Zero

9/28/2025

Zero has the audacity to exist as nothing. A neat round hole, a circle mocking the straight lines of ambition. Before zero, humanity ticked off its goats, sheep, mistresses, and kingdoms without ever needing a placeholder. Babylonians had a half-assed symbol for a gap, Greeks sniffed at the very idea of nothingness, and Romans — the bastards who gave us plumbing and crucifixion in equal measure — somehow ran an empire without a zero. Try writing an engineering manual with Roman numerals. Go ahead: design an aqueduct with MCMXCVII bricks. By the time you finish, the aqueduct will have collapsed, and so will you.

Then came India, where some anonymous lunatic — in the 5th century maybe, in the smog of Uttar Pradesh, or maybe it was a bored merchant counting sacks of grain — decided to mark absence with a dot. शून्य (śūnya), the void. That dot spread like gossip: to the Arabs, who passed it west as ṣifr, “empty.” Sifr became “cipher,” “zero,” and every cryptic code, algorithm, and ATM slip you curse owes its life to that humble hollow.

I live inside that hollow. At fifty, I am śūnya embodied, a cipher in Calcutta, a man-shaped placeholder in the census, valuable only to statisticians who need to pad their denominators. Everyone else seems busy hurtling on their hedonic treadmills — fast cars, faster women, cholesterol-laden triumphs of consumption. I’ve never run on that treadmill, not even when my knees were new. Now the only running I do is from my own reflection.

People imagine “nothingness” as bleak. But zero has always been promiscuous, paradoxical. In mathematics, zero divided by anything is zero, yet anything divided by zero is undefined, catastrophic. Zero both annihilates and destabilizes. My life, too, is zero as weapon: ambition divided by age = undefined, possibility times loneliness = zero. A null set wearing bifocals.

Yet here’s the cruel irony: zero isn’t nothing. It’s structure, it’s scaffold. Zero makes place value possible. Ten is one followed by zero, not just “one and some more.” Without zero, you can’t leap into calculus, can’t launch rockets, can’t code a computer, or as it is in fashion these days, a large lying machine. Even black holes — the astronomical cousins of śūnya — are nothingness with teeth. They devour light, but in doing so, they sculpt galaxies.

So what is my zero? A collapse? Or a curvature pulling meaning toward me? Kierkegaard saw nothingness and shook; Nietzsche pirouetted with it until he cracked his spine; Beckett made vaudeville out of despair. Me? I light up a half-dead screen and type. This blog is my absurd calculus: equations scribbled into the void. If the void doesn’t care, all the better.

And yet — there’s a freedom here. Zero has no baggage. It is a circle unchained. To be a nothing is also to be free of the grotesque circus of being something: no empires to maintain, no kingdoms to defend, no LinkedIn updates to fake. Just this: the quiet rebellion of survival, scribbling from Calcutta, my śūnya perched between entropy and eternity.

If history can take a dot in the sand and inflate it into the algorithms running our miserable smartphones, perhaps my life-shaped zero can still contain something — a possibility, a future tense not yet collapsed into absence. Until then, I’ll stay right here in the middle of nothing, scratching circles in the dark, hoping the dark has a sense of humor.

At the end of the day, zero is not absence. Zero is potential. And if I’m living as a zero, then maybe — just maybe — I’m sitting at the root of possibility, not the end of it.