The Zero sum Game

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”.