The trouble began during our annual three-week winter trip to Chennai in 2001, just a few days before we returned home. I faithfully tallied the number of fruit jelly candies Amma bought at the green grocer’s, the number of perforated ceiling tiles in my father’s office, the number of thrushes sipping from the bird bath by my classroom, the number of former friends that called me a terrorist in the months after 9/11. Amma, noticing how much I loved numbers, had asked Miss Wabash to give me extra math worksheets, even though it was not computation that thrilled me, but the numbers themselves-the accounting of all that was domestic or wild, safe or dangerous, a kind of language that remained stable no matter the city. My toes quivered when Miss Wabash-despised by the other fifth graders for her strictness-teased out these reverberations in purple chalk during the math hour. They vibrated in Pittsburgh, they vibrated in Chennai, and the sense that I was deeply connected to everything in the world by numbers was infinitely comforting to me. The answer for me back then was yes-most numbers vibrated.
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