The Indian Clerk (15 page)

As if in chastisement, a church clock strikes five. Now Eric really is late. Although dusk has yet to fall, the light coming
through the windows is getting more diffuse. Through a blur she sees that the men with the newspapers are leaving. The ladies
in the plumed hats are fussing with their handbags, preparing to return, no doubt, to husbands awaiting suppers. And suddenly
it dawns on Alice that once the ladies leave, she will be the only customer remaining in the vast room. The waiters, without
ever betraying their impatience, will continue to light her cigarettes, pretending not to care that she alone is keeping them
from getting on with their work, keeping them from replacing the teacups and teaspoons with fish knives and forks and dinner
plates: the endless changing of table settings that signifies the progress of morning into afternoon into night, one day into
the next . . . Something to write about? Her glass is mostly empty now. What's left of the tart, sugary drink the melted ice
has rendered pale yellow. She looks at her watch and discovers that Eric is an hour late.

After that, there was silence for a moment. Then they all laughed. Gertrude, tangled up in the rattan chair, laughed so hard
the cat jumped off her lap.

Instantly the waiter is back with his fan. As he beats at the crow, one of his colleagues mops up the spill, waggling his
head and murmuring apologies. For the first time she notices his red teeth. "It's all right, it's nothing," she says, standing
uncertainly, while above her, out of reach, the crow swoops and circles.

Is it looking at her? Does it want something from her? On the way home from Hardy's, she asked Eric about Gertrude's unmoving
left eye, and Eric said, "It's glass. A childhood accident, I've heard. And to think, she's utterly devoted to him!"

The juice has stained her dress. Probably ruined it. She wants to weep or cry out, because the truth is, she's no adventuress,
just a young girl in a strange city who will never tramp the dirt alleys of Triplicane, never taste a native dish, never be
brave enough, even, to wander out of Govindran's protective gaze. She misses Aunt Daisy. She misses her husband. She misses
a doll she had as a child.

Alice steps away from the table. It's time to return to her room, to change her dress, to do what she can to salvage Israfel.
And yet, for the moment, she does not want to go back to her room. She wants to stay right where she is, with the waiters
in their glorious robes. Eric bursts in, and she hardly hears him as he fills the echoey chamber with his apologies, his exuberance,
details of his meeting with the Indian that he cannot keep from tumbling forward. She stops his hand as he reaches for her
waist; points at the ceiling. "Look at the crow," she says. And he looks.

"How did that damned thing get in here?" he asks. "Oh, what happened to your dress?"

"It's nothing," she says. She wants to laugh, as Gertrude laughed. Hand in hand, they walk out of the dining room, Eric talking
about the Indian, Alice remembering how, as her brother moved about the room, one of Gertrude's eyes followed him, while the
other remained focused on a bust on the mantelpiece, its gaze so steady and merciless you could have sworn it was seeing.

Fortunately, as soon as my husband and I had sat down with Mr. Ramanujan to partake of Indian tea, any alarm that his outward
appearance might have provoked in us fell away. Rarely have I met a man of such grace, charm, diffidence, and delicacy of
manner. Mr. Ramanujan's English, while not unmarked by the accent of his native tongue, is fluent, his vocabulary much larger
and more precise than that of the average British working man. And though he can come across, at first, as shy, once he reaches
a stage of comfort with those in his company, the floodgates open and he reveals himself to be the most congenial of conversationalists.

Our first meeting took place at the canteen of the University Senate House—a building, I might add, Miss Hardy, of incomparable
hideousness. My husband launched the conversation by asking Mr. Ramanujan to tell us something about his education. A tale
of frustration, disappointment, and injustice now poured from his lips. He comes from a family of high caste but little money,
and was raised in the town of Kumbakonam, south of here, in a poor little house on a street with the remarkable name of Sarangapani
Sannidhi Street. He is the eldest of three sons. The father is an accounts clerk; from the little Mr. Ramanujan said of him,
we understood that the man was unassuming to the point of irrelevance.

For his mother, on the other hand, he had only the highest praise, explaining that, despite her having had only the most rudimentary
education (a plight common, I might add, to Indian women), this lady showed from the start an intuitive appreciation of his
gifts and did all she could to foster them; that is to say, though she could be of no actual help to him in his studies, she
made sure that, while he worked, the house was quiet, his favorite foods were at the ready, and so on. She is also, he said,
a gifted astrologer, and, from early on, told him that she had read his stars and that his stars had said he was destined
for greatness.

Alas, his schoolmasters showed no such solicitude! Perhaps the truly original are always doomed to be misunderstood. In the
case of Mr. Ramanujan, his astonishing talent was largely overlooked. In part this was because, from the earliest days of
his schooling, the intensity of his interest in mathematics led him to pay scant attention to the other subjects in which
he was obliged to show some facility. The result was that he did not do as well as he might on the examinations necessary
for his advancement.

One tale he told I found particularly touching. By way of a mathematics prize, he was presented one year with a volume of
Wordsworth's poems. Such a collection, which either of us would have cherished, meant nothing to him. Yet his mother treasured
the volume, and today it has pride of place in the tiny habitation he shares with her, his brothers, his grandmother, and
his wife on a poor little unpaved alley called Hanumantharayan Koil Street.

Unhappily, this victory was an exception in a career marked, rather, by discouragement and failure, than by support and success.
Having done his time at what is known here as the "high school," Mr. Ramanujan won scholarships, first, to Government College
in Kumbakonam and then to Pachaiyappa's College in Madras. On each occasion, his interest in his own mathematical researches
was so all-consuming that he neglected his more quotidian studies, with the result that he failed his examinations and lost
his scholarships. For by this point his explorations of the mathematical universe were all that mattered to him.

He was now adrift. The educational system had rejected him utterly, and he found himself marooned, with no livelihood, income,
or prospects, at his mother's house on Sarangapani Sannidhi Street. How, you may ask, did he maintain, through all this, his
sense of self-worth? What gave him the confidence to persevere, when every authority had cast him off? This was the next question
that my husband put to him.

At this, Mr. Ramanujan rested his hand in his head and thought for a while. Then he looked Mr. Neville in the eye, and explained
that he could give no simple answer. There were moments, he said, when his despair became so great that he thought seriously
of giving mathematics up altogether. On one or two occasions he contemplated suicide. But then a great rage would well in him at the institutions that had pronounced him worthless, and he would be seized by a sudden determination to prove them
wrong.

Alas, the energy that such tantrums roused in him invariably flagged after a few days. More crucial to his ability to soldier
on was the unyielding support of his mother, who bolstered him in his pursuit of matters far beyond her ken with her reassurances
and ministrations.

Yet there was another facet to his persistence in those lean and unhappy years. It was this: he remained, quite simply, besotted
by numbers. During his days as a scholar, even his mathematical studies were unsatisfactory to him, as he was compelled to
drive down well-trodden avenues and engage his fertile imagination in tedious exercises and the exploration of territory of
little interest to him. Now that he was cut loose from the academy, however, he could do what he wished. He was no longer
beholden to systems in which he believed no more than they believed in him. Instead he was free to spend his days, as he preferred,
sitting on the front porch of the house in which he had spent his childhood, working away at formulae and equations on his
slate (he could not afford paper), dreaming and inventing. Indeed, he told me that his friends used to make fun of him because
his elbow was black; it took too long, he said, to erase the slate with a rag, so he used his elbow instead!

I feel that I should make clear now, Miss Hardy, that our conversation, that afternoon, did not proceed exactly along the
lines that I have described. Instead it seemed that Mr. Ramanujan was forever being distracted from his own compelling tale
by points of mathematical interest of which some anecdote or other had reminded him. He would then share these points with
my husband, writing down figures on scraps of newspaper and packing paper that he keeps in his pocket (yet another sign of
his poverty), and the two of them would launch off into a discourse of which I could make neither head nor tail, until Mr.
Neville, observing my bewilderment, gently steered the conversation back to subjects within my reach. And though I appreciated
my husband's kindly impulse, yet I also regretted that poor Mr. Ramanujan, by virtue of my ignorant presence, was losing a
rare opportunity to amplify on matters of which my husband was, without doubt, far more cognizant than anyone he had ever
met. Indeed, Mr. Ramanujan's high degree of animation during these rounds of mathematical intercourse convinced me that, should
he not come to England, he would be depriving himself of some essential source of nutrition.

I now asked him about his wife. Here he frowned. As you may know, Miss Hardy, matrimony is in India a far more ritualized
business than in our own country. For instance, when Mr. Ramanujan married Janaki (this is the girl's name), she was only
nine years old. The marriage was arranged between the families in consultation with astrologers. Before the wedding, the bridge
and groom met only once; after—again, in keeping with tradition—she returned to her family, and only took up residence in
her husband's house when she was fourteen.

Given the circumstances, you might think that Mr. Ramanujan would regard his wife merely as an accessory or impediment. Instead,
much to our surprise, he spoke of the girl with affection. True, marriage had brought with it burdens—he could no longer afford
to pass his days on the porch doing mathematics; he would have to get work and earn money—yet while he acknowledged these
burdens, he never expressed the slightest vexation with the girl who was their cause. Fortunately, over the years, a few gentlemen
both English and Indian, some of them amateur mathematicians, had come to recognize Mr. Ramanujan's genius without necessarily
grasping its nature. On these gentlemen he had in turn come to depend not just for moral but sometimes financial support.
One of them now obtained for him the clerkship at the Port Trust Authority, which enabled him to move his mother and wife
to a house in Triplicane, virtually in the shadow of the Parthasarathy Temple.

At this juncture my husband and I were obliged to break off our conversation with Mr. Ramanujan, which had now lasted almost
two hours. Before bidding us goodbye, however, he produced a pair of notebooks bound in cardboard and presented them to Mr.
Neville. These notebooks, he explained, contained the fruit of his mathematical labors. Would my husband care to borrow them
and look through them?

We met him again the next afternoon. This time he came to our hotel. While the very English atmosphere of the dining room
at first seemed to make him uneasy, once again, as soon as he was settled with us and drinking tea, he relaxed visibly.

Mr. Neville now broached the dangerous question: would Mr. Ramanujan reconsider his earlier decision not to come to England?
While we understood his fear of breaking a rule of his religion, we also believed that if he remained in India, he would be
doing both himself and the world at large a great disservice.

At this, Mr. Ramanujan gazed solemnly at his cup. I feared that Mr. Neville had overstepped his bounds; said too much. Indeed,
I was on the verge of apologizing, when Mr. Ramanujan looked up and asked, "Has Mr. Hardy not received my most recent letter?"

My husband replied that he was not certain. He had not heard from Mr. Hardy since our arrival.

Mr. Ramanujan then said that he was worried that Mr. Hardy might lose interest in him once he read this letter, because it
was written in his own English; his previous letters, as he put it, "did not contain his language" but were "written by a
superior officer." He had then copied them out in his own handwriting. Mr. Neville now asked if this "superior officer" was
the same one in whose company he had gone to the interview with Mr. Davies of the Advisory Committee for Student Affairs.
Mr. Ramanujan admitted that it was. And then the whole story came out.

The situation both is and is not as your brother surmised. Mr. Littlewood was correct in guessing that, when Mr. Davies asked
Mr. Ramanujan, point blank, if he wished to go to Cambridge, the question left him rather flummoxed. He never had the chance,
however, to say yes or no, for before he could speak, his superior, Mr. Iyer, answered for him. The answer was an unhesitating
no.

He himself is rather confused about the matter. From an intellectual standpoint, he admits, he is quite avid to come to Cambridge.
At the same time, he has grave doubts about the venture. Would he, he wonders, be obliged to take an exam such as the tripos?
(He has a great fear, it seems, of exams.) My husband told him that he thought not but that he would check with Mr. Hardy.