The body of the car passing by was also marked with numbers and Devanagari characters

As I wandered through Mumbai, a car crossed in front of me. On its side, bold Devanagari letters were painted across the body. To my eyes they were nothing more than a jumble of lines and circles, but to the people of India they were simply the everyday script of life. Looking closer, I realized even the numbers were written in Devanagari. I had always assumed numbers were “universal,” a language shared across the globe, so it felt almost like a small cultural betrayal. Yet if I thought about it, the irony was clear—this very number system was invented here, along with the concept of zero that changed the world. It wasn’t history betraying me; it was me forgetting history.

In the chaos of Mumbai, those rows of Devanagari script seemed to stand with a peculiar dignity. The car passing by apparently bore the words “Motor School,” though to me it looked more like an encrypted code. For the people of the country that gave birth to zero, the fact that their letters and numbers look different to outsiders is hardly an inconvenience—it’s more likely a point of pride. In Mumbai’s streets, Devanagari spills everywhere—on shop signs, bus panels, the walls of buildings—and to a foreigner it all presses in like a riddle.

In the passenger seat of the car, a young man gazed out the window. His eyes weren’t fixed on me, yet there was a strange sense that he knew I was there. The driver, meanwhile, slouched with one hand lazily holding the wheel, looking half-bored. Even in the land that invented zero, it seems the minutes spent waiting at a red light amount to the same universal void. I stood there in the crowd, and for a fleeting moment, I thought about the weight of that invention—zero—amid the bustle of Mumbai.