Kundali
Five days a week in her minuscule fourth-floor apartment, Ms. Shukla ran a Kundali Matching business and managed to accumulate a 97.5 percent success rate (factoring in the soon-to-be Prasad couple, Taj, who had tragically passed a week before the wedding in a freak jet-ski accident, thereby confirming my suspicions about jet skis and similarly formulated water sports). She held readings in her living room, scarcely using more than two sheets of paper, preferring only a thin wooden pencil as her writing medium of choice, for she had previously agreed to perform a birth chart reading for me.
I double-checked to make sure the boxed pumpkin pie was secure beneath my arm, that which was promised as my form of payment. Ms. Shukla thought pumpkin pie was “exotic,” which was funny in the quietly tragic ways most forms of cultural misunderstandings are because, of course, to most Americans, pumpkin pie was one of the most aggressively normal holiday staples imaginable, the culinary equivalent of elevator music, but to her it apparently carried the weight of some imported delicacy like sauvignon.
The wind in the apartment rustled through the jaunty window AC unit like letters through a mail receptacle. As I got closer to the window, the damp of the cold trickled through the grates and moved through the bundles of crumpled, curlicued receipts like sea anemones rising and falling. She moved through the living room like a marionette and poured me a cup of hot tea, cutting gently into the cold custard before setting it out onto a small chipped plate; she offered it to me, which I refused, and then she started the reading.
❧
She began by drawing a large X over the singular sheet of paper, followed by a diamond, which spanned the height of the paper, bisecting itself onto the X drawn in the middle like a crucifix. “Your First House, your first aspect,” she said, pointing to the first box. “Your traits. It’s commonly referred to as the House of Self, the house of physical appearances, our general personality traits, health, immunity, the house that governs childhood.
“It represents the person you are going to become.”
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My mother suffers from OCD, specifically with things in singles not coming in pairs. She must have everything in pairs of two. She had particular issues when it came to groceries, when the lined pairs of yogurt pots we bought from the store were eaten in ones and not twos. When somebody forgot the rule, she would spend an hour in the bath, scrubbing herself red, like a blistered tomato, and then call her therapist till the early hours of the morning. It was particularly bad when it came to fruit; a single grapefruit left in the produce drawer would send her into a frenzy; a single can of beans left in the cupboard had a similar effect.
Her shrink thinks it’s because her father left the family very early when she was only eight, so even though she can’t fully remember what he looked like or what his voice sounded like, he came to haunt her like a revenant, namely in other ways. She just accepted this fact plainly, like a chronic joint condition flaring up when it rains or when she is reminded of overzealous men. After my father fully realized this tiny little imperfection, he too left only two years into the marriage.
Eventually, I picked up on this habit, and it became a sort of ritual for the family: everything done in twos, not ones, this shiny, unheard, unspoken rule of twos.
❧
She clears her throat briefly before continuing. “While the first house concerns the self and physical body, the actions of the second house govern the domains of wealth, family, finances, and primary knowledge. The second aspect in Kundali is all about wealth and earthly possessions; it answers this question:
‘What do you value? What Gods do you worship on this earth?’”
❧
When I was eleven years old, my cousin, twenty years older than me on my mom’s side, while she was a grad student at Berkeley getting her master’s in Classics, suffered a psychotic episode on the day of her graduation. The exact root cause for the breakdown was, and still is, debated amongst the family. Some blamed it on the state of the current job market, that a degree in Classics would never yield a fruitful career in something more practical like, say, law or economics, but when has the job market not been in some state of unpredictable flux? Some blamed it on the comforts of academia, making her weak, that the thin subcutaneous placenta-like membrane of university life that protected her from the harsh realities of the real world was just starting to break. Depression was a synonym for sadness, and to my naivete, I remember going to visit her at that age and asking why she had been sad.
For it to have been a simple answer: it was the color of paint on the walls, it was the poor diet she had been confined to, things that could actually be changed. Things that were tangible and within the realm of possibility to correct and cure. Our uncle had likened it to “Siddhartha experiencing enlightenment outside the palace walls,” likening the image of a distraught young woman to something of a prophetess or holy fool.
I remember the doctors had used the term “eco-anxiety” when describing her predicament, the idea of people who get severely depressed over the state of the world. Getting distraught at the fact that two very different people—one person who could be so rich and the other, a homeless man—that such inequality could provoke such melancholy.
People come up with all sorts of explanations for why some people are more well-off than others: karmic retribution, reincarnation, even horoscopes. It all boils down to luck. “It’s a shame,” I remember my uncle saying. “She would’ve made a great professor.” And now I laugh, looking back, seeing how they could predict one thing, but couldn’t even fathom another.
❧
“Our values in the second house lead us to the values in the third house; every aspect that precedes the one before it sets a gentle consideration for the subsequent house to follow,” she says, smiling. “The third house is the house that rules over communication and action as well as inclinations.”
❧
Up until the age of fourteen, I used to carry around an 8-ball, a shiny phenol-filled tiny bowling ball that would predict the future. A carnival attendant had given it to me as a consolation when I was four at a county fair to stop crying. I remembered that one time we went on a family vacation to Lancaster, Pennsylvania; I had, however, had the misfortune of leaving the ball at the hotel, in our formerly occupied room. I remember the cup of tea my mother had hurriedly made at the hotel lobby, on our way out, which grew colder in the cup holder, an angry woman on the steering wheel swearing sixteen ways to Sunday, up and down Interstate Eighty. I remember seeing the strings of smoke growing fainter until a few weak wispy strands sprouted up from the cup. A slight layer of film began to form on top of the paper cup as it cooled like scum, a pattern growing in concentric circles like tree rings, growing larger and larger. The rings spun tighter and faster like electrons in their shells.
I nearly died choking on a peanut in my kitchen years ago, but I did not because I remembered to carry the ball like a talisman into the kitchen that night. Or the day my mother went into labor, only surviving the long undertaking solely because she’d gone to Mass the night before. I like to wonder that if she hadn’t taken communion, I would’ve perhaps been born blue.
They say that when a thin film forms atop your tea, it’s the polyphenols, the combination of hard water calcium carbonate within the tea bags, or the amalgamation of polypropylene that coats the waxy tea bags in transit. Whenever I drink a cup of tea, I always expect the film to appear, watching it split like a mass of ice calving. I have come to think of it as some sort of omen. Only I can’t see the tea leaves at the bottom of the cup or what they mean. Weeks later, I recall the doctor saying I should start SSRIs before something terrible happens.
❧
“Four is the house that rules over family and home.” It is commonly referred to as the house of happiness, mother, and property. The term “mother” associated with this house can seem vague to newcomers; this just means this house is to give insight into how, or even if, a maternal figure could seek to shape a certain outlook on your life.
“She, the house, is influenced by the gentility and femininity of Cancer, presided over by the nurturing mother Moon.”
❧
In the radiology office with my mother five years ago, I remember flicking through the channels in that lobby before finally landing on some network doing its off-season penance with 2000s rom-com reruns, those hyper-saturated, ironic-but-not-too-ironic worlds where everyone’s apartments are clean, and everyone’s problems are narratively solvable before the next commercial break. The network, by December, would switch fully to Christmas movies with terrifying corporate efficiency.
Radiological imaging is standard procedure in cases of renal transplantation, not just for the donor’s health, but to ensure the receiver’s new organ has some fighting chance of integration. On the two monitors in front of me: my pelvis, glowing in spectral blues and silvers, like a deep-space nebula rendered in grayscale. Flashes of light and shadow, expanding and retracting like smoke signals written in a language I had no chance of understanding. Between the vertebrae, which looked almost architectural, and the ribs housing all the organs like a little home, I could see something that was definitively me and also profoundly foreign. In seeing the purest, most innermost parts of you, a strange humility pervades in seeing your insides, expecting them to mean something, but ultimately realizing they mean nothing to you.
The doctor, in a tone both technical and apologetic, said that the probability of the transplant being accepted was “anywhere between 4.0 and 64.2 percent.” Which is to say: either no chance at all, or maybe a good one, depending on how you interpret numbers when they concern the mother you were expected to love and be her own continuation.
❧
“The Fifth is about pleasure. It is the house of romance, creativity, and children, all to do with the affairs of the human heart”
“Incidentally, Vedic scholars associate this house with the stomach from which we are nourished, for its connections with conception, both in a literal and metaphorical sense.” She chuckles.
❧
On my first date in the city, I asked him if he believed in horoscopes, like some sort of litmus test.
“Horoscopes, I don’t really understand them, but I think they’re cool,” I remember him saying before setting the compostable plastic fork to his mouth.
How does someone think something is cool without actually understanding it to some degree? I asked myself internally.
“Washing your greens thoroughly won’t protect against E. coli,” I remember reading the news on the train home that evening in a study published that purported that kale, amongst other leafy greens, was a likely source for the pathogen, but less susceptible than other leafy greens such as spinach or lettuce. But it was already too late; my stomach had already started to hurt.
Coolness by default was once an aesthetic movement adopted by rebels and underdogs, bikers, gangbangers, hippies, and goths, those on the fringes of society like political dissidents and slaves who understood that rebellion invited open punishment. What did he have in common with underdogs, bikers, and gangbangers? Was he secretly one? It seemed that I wanted to know more.
And that killed me each day, even after we stopped seeing each other.
❧
“The sixth aspect we will discuss relates to health, diet, and daily routine. Known as the house of sickness, this house also deals with enemies, illness, and debt- anything that might come to harm you in this life. Most astrologers start consulting this house intensely in times of sickness or chronic illness to see or hopefully predict the length and scope of illness one has.”
❧
The week after my mother passed, I stopped eating all sugar entirely. On the way to an appointment, I forgot that people tell you that you should drink an entire gallon of water before a blood lab, so finding the vein can be easier. The results following the lab I was given go as follows: I was to adhere to a “Mediterranean diet” as they had dubbed it. “Avoid carbs, white bread, white rice, fried foods, and most especially sugar.” Maybe in medical school, they don’t teach you about calamari or arancini, arancini being a double whammy. I got all sorts of advice from acquaintances and vaguely familiar family friends, things like “Things will get better,” or so they say, one even likening my predicament to “the road signs on the highway approaching your destination,” a blatant ripoff of some generic HR motivational poster. When I read the adverts for nicotine patches on the bus station signs, I think to myself:
“Giving up cigarettes is just like giving up sugar, or your mom. You learn to do it whether you like it or not, and then you just accept it.”
❧
“Even though this house is dubbed the house of Marriage, I like to consider this house as the house of relationships. See, while most of the other houses concern the self in relation to the world, this house is really about how you interact with others in matters of love and friendship, very important for kundali match-making.”
❧
I think I have the smallest bladder in all of the Northeast. The bathroom is just down the hall, and we pause; she finishes her slice of cold pie while I’m pissing, and I recall the first day I moved into my apartment.
I had enlisted the help of some friends who had helped me move in, and at the end, my good friend, Marco, scored us some weed to christen the home. In the same way people sage their houses or ask a priest to come and bless their flats, we smoked in the bathroom because it was December when I moved in, too cold to smoke outside or for the lighter to faithfully cooperate with the wind. Ella suggested turning on the shower to produce a thick mist that would cover the smoke detectors. The apartment stunk of hash for four days and five nights after that, seeping into the walls like a turbulent colony of black mold that only grew in intensity and festered as each night passed. Only a $12.99 eucalyptus candle from the nearby Duane Reade was able to solve that problem.
“Your apartment has ghosts,” Marco said to me.
“I haven’t even slept a night here; how do you know?” I asked.
“I get weird vibes from the place,” Ella added, which was the confirmation needed to decide that an exorcist was our only way towards salvation.
“Just finish the bowl, man,” I said, and Marco pressed the glass pipe to his lips.
People seem to believe in ghosts for many reasons. If you would’ve asked me that night if I felt weird sleeping in that one-bedroom apartment alone, I would’ve said yes, but only because Ella said she did, and then consequently Marco after, who in reality had just smoked a little too much weed.
It was Miss Dunphy next door who had been trying to mount her decorative 1908 Royal Copenhagen Christmas plates; the loud thumping noise, which Marco was able to hear at first, soon became a collective hive fixation. I don’t usually believe in ghosts, but it’s known that in times of great uncertainty, feelings of religiosity can and will increase.
❧
“This next house is a bit of a contradiction,” she warns me. “The eighth is the House of Sex but also the House of Death.
“This house places the ideas of death and rebirth on the same plane, designating them the same importance. Failed relationships lead to new changes, new growth in the same way death forces us to change and move on, ushering in change and regeneration, reminding us that these changes should be welcomed and welcomed with eagerness.”
❧
In college, during a class on Feudal Japan, a class I mostly took because it looked the most appealing on the list of courses needed to fulfill a humanities requirement, the professor had made an offhand remark that has, for reasons unclear even to me, refused to leave my head for the better part of a lustrum. He said, in a matter-of-fact kind of way, that in times of war, mothers will often kill their babies.
He was talking about mabiki, a term I would later learn literally means “thinning seedlings,” as though human infants were a kind of overplanted crop, and right around then a blonde sorority girl two rows up made a small noise, akin to a weak spasm, and ran out of the room crying.
I remember watching her face as she left, this bizarre combination of pity and embarrassment that surfaced, as if we were privy to something not meant to be witnessed in public. The thought that a mother could smother her child with a sheet of wet paper was horrifying, yes, but what piqued my interest was the precision of it: the wetness softening the fibers just enough to obstruct the air from mouth and nose without leaving a mark. It was an act at once terrible and meticulous.
A TA then had shown a documentary, where a narrator with the kind of deep, network-voice gravitas explained that mothers who kill their babies often do so for complex sociological reasons like poverty, famine, shame, and in certain cases even as a form of “altruism,” believing they are sparing the child from a more brutal fate.
Beside me, Calvin, who had that smug undergraduate confidence of someone who’d only recently begun to discover irony, leaned over and whispered, “How would you know if you lived a terrible life if you never lived it at all?” Which was supposed to be clever, I think, but what struck me, and still strikes me, is that maybe this was the first time I understood how thinking about morality too deeply can become its own unique kind of generational violence.
❧
“The Ninth house is the auspicious house of faith and divine worship. It is the strongest trine house, meaning this house has the potential to display the future based on the results of one’s own past actions; some astrologers even surmise that this house is the strongest link between you and your past lives, revealing what kind of karma was accumulated or who a person was in before their current birth.”
❧
There have always been forms of horoscopes, or modern-day horoscopes, I’d consulted. I think even the atheists in my life believed in something “horoscopish” to a degree, like psychiatrists or psychotherapists. Like my childhood neighbor Larry and his fading high-school sweetheart who always wore the same jersey on game day, and who in one instance yelled at her when she accidentally put bleach into the wash the night before the big game. The score had been 13–9; the Denver Broncos lost to the Los Angeles Rams, which only confirmed the sacrament and its powers. The same principle applied to Mrs. Chang, who chose to celebrate Christmas each year despite famously being the neighborhood’s resident Han Buddhist.
I still, to this day, feel the need to go to church, but only ever on Christmas.
❧
“The 10th House in Kundali is the Karma Bhava, the house of social status, and is concerned with the profession you are involved in. Studying this house can reveal your career path or future. This house naturally corresponds to Capricorn, whose workaholic tendencies and ambition are unmatched.”
❧
I remember approaching a friend at a house party, the night following our graduation. Whenever things get too loud or too boring for me at a party, I am always tempted to put my headphones in and listen to my own music as if to say, “I don’t need you or this damn party to hell with it”. In reality, I just end up drawing more attention to myself and getting more reactions from people, which feels like an unintended but desirable consequence. My friend Gabe comes over towards me and ushers me to remove my headphones. He’s going to Divinity School in Cambridge before hopefully heading towards a law degree. We get to talking and eventually the conversation pivots towards our plans post-grad.
There’s never a linear answer to the question, but in all honesty, there’s never a linear answer to this question regardless of your major, I feel. If only there were a college degree program in majoring in something absolute. Not everything should revolve around this “methodicality”; I feel as if these days people want things too linearly, as if one’s own life can be cut and dried, moved from one phase into the other like the conveyor belt of a factory moving tiny chocolates from the tempering to the cooling stage in rapid succession. If they really wanted to, there’s always a trade school application somewhere online, but I believe there’s a beauty in not knowing, a boundless feeling you get in uncertainty.
But of course I didn’t say that. I didn’t want to seem smart. Young people are always cautious of seeming too smart; then, you just come off as pretentious, so I just shrugged and studied the floor.
❧
“The 11th House in Kundali is known as Labh Bhava, meaning the House of Profit, Wealth and Honor. But it is not just about personal ambition; oh no, it also indicates our attitude towards society.
“This house reveals what we want in the highest sense.”
❧
This seems like such an appalling thing to admit, but I’ve always wanted to be famous. Maybe not famous; that’s probably not the right word, but impactful. Substantial. I want to do something with my life that feels meaningful, so much so that I periodically get existential crises over not knowing what my “impact” or “meaning” will be.
I remember getting one of my earliest panic attacks in the office of some middle school guidance counselor. Out of embarrassment, I blamed it on something else, something broader like growing up or teenage angst, far too convoluted for adults to waste interest in exploring. She then instructed me to take deep breaths, to breathe inwardly before exhaling in controlled, syncopated reciprocations, holding and letting go in little increments of five.
As a mental exercise, she had asked me to imagine myself in a hundred years, which seemed silly; the average human only lives for around seventy-two to seventy-three years, but I just guessed, responding with, “I’ll just be a bag of dusty bones”.
That made me sob even harder. She called my mom shortly thereafter and brought a premature end to the school day.
❧
“The 12th house is most mysterious; some describe it as an unseen realm that exists without physical form, the realm of dreams, emotions, and secrets. This house governs the secrets of the mind. It’s connected to fear, anxiety, and misgivings.
“It holds the key to understanding but also to undoing a person.”
❧
Finished with the reading, we slowly made our way into the kitchen. Out of kindness or a feeling that I had just wasted her time, I offered to do the dishes. I couldn’t say.
Outside the kitchen window, I watched as the train flashed past, those brief split-seconds when the opposite car’s windows align with mine, creating this fleeting little corridor of reflected light, a sort of unintentional mirror, something entirely and secretly mine.
It’s ridiculous how moved I am by it.
Daniel Tanudjaja is a Junior at the University of Virginia studying English, French, and Russian. He is a strange man, hailing from an even stranger Chantilly, Virginia.
