The Geometry of Grief

# The Geometry of Grief My father was a mathematician. Not professionally—he worked as a bank clerk in Chandigarh, handling other people's accounts—but in his heart, in the way he saw the world. Everything was a problem to be solved, a pattern to be recognized, a theorem waiting for proof. When he died, I inherited his notebooks. --- There were forty-seven of them, spanning thirty years, filled with his small, precise handwriting. Most contained what you'd expect: equations, proofs, sketches of geometric figures. He had been particularly interested in tessellations—the way shapes could fit together to fill a plane without gaps or overlaps. But scattered throughout were other entries. Observations. Questions. Fragments that resisted easy classification. *The grief of small towns*, one entry read, *is shaped like a Klein bottle—it has no inside or outside, no beginning or end.* *Love is a proof by ...