charity shop. ♦