The Indian Clerk (25 page)
Authors: David Leavitt
I wish that, at the time, I had understood as clearly what he was suffering as I do now. By means of the same powerful intuition
that, in earlier days, he had passed off as a gift for prophesy, he must have "seen" the horrifying scenes in Kumbakonam.
Yet he could do nothing. Due to the U-boat attacks, he could not go home. And in the meantime, in the absence of letters,
he tried to read the silence. This is a dangerous undertaking in the best of circumstances. I know, having often tried it
myself. When those you long to hear from do not or cannot speak, you speak "for" them, just as, in the days of our youth,
Gaye used to speak "for" the cat, saying things like, "I'm not feeling very well," or, "Hardy, you're cruel, you won't rub
my tummy." In the same manner, Ramanujan must have spoken "for" Janaki, and in turn replied to this Janaki who, for all we
know, bore not the slightest resemblance to the girl he had left behind in India.
And this was only one of his many troubles. The war frightened him, as it did all of us. The foods he craved, in particular
the fresh vegetables that were a staple of his diet, were becoming increasingly hard to obtain. And then English customs,
he told me, seemed very strange to him. There's no nice way to say this: he thought us dirty. Once, for instance, we overheard
a woman at a tea shop complaining that if the members of the working classes smelled, it was because they bathed just once
a week. "If only they would bathe, as we do, once a day!" this woman said. Ramanujan looked at me in alarm. "Do you mean to
say you only bathe
once
a day?" he asked.
Our ablutionary habits were not the only ones that puzzled him. Why, he asked me, did children not stay with their parents
after they married? Did they not love their parents? Would they not be lonely? I answered that the English valued independence,
and this concept, too, he found strange. Used to sleeping anywhere at all, in a small house shared with many people, he even
found it strange to have his own room.
Autumn drew to a close, and the weather started getting cold, colder than anything he had ever known. This is perhaps the
aspect of his English experience that I am least able to imagine—I, who from early childhood became habituated to the vagaries
of winter: numb fingers, chapped lips, the struggle to compel the blanket to exert a few extra degrees of warmth. Clothes,
which he had always looked upon purely as a kind of decoration, a way of embellishing the body while protecting his modesty,
he now had to use, for the first time, as layers of defense against the encroachments of winter. Not only did he have to contend
with the terrible, pinching shoes, but with gloves, scarves, galoshes, greatcoats, hats. Rain he knew from the monsoons—but
warm rain, leaving steam and moisture in its wake. Here, on the contrary, even the brief walk to New Court could be a struggle
with wind gusts that threw sheets of sleet and hail into his eyes, and broke the spine of the umbrella I'd given him. Bathing
was an ordeal. No wonder the English were, from his point of view, so filthy! For who could endure more than one bath a day
when the temperature in the bathroom was below freezing?
When he got to my rooms in the morning, I would watch him unwrap himself and then give him coffee, which he drank gratefully
and in quantity. I toasted crumpets for him over the fire. Still, he never seemed to be able to get warm enough. I myself
thrived in cold weather; the morning found me bright and vigorous, my cheeks red from a brisk walk. Ramanujan, on the other
hand, would be pallid. He wasn't sleeping well, he told me. Perhaps I should have taken this as a warning sign; and yet there
was so much to distract the attention in those days of war!
Inattention: the schoolboy's perpetual excuse. I was looking at something else. The other boy hit me first, I wasn't listening,
sir. What right have I to resort to it now when I would never accept it from a student?
No, what I am offering is
not
an excuse. It is a confession.
B
Y SEPTEMBER, Trinity is a different world. Whewell's Court is a barracks. When he goes to meet Hardy each morning, Ramanujan
must navigate bunks and tents and a mess. Nevile's Court is an open-air hospital. Wounded soldiers, their faces and limbs
bandaged and bloodied, lie in neat rows on metal frame beds under the arcades of the Wren Library. Across the way, lights
have been strung from the ceiling of the south cloister, which has been made into an operating theater.
To the extent that he can, Hardy stays in his rooms. Soldiers parade everywhere. In Great Court, Butler preaches to the troops,
warning them to resist French temptresses. Colonels and captains in khaki dine at high table, toasting with champagne if the
next morning one of their fellows is to be shipped off. This spectacle is so distasteful to Hardy that he starts eating alone
in his rooms. Eggs and toast. The food of his childhood. When he does go out, he finds himself strangely drawn to the library
arcade, to the soldiers who were running fresh not a month earlier. Now dozens of them arrive every day, feverish from infected
wounds, suffering from lockjaw, typhoid, spotted fever. As he passes, they ask him for cigarettes, which he provides, much
to the chagrin of the sisters. The sisters don't like to see their patients smoking.
Few others are around, which leaves Hardy feeling a certain sadness that he recalls from his childhood, a sadness associated
with the September days before school began, each one shorter than the last, during which it seemed that everyone in the world
except him had something to do, somewhere to be. Now, when he walks the river, he never runs into anybody. Littlewood is gone,
a second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery. Keynes is at the Treasury. Russell is off speechifying against the war.
Rupert Brooke, thanks to Eddie Marsh's intervention, has got himself a commission in Churchill's Royal Naval Division. Bekassy
is in Hungary, Wittgenstein in Austria. It doesn't matter that they're fighting on the other side. What matters is that each
is defending his fatherland, and, in doing so, taking part in some exalted, immemorial rite of manhood. Or so Norton explains
it. Norton makes it his business to explain things. He makes it his business to understand.
One weekend he arrives back at Trinity from London. He carries, or so it seems to Hardy, the redolence of Bloomsbury, its
cloistered, bookish gloom. He asks Hardy what he's planning to do should conscription come, and Hardy replies, "I suppose
I'll go to war."
"You mean you won't be a conscientious objector?"
"I disapprove of conscientious objectors as a class," Hardy says, by which he means that he disapproves of Norton as a class;
of Bloomsbury as a class; of the image he has conjured up, of Strachey and Norton and Virginia Stephen (now Woolf) sitting
in their London libraries, gazing out at the rain and muttering, "Oh, the horror!" Strachey, Norton tells him, won't talk
about the war. He spends his evenings reading books that take him as far from the war as he can get. Right now, for instance,
he's reading
Memoirs of the Lady Hester
Stanhope.
And why does the idea of Strachey sitting up in bed, no doubt in a nightcap, with
Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope
open on his lap, fill Hardy with such distaste? He's no better, really. His cloister is New Court. And instead of Lady Hester
Stanhope, he's rereading
The Portrait of a Lady.
As for Norton—well, if there's evidence of the degree to which he's muffled himself, it's that he fails entirely to pick up
on Hardy's insult, and says simply that
he
will certainly declare himself a conscientious objector should the necessity arise—not, Hardy senses, out of conscience but
simply to protect himself. And how is Hardy supposed to respond to that? It seems to him that every day he and his old friend
have less to say to each other, even though they still sleep together now and then.
What preoccupies him most is this question of what he should call himself. Is he a pacifist? Certainly his disapproval of
this shameful war is as absolute as Russell's. And yet he can't claim that he disapproves of
all
war. He would fight a just war. So the question is: has this war, despite its beginnings, now
become
a just war? The wounded soldiers, when he sits with them, cannot stop speaking of the atrocities in Louvain, the sacking and
burning of houses, shops, farms, and, worst of all, the library, the famous library, as celebrated for its collection of rare
and precious books as the one in the shadows of which they now lie. It's curious: few of these men are educated. Most, Hardy
imagines, don't read at all. Yet the sacking of the library seems to have shaken them to the marrow. "To burn a library to
the ground," Hardy tells Moore, with whom he now strolls the arcades of Nevile's Court as once they strolled the meadows of
Grantchester . . . But he can't finish the sentence. Who could finish such a sentence? Among the books burned there must have
been German books, books by Goethe and Novalis and Fichte. And who burned them? The countrymen of Goethe and Novalis and Fichte.
The trick is to try to maintain some sense of balance, and in this regard, writing letters helps.
To Russell, who is giving a lecture tour in Wales, he writes: "How is it possible that England hungers to crush and humiliate
Germany? What is wanted is peace on fair terms."
To Littlewood, with whom he tries to keep collaborating after a fashion, he writes: "It is proving harder than I suspected
to teach him. His mind is like Isabel Archer's, it keeps jumping out the window. I can never keep him on any one topic for
long."
To Gertrude, whom he can see far less often now than before, he writes: "Please tell Mother not to worry. In all likelihood,
if called up, I should be rejected on medical grounds—
entre nous,
I hope not, but don't tell her that."
Ramanujan, too, is writing letters. He writes to both his parents. "There is no war in this country," he tells his mother.
"War is going on only in the neighboring country. That is to say, war is waged in a country that is as far as Rangoon is away
from Madras. Lakhs of persons have come here from our country to join the forces. Seven hundred Rajas have come here from
our country to wage war. The present war affects crores of people. The small country Belgium is almost destroyed. Each town
has buildings fifty to a hundred times more valuable than those in Madras city."
His letter to his father is much shorter. "I have all the pickles," he writes. "You need not send anything more. Except what
you are sending now, do not send any other thing. I am getting on well. Do not allow the gutter to run as usual. Pave the
place with bricks. I am getting on well."
T
HAT AUTUMN, Ramanujan begins to publish. The
Quarterly
Journal of Mathematics
brings out his "Modular equations and approximations to π." To celebrate, Hardy takes him to a pub, where he refuses to drink
anything. He tells Hardy that he's at work on a big paper on highly composite numbers. His equation is ingenious, and distinctly
Ramanujanian (an adjective that Hardy has no doubt will soon be in circulation). It looks like this:
where
n
is the highly composite number and
a
2
, a
3
, a
5
. . .
a
p
are
the powers to which the successive primes need to be raised so that the number can be written out as a multiple of primes.
Thus, if we are dealing with the highly composite number 60, we can write it out as
60 = 2
2
× 3
1
× 5
1
Here
a
2
= 2,
a
3
= 1, and
a
5
= 1. If we are dealing with the largest highly composite number that Ramanujan has found, 6746328388800 (he writes it out on
a torn piece of newspaper; he has not lost his Indian habit of hoarding scraps of paper), we would write
6746328388800 = 2
6
× 3
4
× 5
2
× 7
2
× 11 × 13 × 17 × 19 × 23.
What Ramanujan has managed to prove is that, for any highly composite number,
a
2
is always going to be bigger than or equal to
a
3
,
a
3
is always going to be bigger than or equal to
a
5
, and so on. And for every highly composite number—an infinity of highly composite numbers—the last factor is always going to
be 1, with two exceptions: 4 and 36. In many ways it's the exceptions that intrigue Hardy the most, in that they reveal, once
again, how notoriously resistant numbers are to the ordering impulse that, by their very nature, they invoke. Whenever you
seem to be getting close to seeing the whole in all its lovely symmetry—the palace emerging from the autumn mist, with all
its stately storeys, as Russell once put it—mathematics throws you a ball you can't hit. This is why, despite all the evidence
to the contrary, Hardy won't accept the truth of the Riemann hypothesis without a proof. The numbers 4 and 36 come early on.
But with the zeta function, the exceptions could come at lengths so remote from the human capacity to count that Hardy can
barely conceive them. As Ramanujan has learned the hard way—as every mathematician has learned the hard way—the world of numbers
brooks neither compromise nor shortcut. You cannot cheat there. You will always be caught out.
In any case, no one he has ever met seems to know the numbers as intimately as Ramanujan does. "It's as if each of the integers
is one of his personal friends," Littlewood said early on, a witticism that misses, in Hardy's view, the eroticism of working
with numbers, the heat that rises off them, their vibrancy and unpredictability and, sometimes, danger. As an infant his mother
gave him a set of numbered blocks, and then lamented that all he would do with them was hit them against one another, the
7 with the 1, the 3 with the 9. What she failed to recognize was his need, even then, to penetrate to the rumble of life within.
Attractions and repulsions, euphonies and banshee screeches. Soon he had broken all of them except for the 7. All his life
7 has been his favorite number. Despite his atheism, he respects its mystic allure, just as he respects the less salubrious
association carried by two other numbers that he refuses to speak, much less write down. It's not that he believes in the
specific superstitions; it's that he's convinced that the numbers themselves give off vapors of malevolence. Other numbers
that most people would consider perfectly benign he also despises: 38. And 404. And 852. Still others he loves. He loves nearly
all the primes. He loves, for reasons that elude him, 32,671. And, now that Ramanujan has introduced him to them, he loves
the highly composite numbers, and of the highly composite numbers, he loves 4 and 36 the most, because they defy Ramanujan's
rule—4, and 36, and 9, the bridge between them; 9, which is 3
2
. He crosses the bridge and steps into fields in which he knows Ramanujan has already tarried. So far as he can see, nothing
edible grows here. They are sterile, or picked clean.