How Do I Draw Thee?

What’s in a number? A lot, it would seem, especially when we are dealing with the people-pleasing number 5 in our newly launched humour column

- Meera Rajagopalan

Five’s an odd number. That’s not just in that ‘duh-of-course-it-is’ mathematical sense. Five is the launch-pad number. Five is when an organisation that’s been running the race the second the starting pistol goes off, pauses for a breath. Five is when children start to ask ‘why’ questions that send parents to Google more often than they don’t. Why, 5 a.m. seems like the time one should aim to wake up to make the jump from regular to extraordinary.

But make no mistake, five is not as simple as all that. It is a devious number, surreptitiously hiding beneath its friendly multiples that repeat faithfully like Warhol patterns.

Take five’s form, for example. The rest of the digits are like a bestseller’s plot points, delivering what they promise from the get-go. Zero, one and three commit to one of the two – lines or curves – and stick to them.