"The Muslims invented zero"
the taxi driver says
as he drives me home from the dentist.
Back at school in Kashmir
he'd been good at maths
encouraged that it was Muslims
who'd given zero a symbol,
a name, sifr. He's right.
I'd read in Dantzig's book, "Number",
how the Greeks could not imagine
the void, nothingness, as a number,
left it to the Arabs to lass emptiness
in a small circle, give it power
just as the dentist has filled
my hollow tooth to give it bite.
With the numbers the Arabs gave us
sums sharpened, became simple to do.
So simple and yet so difficult
to draw a circle around nothing,
around yearning,
so that it won't remain empty.
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