They took everything from us and
claimed as their own. We believed them, awestruck with their perceived
superiority, as if we were watching a ring fight between an ant and an
elephant. They say that out of sheer mercy, I have a different theory although,
they us back one singular thing and we could not even cling to that tight
enough as we had tried mercilessly to forget our past or anything that was once
good about us.
I have a feeling that they gave it
back as they could not really understand the concept of it. They gave back with
some vengeance, “Here, take it and explain to the world what it means”.
They smiled at our back and we were at a loss to figure out what this moth ball
shaped thing was all about.
I was hardly twelve years old, when
I was despatched to a boarding school in Kusumapura. The school was affiliated
to the University of Nalanda and specialized in high level mathematics and
astronomy, both subjects I hated the most. The only saving grace was the school
co-educational, but as always, beautiful girls hardly come to study such dry
and boring subjects. The school was situated outskirts of the main city of
Pataliputra, almost in the middle of what I thought as a forest, making it
impossible for the students to bunk class and catch a movie in Pataliputra.
The principle was a young brilliant
scholar who went by the name of Aryabhata. He was quite reserved and introvert
and we always found him huddled in the corner of the library writing notes. But
as a teacher he was excellent and made mathematics a fun subject.
It was so easy to find a number
which leaves a reminder of 1 when divided by 2,3,4,5,6, but is exactly divided
by 7 or to solve general equations like 3x+5y=1.
Aryabhata was lonely and missed his
lover in Nalanda and she was stunningly beautiful, we heard. He used to sit
under the wood-apple tree, lost in his stupor, misted eyes, dreaming about her.
He felt the emptiness in his heart, “How can thoughts of love be so painful”?
, he would say to Bhaskara, his favourite student. He wrote long letters to her
but never posted them, they remained as treatises of unequivocal love. In
despair he sank into the depth of his subject, solving problems of the nature ax
+ by = c.
His desires, loneliness transcended
his sense of space and time and one day he worked like a man possessed to find
out the solution to derive the circumference of a circle. He taught us these
new techniques by intuit and we could see only Bhaskara document it in his
neatly maintained plantain leaf notebook. We later found out that the
approximation of π was correct up to five decimal places.
One day, while he was resting under
the tree, maybe dreaming of his lady love, a wood apple fell from the tree and
landed next to him, missing his head by whiskers. The sound woke him up and
realizing what had happened, he instinctively rubbed him palm over his bald
head and murmured, “When the soul is empty even thousand arrows cannot
inflict any pain, but an uncovered head is a different thing”. He strode to
the study and kept on murmuring, “When the soul is empty, when the soul is
empty”.
The next day when he came to the
class he had a profound disposition, as if he had just attained enlightenment.
He spoke about the curved nature of space and even if we have an infinite
number at some point it will meet.
He spoke of Brahma, the Absolute,
and how all matters in the universe were intrinsically linked to him.
He confessed that his desires,
impure thoughts has digressed him from his true calling and he realized that to
pursue pure love one has to have a pure soul, which is seldom possible in the
boundaries of society.
He then spoke of the emptiness, the
void or “sunya” as the plane that separates all concepts like black and white,
right and wrong, life and death, happiness and pain and as if in a trance he
scribbled a wood-apple on the black board and said,” Let this symbol define the
beginning of an end”.
We hardly understood what he said
and after sometime forgot all about it. Bhaskara, as a true disciple, spent all
his life trying to make sense of it and even passed it on to his students like
Barahamihira, Bhahmagupta as an unsolved problem.
Time passed and we waited for some
supreme beings to solve the unsolved problem for us. The westerners took it,
gave a halfhearted interpretation, the Chinese escaped with a quaint symbol and
the ball was thrown back to us.
We, as stupid as we always have
been, to avoid the problem have started doubting the ethnicity of Aryabhata –
the Arya in the name smacks of Aryan and hence he is a foreigner who invaded
our country and drove the Dravidians down south.
It will take few more centuries, if
at all, to find out what “Sunya” really means, but at least for centuries to
come we can avoid the problem by debating on the region where Aryabhata came
from and trying to pass on the problem to that damned country, who gave birth
to such a hopeless person, who in pain of love found out “Sunya”.
