HUNDRED

As the race started and as several cars began vying with each other for supremacy, my four year old son exclaimed, “Look papa, Hundred cars!”

Hundred, for him, is a wondrous word. It is not merely a figure – as a figure though, it is truly astronomical. It is the most expressive word in his dictionary. He loves his parents hundred! He plans to do many things when he is hundred years old! When he is injured, his foot hurts, you guessed it, hundred! The word has a magical, indefinable taste – I know, I have seen him rolling his tongue along its delectable contours. It also has many more colors than a rainbow can even begin to imagine – I am positive, I have seen all those colors in his eyes. Hundred, probably, is the greatest thing in the world. Greater even than God. Or, probably, it is the God.

For my daughter also hundred used to be all great things under the sky. She is two years older than my son and already the word has lost its grip over her. Yesterday I overheard a conversation between the two siblings.

“Akash’s father possesses hundred rupees,” my temporarily owl-eyed son revealed to his unimpressed sister. “He also has a car. You know how much did the car cost? Hundred rupees!”

“Akash’s father must be a poor man then,” the know-all elder sister replied. “Why, it’s Shruti who is rich. Her father has thousand rupees. You know how much is thousand?”

No, he has no idea as yet about what thousand is. But within a year or so the word would become installed in his mind. May be temporarily again, but firmly. Hundred, naturally, would be dumped unceremoniously as something pedestrian, utterly devoid of any alchemic charm.

Don’t we all grow up that way? Updating our Gods at each stage of our life? Given the facility of searching the debris of my years as a kid, I am sure, I will find hundred to be my primitive God too. I too must have dethroned Him as I grew up. As a student, I remember, to have made a hundred thousand my God. That I have discarded recently and now a million seems to be more Godly. An year later probably, ten million will be the new God.

For my son, however, hundred can be non-numerical; it is mutable into something occult, something supernatural. Down the road somewhere, my hundreds, thousands, millions, have lost this capacity to be non-numerical. They have become hard, obvious, plain numbers about which there is nothing arcane, nothing recondite. Surely, it does take away some charm from these numbers. When my son says, “I love you hundred!” he is being sincere. I won’t feel sincere if I say the same.