The Highest Degree

by Jaimini, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

Pattabhi Sastri took the degrees first. The signs could wait.

He copied them from the merchant's paper onto his slate, one under another, with the chalk held short between thumb and two fingers: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn. Beside each he wrote the degree and the minute and nothing else. A planet at twelve degrees of Aries and a planet at twelve degrees of Libra were, for this purpose, the same height. The house each stood in did not matter yet. He was climbing a ladder, and a ladder has no rooms.

The merchant sat on the far end of the thinnai with his umbrella across his knees and watched the chalk. His name was Natesan; he sold cloth in the Big Bazaar, mill cloth mostly, a little Kanchipuram silk for weddings. Behind him the street was already white with heat. A boy went past with a can of buttermilk, then a bullock cart loaded with paddy straw, then two women from the tank with brass pots on their hips. It was the ninth day of Aippasi and the rains were late.

"Saturn," Pattabhi said.

"Yes."

"Twenty-seven degrees, forty-two minutes. The Moon, twenty-seven, forty. Nothing else above twenty-two." He drew a line under Saturn. "Saturn has climbed highest. In this chart Saturn is the king."

"That is what Kuppuswami said."

"Then Kuppuswami can count."

Natesan did not smile. He had the look of a man who has carried one sentence all the way from the bus stand and wants to put it down. "He says Saturn as the soul's planet, in a girl. He says where Saturn falls in the navamsha, and Ketu twelfth from it. Release. He says she will not stay in a house. Temples, fasting. Kasi before she is thirty."

"Who is Kuppuswami?"

"The Kumbakonam people's man. The boy's family." Natesan named them: two rice mills at Swamimalai, a son with the State Bank at Thanjavur, a grandmother who had been to Rameswaram eleven times. "Everything was agreed except this. Their own astrologer matched the stars. Eight points of ten. Then the boy's mother wanted Kuppuswami also, because Kuppuswami reads your way."

"There is no my way. There is the second way." Pattabhi turned the paper over. The square chart was drawn in a village hand, the lines not quite straight. Lagna in Capricorn. Cancer, seventh from it, held nothing.

"He also says the seventh is empty."

"It is empty. It is not silent." Pattabhi touched Cancer with the end of the chalk, then Taurus, then Scorpio, then Aquarius, quickly, the way a man touches coins he already knows are in his pocket. "Signs look at signs. These three look into it, and none of them is empty." He went back to the ladder.

Natesan reached into his shirt and brought out a steel watch with a cracked crystal and laid it on the stone beside the slate.

"This was the watch. It was my father's. That night it said eleven-forty. I wrote it on the back of my ticket, and the ticket I gave to the astrologer in our village, and from the ticket he made this." He tapped the paper. "Sastrigal, who knows if it was right? A watch like this. It loses, it gains. A man in that state, his wife shouting in the next room. He might be off five minutes. Ten."

"He might."

"The Moon is only two minutes behind." Natesan had learned the words on the bus. "If she came a little later—"

He slid a ten-rupee note under the edge of the slate, folded in four.

Pattabhi looked at the note and not at Natesan. The note stayed where it was.

"Where was she born?"

"At the junction. Here. In the ladies' waiting room." Natesan's hand moved, south, toward the railway. "We were going home from her mother's people at Sirkazhi. The pains began in the train. At Mayiladuthurai there was a railway doctor, so we got down. It was the night the Kaveri came over the road at Tiruvidaimarudur. Nineteen years."

"Then the railway knows the time."

Natesan's mouth stayed a little open.

"The railway writes everything down," Pattabhi said. "Where is the girl?"

"At the station." Natesan looked at the watch on the stone as if it had said this. "She is always at the station. Since she was small. The signallers taught her their clicking and now she sits with them. People call her Railway Kamakshi. The boy's mother has heard it. That also."

Pattabhi wiped his chalk fingers on his veshti and stood up.

---

She was in the telegraph office, as her father had said, on a bench against the wall under a calendar from a Madras cement company. A long plait, a cotton sari the colour of turmeric washed many times, a pencil behind one ear. The sounder on the signaller's desk was clattering, and the signaller, an old Muslim with spectacles pushed up on his forehead, was writing with his eyes half shut. Kamakshi's lips moved a word ahead of his pencil.

"Twelve Down," she said, before he had finished the line. "Late at Kumbakonam. Twenty-five minutes. Engine trouble."

The signaller grunted and wrote engine trouble.

When she saw her father in the doorway she stood up, and when she saw who was with him she pulled the end of her sari over her shoulder and put her palms together. She did not ask why an old astrologer had come to the junction in the heat of the day. She looked at the folded paper in her father's hand, and then at Pattabhi's face, and seemed to have the whole of it from those two things.

"The station master," Pattabhi said. "The diaries from nineteen forty-one."

"Arulappan Sir is on the platform," she said. "The old diaries are in the record room. The rats have been at the bottom shelf. Forty-one will be on the second."

Arulappan was young for the post, with an oiled parting and a pen clipped inside his shirt pocket, and he listened to Pattabhi with the patience of a man who has been asked for stranger things by passengers. He took a key from a nail behind his desk. The record room was a lean-to at the end of the building, tin-roofed, smelling of damp paper and phenyl. Station diaries stood in rows on wooden racks, their spines lettered in white paint. Silverfish ran from the light.

Kamakshi found the year before he did. It was a ledger bound in red cloth, swollen at the edges. Arulappan opened it on the sill of the one window and turned the pages back through November, through October, and stopped where the ink changed from blue to violet.

"The flood night," he said. "Look, they stopped the Mail at Kuttalam. Water over the rails at Tiruvidaimarudur." He ran his finger down. "Here."

The entry was in a clerk's copperplate, the letters leaning forward as if into wind.

23.52. Female child born to wife of passenger N. Natesan (cloth merchant), ladies' waiting room. Rly. Asst. Surgeon attended. Mother and child well. Ticket examined: Sirkazhi to Kumbakonam. Allowed to break journey.

Natesan made a sound in his throat.

"Eleven fifty-two," he said. "Twelve minutes after. Sastrigal, twelve minutes—"

"Turn the page," said Pattabhi.

Arulappan turned it. The next morning's entries began at five: the Mail released, water falling at the bridge, a goods train held at Aduturai, a buffalo killed on the line near Mannampandal. At eight, on its own line:

08.00. Time signal received from Madras. Stn. clock found 6 min. fast. Corrected.

Pattabhi put his finger under the six.

"Fast," Kamakshi said quietly.

"Fast by six at eight in the morning." He spoke to the page, not to them. "When was it corrected last?"

Arulappan turned back one page, to the previous morning. 08.00. Time signal received. Stn. clock correct.

"Correct at eight one morning," Pattabhi said. "Six fast at eight the next. Twenty-four hours, six minutes. A quarter of a minute in each hour." He took the stub of chalk from his waistband, looked for a slate, found none, and wrote on the whitewashed wall of the record room, low down, where it would not be noticed. "From eight in the morning to eight minutes before midnight. Sixteen hours less eight minutes. Call it sixteen. Four minutes gained."

"If it gained evenly," said Arulappan. He was interested now.

"If it gained evenly. A clock that has not been dropped, in a room that is not opened to the wind, gains evenly. Was it dropped?"

Arulappan shrugged. Nobody had written that it was dropped.

"Then it said eleven fifty-two, and the time was eleven forty-eight." Pattabhi looked at Natesan. "Your father's watch was eight minutes slow."

Natesan took the steel watch out and stared at it, as if it might apologise.

---

Pattabhi did the rest on a bench at the north end of the platform, under the water tank, where there was shade and a tap that dripped. He had brought his tables in a cloth bag: the ephemeris for the years of the war, bound in boards, the corners soft as cloth from his thumb. Kamakshi sat at the other end of the bench with her hands in her lap. Her father had gone to the bazaar to tell the shop boy he would be late. He had not wanted to go.

The Lagna first. Eight minutes more of the night, and the rising degree of the zodiac moved two degrees on. It had been at fourteen of Capricorn. It came to sixteen of Capricorn. Same sign. The houses stayed as they were. He wrote it down and drew a line under it.

Then the planets. In eight minutes Saturn did not move enough to show on paper; he was the slow one. Jupiter, Mars, Venus, the Sun, Mercury: a fraction of a minute each, nothing that changed a rank. The Moon was the only one that ran. Thirteen degrees in a day and a night, half a minute of arc in every minute of the clock. Eight minutes of the clock: four minutes of arc.

He wrote: Moon 27° 44′. Under it: Saturn 27° 42′.

He rubbed out nothing. He drew the new ladder beside the old one.

"Now the Moon is king," Kamakshi said.

"By two minutes."

"Is two minutes enough?"

"The highest is the highest." He wrote AK beside the Moon, the letters very small. "If there is a tie, there are rules for the tie. There is no tie."

She leaned to look. "And the one at the bottom?"

"The one at the bottom is the Darakaraka. The significator of the spouse." He touched it. Mercury, at three degrees and some minutes, a long way below everything else. "That has not changed. Whoever he is, he was always Mercury."

She did not ask what Mercury meant. She looked at the word for a while and then at the tracks, where a shunting engine was pushing three empty wagons into the siding with a great deal of noise and very little speed.

Pattabhi turned to a fresh page of his own notebook and began again from the top.

"What are you doing?" she said.

"The eighth."

There are those who rank seven planets for this ladder and those who rank eight. The sutra that governs it is short, as the sutras are short; it says what it says, and the men who wrote after it have read it in different ways for a long time, and not all of them were fools. Pattabhi had been taught seven. He had been taught seven by a man he loved, in a house at Tiruvarur with a well in the courtyard. Later, he had been taught eight by a man he did not love, and had found that the second man was not a fool either.

Rahu walks backward through the signs. For this purpose his degree is taken backward too: what remains from thirty. Pattabhi found Rahu's place in the tables for that night, one degree and fifty minutes into his sign, and wrote, and subtracted.

Rahu: 30° less 1° 50′ = 28° 10′.

He drew the third ladder. Rahu stood on the top rung, above the Moon and above Saturn, by twenty-six minutes. With eight, nothing the station clock could say would have mattered. With eight, Rahu was the king, and had been since before the train left Sirkazhi.

Kamakshi read it upside down and then came round to read it the right way.

"Why do you take it from thirty?"

"Because he goes backward."

"And which is right? Seven or eight?"

He took some time over this. The tap dripped into its stone basin.

"The ones who count seven say the sutra means seven. The ones who count eight say it means eight. Each has a reason. Each has a teacher." He closed the ephemeris on his finger. "I have counted it both ways for forty years. When the two agree, I sleep. When they do not, I write both."

"Does Kuppuswami count seven or eight?"

"I do not know Kuppuswami."

She looked at the three ladders, Saturn's and the Moon's and Rahu's, one beside another down the page, and said nothing at all. Then she said, "What does Saturn give? As king."

"Work that is not finished in one life. Patience. Cold rooms. A long road."

"And the Moon?"

"People. Feeding them. Being in their eyes."

"And Rahu?"

"Foreign things. Machines. Smoke." He shrugged. "Hunger that does not know its own name. It depends where he sits and who looks at him. A word is not a reading."

Down the platform the signaller had come out of the telegraph office and was holding up two fingers to the pointsman, who waved back. Twelve Down was signalled. Kamakshi turned her head toward the sound of the sounder through the open door, the way other girls turned toward a song from a neighbour's radio, and turned back.

---

He gave Natesan the paper at the thinnai at sunset, written fair on a clean sheet in his own hand. At the top he had written the time, 23 hrs 48 min, and under it, in brackets, by the station clock 23.52, the clock gaining 6 min in 24 hrs on the Madras signal of the following morning; see Station Diary, Mayiladuthurai Junction, 1941, entries at 23.52 and 08.00. Under that the Lagna, the planets, the degrees. Then the first ladder, the seven, with the Moon at the top and the small letters AK. The Karakamsha under it, the Moon's navamsha sign; and from it, twelfth, no Ketu. He had looked. Ketu was elsewhere, doing something else.

Then a line across the page, and the second ladder, the eight. Rahu at the top. Beneath it, in the same hand and no smaller: By those who count eight.

Natesan read it under the lamp with his lips moving. At the Moon he breathed out. He read the line about Ketu twice, and the second time he laughed, a short sound like a cough. Then he came to the second ladder and stopped.

"Sastrigal."

"Yes."

"This last part." He laid one finger on it, carefully, as if it might be hot. "Is it necessary?"

"It is not necessary for me. I have done it."

"If you wrote the paper without it—"

"I can write the paper without it. Kuppuswami can write it back in. It will take him the time it takes to subtract from thirty." Pattabhi lifted the corner of his slate, took out the ten-rupee note, which had lain there all day in four, and put it into Natesan's hand. "My fee is two rupees. I have no change for this. Bring two tomorrow, or the day after. I am here."

Natesan held the note and the paper together. He looked at the paper for a long time. Then he folded it on its creases, very straight, and put it inside his shirt, and the note with it.

"The station time is the station's," Pattabhi said. "Tell the Kumbakonam people that. The diary is in the record room on the second shelf. Anyone can read it."

"And the eight?"

"The eight is the eight."

Natesan stood. He did the thing that men do when they cannot think what to say to someone older, which is to look up at the sky as if for weather; and there was weather, at last, a bank of cloud over the east, heavy, the colour of slate. The first big drops came down onto the street and made dark coins in the dust. He opened his umbrella and went down the step, and did not look back until the corner, and then did.

Kamakshi had not gone with him. She had come back with him in the afternoon and sat at the edge of the thinnai while Pattabhi wrote out the fair copy, and she was still there. When her father had gone she took the slate from beside the lamp. The three ladders were still on it in chalk, Saturn's, the Moon's, Rahu's, smudged where Pattabhi's wrist had dragged.

She took the pencil from behind her ear and a little block of telegraph forms from the fold of her sari, the pink ones the signallers used, and on the back of the top one she copied all three, line by line, degree by minute. She did the subtraction for Rahu herself, in the margin, thirty less one-fifty, and checked it against his.

Then she wiped the slate clean with the end of her sari, and handed it back to him, and went out into the rain toward the junction.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Jaiminī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Jaimini, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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