Contrary to the normal custom, he did not wait for permission before walking in. He walked in after gently parting the curtains and without much ceremony, sat down across from my father. He was dark and short with his unparted curly hair shining with a generous application of oil. The wetness of his forehead was either excess oil rolling down or perspiration. Either way, it was shining in the government-regulation light in the room. it would indeed be so, to begin a story like this rather affectionately since I was not there. I don't even know if this is how it all happened, but sitting here thirty years later, I might as well imagine it so because it gives comfort to my memory and makes it come alive a little better. He began, then clearing his throat, staring at my father's bewildered face - not in the sort of way a rude man stares - but in a gentler way of the sages, sir, you are perhaps wondering who I am. I am not here for alms or with some scam to separate you from your money, and above all, I seek no favors from your office. I am just a passing astrologer with some predictions for your family that I thought I will pass on to you. I am not looking for any money, not in the least bit, but perhaps a cup of tea would be nice. As he spoke, his eyebrows moved up and down, the way two fish meeting each other accidentally in a fish tank. Two cups of tea were promptly ordered, just as they always are in government offices. A bell was perhaps rung, a man in khaki pants perhaps peered in, my father raised two fingers to make a sign of V and the khaki-pants then departed most obsequiously behind the curtain. Perhaps a cigarette was lit and my father, as he always did in his office, stared unsmilingly at thick files tied together with red ribbons while the visitor sat silently under the whirring fan waiting for his turn to begin. Such visitors were rare to his office to be sure, and when they did arrive, it was often with more notice and ceremony appropriate for favor-seeking. As soon as the tea appeared and the curtains closed behind them, the visitor cleared his throat to continue his conversation. You have a son and daughter, he said, without waiting for confirmation and the son is the oldest. My father agreed while thinking who in the world has told him this. Then the visitor dropped a ton of past-hints that no one else could have known to achieve some hard-earned credibility. Thus having captured his attention, he said abruptly quite like the way things happen in the horror movies when you least expect it, you know something, I want you to be warned of something. Your son and daughter will both die together when he is forty-two in a plane crash. That night, my father came home, and told his son, that is me of course - who was a rather bookish eight then - you see son, there was a man in my office and he claimed to be an astrologer. Then foolishly - because you ought not say such things to eight year-olds - but he did anyway; he was that sort of a fellow, he said that you will die in a plane crash at forty-two. Not a problem, I agreed vigorously, I just don't have to fly that year. This posed no problems to either of us at that moment, because in my household, flying was a very rare occasion, and those days in India, you flew only when you absolutely had to and it was a rare event. So keeping his son from flying for a year was not a problematic solution to the tricky problem for my father.
So here I sit in the lounge again - and I have taken a flight pretty much every other day this week or every day of the week - often more than one each day, and I think this is what I have to look forward to. A fiery death at the age of forty-two. I am not a believer of fate, astrology or God. So it is quite evident to me that the prediction from this random astrologer to father's office, the memory of which has stayed with me forever since, is nothing but pure rubbish and that I am going to live past forty-two and see my fifties with its accompanying midlife crisis and baldness. But then again, one in a while, the thought occasionally props up in my head:
What if he was right?
