‘A measure of the earth’ or a short history of geometry

He gazes at the list in front of him, completely mesmerised. He had never, ever dreamed there would be so many. Before he had gone looking for this list he had thought there would be around twenty. The obvious ones (circle, square, triangle) and then some more complex ones (rhombus, oval, octagon and the like). He feels especially stupid today. This little boy feels stupid every waking moment of every day in this strange land but today the idiocy is more notable to him, more repulsive.

He scans over the ancient words in awe. Polygon (concave, constructible, convex, cyclic, decagon, digon, dodecagon, nonagon, equiangular, equilateral, star), henagon, hendecagon, heptagon, hexadecagon, hexagon, icosagon, pentagon, octagon, decagram, octagram, heptagram, hexagram, pentagram, triangle ( acute, anticomplementary, equilateral, excentral , isosceles, medial, obtuse, rational, right, isosceles right, Reuleaux , Kepler, scalene), parallelogram, equilateral parallelogram: rhombus, Lozenge, rhomboid, rectangle, square, trapezium, isosceles trapezium, quadrilateral, cyclic quadrilateral, tetrachord, kite, tangential quadrilateral, trapezoid, isosceles trapezoid, circle ( circumcircle, excircle, incircle, nine-point, circular sector, circular segment) , crescent, ellipse, oval, Reuleaux polygon, rotor, lens, rounded rectangle, semicircle, sphere, stadium, Archimedean spiral.

He realises that the sole purpose of this classification is to separate each individual structure based wholly on its difference from the other. He feels a pain he has just about managed to forestall his entire short life up until this point. He holds his breath and counts to twelve but he still feels shrouded in the darkness. The book’s coloured outlines and contours are suffocating him, slowly. He will never know what shape the folk of his soil fall into. He sees not what way their lines point, nor does he know how black a silhouette their pain embodied on paper maps. Equally so, he cannot dare to try to read the contours of the landscape he inhabits due to reasons unknown to his little mind. (Its people lie down proudly in their own shape formations and there is no space in their tessellation for his alien hemitery.)

The break-down of shapes is beginning to make his eyes sting with angry, scared tears. He could never fit in a place that he has only experienced, (like his furniture, clothes and handful of personal belongings) - second-hand. He would feel as isolated in that land his Mother had fled with him in belly as he does here in the only land he has known, without knowing. He has not yet read any Said, Bhabha or Fanon but when he does he will understand more. He will feel the full gravity of his loss. He will see that his young mind was forced to surrender a little bit of innocence there and then, doing this homework of ‘An introduction to Geometry’. He understands now, at this point however, that so many people in his world see themselves as one particular shape, and him as another. And these shapes are universes, never mind continents or centuries apart. The little boy will spend many years trying to morph himself into one shape, then another and yet another still. In his nightmare-filled sleep he will fight and revolt against the idea that people are just like shapes. In his despair he will try to deny that both label the others around them through surface configurations that distinguish one thing from its surroundings. He tries so hard to refute this because it makes the aching loneliness in his bones ease for a moment. But in the harsh light of day, he cannot hide from the truth. It sneaks up on him at every given opportunity and punches him hard as ever in the stomach. And he is lucky that he has not been assigned any shape whatsoever in this life, or these blows to his ghost-shadow might leave a mark.