We walked upstairs together in silence, with the cool, delicious feel of pinewood under our bare feet. I had been upstairs many times in the past, when I spent the night, but only once or twice had I been taken into the study, and we had never lingered there. The study was Arya’s sanctuary as well as her place of work, and it was the one room in the house she preferred to keep to herself. The walls were taken up with bookcases. Most of the books were old – not antique, but earlier twentieth-century Indian, with dark-coloured cloth binding starting to unravel. I had seen such books many times. The schools in India were full of them, and my parents had their own sizeable collection. I grew up reading books just like them. A magnificent bronze statue of Shiva, depicted as ever inside the endless wheel of life, death, and rebirth over which he presides, dominated the room from the far corner to my right. It seemed eerily familiar. I had grown up with Shiva watching over me day and night from the wall opposite my bed at home. There were also a number of representations of Ganesh, the elephant god, with whose wisdom and benevolence Arya very much identified. Two stood on her desk, rather incongruously standing guard over her state-of-the-art desktop. Others were almost hidden away in spaces on the bookshelves.
In other spaces were family pictures, and pictures of Arya with me and my parents. There was also a grainy black-and-white print of a group of important-looking Indian dignitaries – a group that I’m sure included a relative of Arya’s, because her family was connected politically in those days – shown standing on the lawn outside the Viceroy’s residence in Shimla with Lord Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and the Mahatma, on the eve of Independence. I know that picture was poignant for her. Her family had supported Gandhi politically in his futile struggle against Partition, and the Jalfrezi she had mastered was her expression of a grief for the senseless death and displacement that followed, a grief that had never left her. The room was dimly lit by two small desk lamps, and a hint of her Neroli incense floated in the air.
She gestured me to join her behind her desk. She opened a drawer and took out a thick grey file folder. She put it down on the desk, and held her hand on top of it. After some seconds she opened it and took out the sheet of paper on top of the stack.
‘Do you know what this is?’ she asked.
I smiled. I knew exactly what it was. The square diagram was different to the wheel in which western charts are presented, but I had seen many examples of Indian astrological charts in books my parents kept at home. After their death I had donated most of them to our local temple, but some I had kept for sentimental reasons. Then I looked at the name on the chart, and at the date, time and place of birth.
‘Your parents brought this to me when you were very young, perhaps eighteen months, not more than two years old,’ she said. ‘It was cast and hand-drawn by an astrologer in Shimla. He has signed his name at the bottom: Rajiv. Anyone can draw a chart, but it’s an old tradition to commission a fine piece of penmanship for a new child. Rajiv has a wonderful hand, doesn’t he? And his use of different coloured inks is so evocative.’
She laughed, holding it up to the light.
‘I could never do work like this, not if I live to be 200. My handwriting is atrocious, always has been, and I can’t draw a square with straight sides to save my life, even with a ruler. When I was in school, my teachers shouted at me for years for being untidy, but it made no difference and eventually they gave up. I was always too concerned with the content to worry about appearances. So I’m never going to get a commission to prepare something like this. But I can interpret the information Rajiv has recorded so beautifully.’
I was still staring at my birth chart, full of symbols of which I had no understanding, but that Arya could read, symbols that came alive for her.
‘I was also schooled in astrology myself when I was younger, Kiah. My parents were determined that my sister Shesi and I should each do our best to master one of the four Vedic pillars. Shesi’s was the Ayurveda.’
‘The medicine of India,’ I said quietly.
‘Yes, a sad irony in a way because Shesi was always so fragile, and died so very young, bless her.’ She picked up a family picture from the shelf behind her desk. ‘This is Shesi, aged eighteen. She was dead less than a year later.’
She looked at the picture for some time before replacing it on the shelf.
‘But mine was the Jyotish, the astrology, and I studied for many years. So your parents brought this chart to me. They wanted to know all about you at eighteen months, or two years, or whatever you were.’ She laughed. ‘I told them, “It’s impossible. She’s a baby still. I can’t tell you anything now. You should wait until she’s older.” But of course, they wouldn’t listen. Parents never do. It was only because they cared so much about you.’
She put an arm around my shoulder.
‘But later, Kiah, when you were older, I came back to this chart many times. Whenever you came to see me with a problem at school, in college, when you wanted to become a lawyer and your parents wanted you to be a doctor, when you decided to open your own practice, and then, of course, when…’
‘When the Week from Hell happened…’
‘Yes, during that terrible time too. I came back to this chart, Kiah. I updated it according to the transits at the time, and I used what insight I had to offer you whatever guidance I could.’
I looked at her. ‘My chart gave you information about all those things?’ I asked. ‘All those times when you knew exactly what to do, when my life was falling apart, when I didn’t know which direction to go, when it all seemed so hopeless…?’
‘Of course, Kiah, because your birth chart is a picture of you. It’s a snapshot of the cosmos at the time you were born.’ She smiled. ‘It’s not the only thing, of course. Often I just listened to you and said to myself, “Yes, I remember being nineteen too. I remember what it was like to be a young woman starting out in the world.” But the chart is the basis for what I know about you.’
‘Amazing,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘What’s really amazing,’ she said, ‘is that I didn’t figure out what you should do, which direction you should take. Not once. You did – every time. You always had the answer inside you. My only role was to hold up a mirror to enable you to see it more clearly.’
‘I suppose I’ve always known that you were an astrologer,’ I said after some time. ‘I mean, I know my parents came to you for advice, and I saw charts at home, so in one way it’s no surprise. But you never told me before, at least not in so many words.’
‘There was no reason to,’ she said. ‘If you had asked, I would have told you, of course. But the technicalities of what I was doing weren’t important for you then. Now that you may have to take the information I give you out into the world, I think I owe it to you to tell you specifically what I’m going to do about Isabel Hardwick, who I suspect of being a kindred spirit.’ She laughed. ‘How you explain that to people out there in the wider world – if you do explain it – I leave to you.’
I laughed too. ‘Gee, thanks.’
She handed me Rajiv’s chart.
‘Kiah, I want you to have this now,’ she said. ‘Your parents brought your birth chart to me because they loved you and they wanted you to have a light to see your way forward. This is your chart. Keep it safe.’
She drew me into her arms, and we embraced for what seemed a long time. Not too long before, I would have been a mess. Brought face to face so abruptly again with my parents’ love for me, I would have cried inconsolably on Arya’s shoulder and wondered how I would ever make it without them. But I was calm now. I still missed them and their memory was very precious. There was still an immense emotional undertow. But I was at peace with their memory.
‘Give me a day or two with Isabel,’ she said, kissing me on the cheek as we slowly released each other. ‘Let me see where she’s pointing us, where the path leads.’