The Indian Clerk (49 page)
Authors: David Leavitt
New Lecture Hall, Harvard University
O
NE AFTERNOON NEAR the end of 1917 (Hardy said in that lecture he never gave), Littlewood and I sat down together to solve
what we had come to think of as "the Ramanujan Problem." "Problem," I now believe, is a word that should never be applied
to matters of the human spirit. It belongs to mathematics, as in
Waring's Problem:
for any natural number
k,
does there exist an associated positive integer
s
such that every natural number is the sum of at most
s k
th
powers of natural numbers? (Toward the solution of this problem, incidentally, Ramanujan made an interesting if little-known
contribution.) Human situations, on the other hand, are complex and multiform. To understand them you must take into account
not only misunderstandings, occasions, circumstances, but the mystery of human nature, which is as rife with contradictions
as the foundational landscape of mathematics. And the thing is, no one ever does. We didn't. Instead, when Littlewood and
I sat down together—in the same London cafe where he had told me of Mrs. Chase's pregnancy—we laid the situation out in front
of us and looked for a reason, one reason, why Ramanujan might be depressed. And we decided that he was depressed because
Trinity had failed to elect him to a fellowship. Ergo, in order to keep him going until next October, when we could once again
put him up for a fellowship, we would have to replenish his self-esteem. Ergo we would have to arrange for honorifics to rain
down on him. As we saw it, powerful institutions would be induced to affirm his worth, his spirits would revive, and he would
go back to work. Then the "problem" would be solved.
Now, of course, I see that our approach was hopelessly naive—and I think, in our hearts, we knew it. Both of us disdained
honorifics. We admitted as much, even as we acknowledged that ours was the luxurious disdain of those who, having won the
prize, can afford to dismiss it. Nor can we have failed to recognize the likely futility of a "cure" that fixated on one cause
of the malady while ignoring all the others.
Nonetheless we set ourselves, with alacrity, to the task at hand. First we got Ramanujan elected to the London Mathematical
Society. Then we proposed his name to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. The first election went through quickly, in December.
I wired him—he was in another sanatorium by then—and his response, while enthusiastic, was muted. For though these elections,
we knew, would bolster our case when we brought his name up at the fellowship meeting next October, we also knew that neither
was sufficient to haul our friend out of his torpor. If we were to solve the Ramanujan problem, a more substantial change
would have to be brought about, and this would be to have him elected an F.R.S.
Let me try to give you some idea of what it means, in England, to be named an F.R.S. For any kind of scientist, it is the
highest honor in the land. Each year over a hundred candidates are put up, in all disciplines, of which at most fifteen are
elected. Rarely is a man elected who is under thirty. When I was elected, I was thirty-three. So was Littlewood.
We considered Ramanujan's chances. What he had going for him was his obvious, indisputable genius. What he had going against
him was his youth—he was just twenty-nine—and the fact that he was Indian. In its history the Royal Society had only ever
had one Indian member. In all probability, we reasoned, he would not be elected. Still, we decided to float his name. After
all, if we failed, he need never know we had made the effort. And if we succeeded, it might be just the thing to save him.
Just then, the president of the Royal Society was the physicist Thomson. He was the discoverer of the electron (hence his
nickname, "Atom"), and in a few months he would succeed Butler as the Master of Trinity. I knew him well enough that I could
write to him on Ramanujan's behalf. In my letter, I tried to impress upon him the tenuousness of Ramanujan's situation. While
I believed that he would probably be alive in a year's time, I could not guarantee it. And though I felt hesitant about rushing
a fellowship for which, under ordinary circumstances, he would have been considered too young, the fragility of his health
and of his spirit, in my view, argued for an exception to be made. Of his merit there was no doubt; he was vastly more qualified
than any other mathematical candidate.
Much to my relief, the tactic worked. In February 1918, Ramanujan was simultaneously elected a fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical
Society and an F.R.S. The coincidence of the two elections led to some confusion, for when I sent him a telegram informing
him of the latter, which he did not expect, he confused it with the former, which he did. Indeed, he told me later, he had
to read the telegram three times before he understood what it actually said. And even then, until I verified the news for
him, he did not believe it.
By this point, Ramanujan was no longer in Cambridge. Instead he was living in a tuberculosis sanatorium called Matlock House
in Derbyshire. Why he had settled, in the end, on this particular institution I am not sure. It might have been because Dr.
Ram, who worked there, was Indian, or because the cook was supposedly willing to prepare dishes to the tastes of the individual
inmates. In any case, his decision came as a relief to me, as it meant that I could go along with the conditions imposed by
Scotland Yard without revealing to anyone that Ramanujan had tried to kill himself. All I had to do was to inform the doctors,
on whom I supposed I could count for discretion. In November of 1917, then, Ramanujan went by rail to Matlock and stayed there
for most of the following year.
Matlock was distinguished, among other things, by its remoteness and difficulty of access; during the war it could be reached
only by one train that arrived at eight in the morning. I will not pretend that I liked the place. The structure itself was
unforgiving, and had the look of one of those punishing schools to which children in Victorian novels are sent to languish.
Back in the last century, it had begun its life as a hydropathic institution, which explained the plethora of disused equipment—various
forms of tubing and emptied pools—that littered the grounds. The bathtubs were enormous. A staggered brick wall divided the
house from the sloping road that ran alongside it, giving it the look of a prison, which was apposite. It
was
a prison. Let me say this once, clearly and for the record. Ramanujan was not there to be treated for tuberculosis. He was
there for the convenience of his friends and to satisfy an informal sentence handed down by a chief inspector at Scotland
Yard. And he knew it. He must have known it.
From the beginning of his tenancy, he was unhappy. Dr. Ram, as it turned out, was a bullying sort, who wielded the power I
had unwittingly put in his hands with relish. Using as his weapon that authority with which medical men naturally endow themselves,
he made it immediately clear that under no circumstance should Ramanujan imagine that he would be allowed to escape Matlock.
So long as his doctors declared that he was unwell, he had no freedom, no rights. Nor would he be allowed under
any
circumstances, even an improvement in health, to leave sooner than twelve months from the date of his arrival. Whether Dr.
Ram elucidated, or Ramanujan guessed, the true source of this sentence I cannot say. I know only that Ramanujan, much to my
perplexity, appears to have accepted Dr. Ram's word as law. At Hill Grove he had rebelled; at Matlock he submitted.
How can I impress upon you the peculiarity of his situation in those months? Let me describe the two visits that I made to
him at Matlock. The first took place in January of 1918, the second in July. On the first occasion, I went with Littlewood,
who managed to borrow a motor from his brother so that we might avoid any difficulty with the trains. It was a very cold day—snow
had fallen the night before—and as we drove through the gates I was startled by the sight of tuberculosis patients sitting
outdoors at tables and in chaises longues, swaddled in wool blankets. Ramanujan himself we found inside, but in a room without
windows: a sort of verandah that must have served, during Matlock's hydropathic heyday, as a sun room. Although he too was
swathed in blankets, he was shivering from the cold, and his teeth were chattering. We had not wired to alert him to our arrival,
and when he saw us striding toward him he looked, at first, taken aback. Then he smiled, threw off his blankets, and stood
to greet us.
He had lost even more weight, and his face was haggard. We shook hands, and he immediately took us on a tour of the place,
which he conducted with that combination of indifference, disgust, and pride that a schoolboy exhibits when performing the
same office for his parents. First he showed us his bedroom—bare of any decoration, and, again, freezing—and then the dining
room with its long refectory tables and jugs of cold milk, and then a sort of sitting room cum library, the shelves of which
were stocked almost entirely with detective thrillers. Finally he introduced us to Dr. Kincaid, the director of the place,
a mild-seeming man in his fifties who greeted us with the bored cheerfulness of a headmaster. At Dr. Kincaid's suggestion
we returned to the open verandah and had tea. By now Littlewood and I were both extremely cold, even though we had on coats
and gloves, and we drank the hot tea fast. Other patients were also lying about on the verandah; they stared at us, and our
tea, with envy.
Having first congratulated him on his being named an F.R.S., we asked Ramanujan how he was faring. I will admit that I hoped
he would answer by declaring brightly that his health had improved, or, better yet, pull from his pocket some sheets of paper
scrawled with mathematical figures. Instead he began to complain. First he complained about the cold. When he had arrived
at Matlock, he said, he had been allowed to sit for a few hours before what the staff called a "welcome fire." Since then,
however, he had been allowed no fires at all. Even when he asked Dr. Kincaid to provide him with a fire for an hour or two
each day, so that he might work on his mathematics, Dr. Kincaid refused. His fingers got so cold he could not hold a pencil.
Next was the food. Despite what he had been promised, the cook had
not
proven amenable to his dietary requirements. She had spoiled the pappadums that one of his friends had sent him, and claimed
that she had no butter in which to fry potatoes for him. Mostly he subsisted on bread and milk. Every day the nurses tried
to impose oatmeal and porridge on him, both of which he despised. An effort at curried rice had been disastrous, as the rice
had arrived so undercooked as to be inedible. Even plain boiled rice the cook could not make properly.
Even in the best of circumstances, there is something pathetic about the grumblings of the invalid, in that they reveal the
bereftness of his world, the degree to which his life has been systematically reduced to a ceaseless pursuit of the most basic
comforts. And in Ramanujan's case, illness was even less a factor than in most. For if his efforts to satisfy his needs for
warmth and for food now consumed his attention, it was mostly because Matlock House deprived him deliberately of those necessities
for no good reason. Cold weather and cold milk might benefit the tubercular patient, but they did not benefit Ramanujan, whose
condition, in any case, remained the same, and who still showed no symptoms of the disease.
What disturbed me most was his sour, scowling tone. After all, this was the same man who had laughed at
Was It the Lobster?,
who had sat on the
pial
of his mother's house and deduced, entirely without instruction, the Prime Number Theorem. He was an F.R.S.! And now here
he sat on another sort of
pial,
and all he could talk about was his dislike of macaroni custard. If there was some cheese in it, he said, it might be tolerable.
But the cook
claimed
she could find no cheese, just as she
claimed
she could find no bananas. Whereas Chatterjee had written to him the other day that in Cambridge he could still buy bananas
for 4d. each. Well, if you could get bananas in Cambridge, why couldn't you get bananas in Matlock? Littlewood promised that
as soon as he got back to London he would arrange for some bananas to be sent on.
After a suitable pause we asked him how his work was going. At this Ramanujan leaned in close, as if to deliver a confidence.
"I have discovered," he said, "that there is one room in the place that is always kept very warm, and that is the bathroom.
And so every afternoon I go into the bathroom with my notebook and pencil and lock the door. Then, for a short while, I am
able to do some work."
"And what work are you doing?"
"Still partitions." And he started talking. As he did—Littlewood told me later that he noticed it as well—his face changed
entirely. I have no recollection at all what he said—I suppose it must have been some quite trivial point he was making, the
sort to which, at Cambridge, I would have responded with a raised eyebrow or a comic yawn, or not responded at all. Only we
were not at Cambridge—Littlewood and I knew perfectly well what our function was—and so we reacted with the sort of exaggerated
enthusiasm one usually reserves for shy children who need to be "brought out." We opened our eyes wide, we opened our mouths
and raised our hands into the air and begged him to go on. And as he did, much to our surprise and regret, his spirits, rather
than rising, sank. I suppose he must have recognized the ruse. "If only I could have more time in the bathroom!" he lamented.
"But there is a lady called Mrs. Ripon, and it seems that she is out to bedevil me. Every time I go in there, and get settled,
she starts banging on the door, wanting her bath. Oh, I wish she would leave, or die! She had a terrible coughing fit last
week, so I was hopeful . . ."