Our teacher, Pilar, had asked us to analyse certain topics of the story «An Astrologer’s Day», but since we hadn’t understood the task very well, she asked us to do it again for homework as an opinion piece.
This is mine:
“An Astrologer’s Day” is a short story about a man who works as an astrologer but is actually a fraud. He doesn’t really study the movement and position of the sun, moon, planets and stars to then, describe the effect that these have on people and their lives. “He knew no more of what was going to happen to others than he knew what was going to happen to himself next minute”, this quote conveys that he had no idea how to predict people’s future since he couldn’t even predict his own, or even how to predict what was going on in people’s lives. But one day, a client approaches his stand and asks him to ‘say stuff about him’, but not the typical open answers that everyone can relate to. He wanted more personal stuff that could actually prove that he was an astrologer. What happened was that the men had already met. In their youngerster days they had fought in a bar and since Guru Nayak, the customer, was stabbed and left to die, he had come to that town after many years looking for revenge.
The story takes place in India and we can figure this out since there are words from the Indian dialect, such as “jaggery” and “pyol”, or because annas and rupees are mentioned and they were the currency used in India, or because it is mentioned that the astrologer wore a “saffron-coloured turban around his head” and finally, because a “cheroot” is mentioned which is a type of Indian cigar.
In the story you can also find ironic elements such as the astrologer managing to get away with what he told people since they were so gullible, or how the client had been talking to his aggressor this whole time and never even suspected anything, and it’s also ironic how by chance or destiny, Guru Nayak approached to him. Which is actually one of the themes: the irony of fate, as well as crime and guilt and human greed.