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out into the yard to fetch wood for the fire in the kitchen. It was a cold morning, and she hurried along. Looking for brushwood and a few stout logs, she went behind the house. The dead chicken lay right in front of the woodpile. She had nearly stepped on it. She found the second one right around twelve o’clock, the hour of the birth, the third and the fourth shortly thereafter, and the rooster in the afternoon. Her husband looked at the dead animals but could find nothing. Just the evening before, they had been strutting about the house, clucking feistily, and there was no indication that a dog or cat, much less a tiger, had gotten hold of them. For Mya Mya there was no doubt. The cadavers confirmed her worst fears. They were the sudden downpour—no, worse—the typhoon in December, the earthquake she had always dreaded and secretly desired: A curse lay upon her son. He was a harbinger of misfortune. The astrologer had prophesied it. She ought never to have borne a child on a Saturday, not in December.
    Even the fact that in the ensuing days more than a dozen of the neighbors’ chickens died the same mysterious death could not console Mya Mya. On the contrary, it only confirmed the worst. She knew now that this was but the beginning and that the misfortune the boy brought would not be confined to her own family.
    Now she lay awake nights, fearing the next catastrophe. She knew it was only a matter of time. Every cough, every gasp, every sigh sounded like thunder on the horizon. Hardly daring to move, she strained her ears every time the child stirred. As if his very breaths were the footfalls of calamity’s stealthy approach.
    A week later her milk failed. Her breasts hung slack against her body, like two deflated balloons. A friend of the neighbor, a woman who had just had a child of her own, took over the nursing. Mya Mya rejoiced in every hour that her son was out of the house. She wanted to talk with her husband. It couldn’t go on like this. They had to do something.

Chapter 9
     
    KHIN MAUNG RECKONED that his wife was overstating the problem. Of course he, too, believed in the power of the stars. Everyone knows that the day, the hour, even the minute of one’s birth can determine the course of one’s life—there was little doubt about that. And there were niceties one did well to observe, days on which one ought to remain inactive, rituals one needed to follow in order to avert catastrophes. There, too, Khin Maung was in agreement with his wife. No one was enthusiastic about a Saturday birth in December, of course not. Everyone knew that the stars did not smile upon these children, that they faced a difficult life, that their souls seldom sprouted wings. Every family knew an uncle or an aunt or at least a neighbor or a friend of a neighbor who knew someone who had a relative who had been born on one of those inauspicious days and who slunk through lifelike a beaten dog, who remained small and stunted like a shade plant. His son would not have it easy, Khin Maung had no illusions about that, but to jump to the conclusion that he was cursed, that was going a bit too far (even if the incident with the chickens did worry him, although of course he would never admit it to his wife). When Mya Mya suggested they consult the astrologer, Khin Maung readily assented, and not only because he was the kind of person who didn’t like to say no. He also hoped that the old man might console his wife with his wisdom or, should the stars confirm her fears, that he might advise them on how to minimize, if not exactly to forestall, the calamity that threatened their child.
    The astrologer lived in an unassuming wooden shack on the edge of the village. Nothing betrayed the esteem that he enjoyed in the community. Not a house was built in the area without his first being asked whether the site was well situated or whether the day of the groundbreaking stood under a favorable star. Prior to any wedding, the prospective couple or