understanding zero

When Daivik was learning numbers, we were employing couple of tricks. Our favorite was to imagine our fingers as various objects and count them.  One day he held out his five fingers and said, ‘look, I have ice creams…1..2..3..4..5’. I told, ‘okay, now give me one’ and closed one of his fingers. I then asked, ‘now how many ice creams do you have’. He counted, and said ‘four’. In this way I kept ‘eating’ his icecreams until only one remained. I said, ‘okay, I will take this icecream also', and closed his last finger. 'Tell me, how many ice creams do you have now'. For a long moment he kept staring at the empty space that was previously occupied by his finger. Suddenly he got excited. 'Appa', he exclaimed, 'if you take away the last icecream, nothing remains'. To emphasise this, he pointed to the recently emptied space (using the other hand!) and said, 'look here, there is no ice cream'.

At this point he realized that there were no more ‘ice creams’ and started crying that I ate them all!

piggy on the railway

...picking up the stones
Down came the engine, and broke up its bones
Ah, said the piggy, that is not fair
Oh, said the engine driver, I don't care.

It came back ! My favorite nursery rhyme came back ! After three decades of hibernation !

As Daivik was insisting on stories from "when you were small", and I was digging into memory for authentic accounts, this rhyme just came into being. Again. And with it, in very vivid details, the house we lived in then, the railway track across the (now non-existent) rice fields, the 7:40 AM diesel engine train, the shrillness of its whistle as it pierced across open spaces, the gooseberry tree, the parrot green berries, their distinctive sourness...

It was like bumping into your best friend from high school as you turned a corner in an unfamiliar city, the friend whom life just took you away from, without a reason, without even a fight. I was thrilled, and ended up singing this silly rhyme in one continuous loop, until everybody cried STOP. But then it is committed in more memories now.

Piggy, you are safe.