The Indian Clerk (52 page)
Authors: David Leavitt
It was true. The cub he had known was now a huge black bear, and was sitting in a corner of her cage picking nits out of her
fur. If she remembered Ramanujan, she did not show it. She did not even acknowledge him. Instead she focused on her nits,
occasionally letting out a grumble that sounded like a belch. And still Ramanujan smiled. "I remember the first time I saw
her," he said. "She was just so—" And he held his hand at the level of the abdomen where his pain resided.
Afterward, we went and took tea. I tried to remember the last time the three of us had been alone together, and realized that
it must have been before the war started, during Ramanujan's brief summer of happiness, his "Indian summer"—the words came
to my lips almost before they came to my mind. "Remember your Indian summer, Ramanujan?" I asked. And to my relief, he laughed,
and said that he did: the balls, and the tripos results being posted, and
Was It the
Lobster?
Then, for an hour or so, until Littlewood had to return to his post, we talked about the zeta function. We talked about Mrs.
Bixby, and Ethel, and Ananda Rao. I told Littlewood about S. Ram—"Rarely in my life have I met anyone who talked quite that
much," I said—and Ramanujan, with great enthusiasm, said, "But I just got a letter from him!"
"Is he back in India?"
"Yes, he arrived two weeks ago."
"Thank goodness. How long is the letter?"
"It is twenty-seven pages long. Almost the entirety of it consists of advice about food—what I should take, what I should
not. It seems he has been consulting doctors in Madras about my case."
"What a funny man he is."
"Yes. At the end of the letter he wrote, 'Now then hurry up and begin eating and devouring plenty and get fat. That is a good
boy.'" Ramanujan sipped from his teacup. "You know he wanted to take me to India with him. He promised he would care for me
on the voyage. It was all I could do to stop him from buying me a ticket."
"Did you ever consider going with him?" Littlewood asked.
"I would have had to jump off the boat."
We laughed. A silence fell. Then Littlewood said, " Well, take his advice. Get well, get fat, come back to Trinity. We've
much work to do. We still haven't proven the Riemann hypothesis."
"Yet, but I think I must return to India when the war ends," Ramanujan said. "At least to see my wife . . ."
"Of course," I said. "A long visit."
"A long visit," Littlewood repeated.
And Ramanujan stared into the dregs of his tea.
In October, we put him up a second time for a Trinity fellowship. It was a tricky business. Given what had happened the year
before, Littlewood thought there would be a greater likelihood of Ramanujan being elected if he, rather than I, proposed him.
As it happened, Littlewood was in Cambridge himself right then, recuperating from a concussion he had suffered when, he claimed,
a box of bullets had fallen on his head; my guess was that in fact he had got drunk and fallen, and then dreamed up the box
of bullets to excuse the injury.
We had our work cut out for us. There was at the time a cabal of Trinity fellows who considered it their duty to oppose Ramanujan's
candidacy on racial grounds. As it happened, Littlewood had a spy in the enemy camp, his old tutor Herman, who also opposed
Ramanujan but was too naive to dissemble. From him we learned the worst. R. V. Laurence, for instance, had said that he would
sooner resign than see a black man made a fellow of Trinity. His allies, seizing on rumors of the suicide attempt, pointed
to a statute prohibiting the "medically insane" from being named to fellowships. Even Ramanujan's status as an F.R.S. these
swines managed to pervert into a "dirty trick" perpetrated by Littlewood and me purely to put pressure on Trinity. As if we
had the power to manipulate the Royal Society for our own ends . . . And yet I have learned over the years that prejudices
are bred in the bone. Neither logic nor pleading will ever prevail over them. Such an enemy you can only fight on his own
dirty terms.
Thanks to Herman, we had one advantage: we knew what tactics would be brought to bear, and this meant that we could, at the
very least, arm ourselves. Accordingly Littlewood obtained certificates from two doctors declaring that Ramanujan's mental
state was sound—certificates that, in the end, didn't even have to be read. For the vote, much to my surprise and relief,
went in our favor, despite Littlewood's absence from the meeting on the grounds that he was "indisposed." Or perhaps his absence
helped. Herman, as Littlewood's representative, read out a report that he had prepared, detailing Ramanujan's achievements
and culminating in his election as an F.R.S. His being an F.R.S. did the trick, I think, not because the title in and of itself
impressed the fellows, but because they foresaw the bad publicity that might ensue should an F.R.S. be voted down. Thus Ramanujan
became the first Indian to be elected a fellow of Trinity.
Littlewood brought me the news. Afterward, as I was hurrying to send a telegram to Ramanujan, I ran into McTaggart, creeping
as usual along a wall. "It is the thin end of the wedge," he said; then, before I could answer, he slunk away to where he
had parked his tricycle.
I sent the telegram. The next day a letter arrived from Fitzroy House, asking me to thank Littlewood and Major MacMahon on
Ramanujan's behalf. All told, his response was more muted than I might have hoped, and certainly less resonant with joy than
it would have been had he been elected a year earlier. "I heard that in some colleges there are two kinds of fellowships,"
he wrote, "one lasting for two to three years and the other for five or six years. If that is so in Trinity, is mine the first
or the second kind?" As it happened, the fellowship was for six years, as I immediately told him. At the time I assumed that
he wanted the assurance because he hoped to stay at Trinity as long as he could, though now I wonder if, already, he was thinking
of his family and what might become of them after he died.
The most interesting part of the letter was mathematical. Ramanujan, as we suspected, was working again—and working on partitions.
He had come up, he said, with some new ideas about what he called "congruences" in the number of partitions for integers ending
in 4 and 9. As he explained, if you start with the number 4, the partition number for every 5th integer will be divisible
by 5. For instance, p(n) for 4 is 5, p(n) for 9 is 30, and p(n) for 14 is 135. Likewise if you start with 5, p(n) for every
7th integer will be divisible by 7. And though Ramanujan had not considered the case of 11 "due to tediousness," his hunch
was that, if you start with 6, p(n) for every 11th integer thereafter will be divisible by 11. As, indeed, turned out to be
the case. The next number to test, of course, would be 7, after which, according to Ramanujan's theory, every 13th integer
would be divisible by 13. Unfortunately the theory broke apart at 7, as the partition number for 20 (7 + 13) is 627 and the
prime factors of 627 are 19,11, and 3. Once again, mathematics had tantalized us with a pattern, only to snatch it away. Really,
it was rather like dealing with God.
How the story speeds up as it nears its end! Have you noticed the way the first days of a holiday pass so much more slowly
than the last? That was how it felt in the autumn of 1918. True, some diehards continued to brood, murmuring of a German plot
to unleash a secret weapon, some monstrosity so powerful that none could imagine its destructive potential. Instead the Germans
folded. Austria sent a peace note to Woodrow Wilson, Ludendorff resigned, and it was over. I was in Cambridge at the time.
I remember hearing, from my rooms, a distant roaring in which I felt I had no right to take part, not only because I had opposed
the war from the beginning but also because I did not much feel like roaring. A horrific fire finally put out, a flow of blood
finally staunched: are these really things to cheer about? I don't think so. So I stayed in my rooms, and at midnight, when
I went to bed, I fell into a sleep so deep it seemed to pass in a minute. By the time I woke, the sun was coming through the
curtains, it was ten o'clock in the morning, and for the first time in four years I didn't feel tired.
That afternoon Miss Chern came to see me. She had heard the news of Ramanujan's fellowship and wondered how she might best
congratulate him. I gave her tea, and she showed me her album of newspaper clippings, most of them collected in America, where
she had spent much of her girlhood. There was an article from the
New
York Times
—an old one, given her by her father—in which a friend of Philippa Fawcett provided an intimate account of her victory in
the Tripos. A second from the
New York Times
—provided by the Marconi Transatlantic Wireless Telegraph—announced Ramanujan's arrival in Cambridge in April of 1914 and
included an interview with me that I had no memory of giving. Two others—from the
Washington
Post
and the
Christian Science Monitor
—also announced Ramanujan's arrival in England, yet what was curious about these articles was that they laid emphasis less
on his work in number theory than on his ability to perform lightning-quick calculations. The first compared him to a Tamil
boy named Arumogan of whom I had never heard, and who had been the subject of a specially convened meeting of the Royal Asiatic
Society. "Multiply 45,989 by 864,726," the second began.
Well, that problem wouldn't flabbergast S. Ramanujan, a young Hindu, who last year left India and entered Cambridge University.
It would take him only a few seconds to multiply 45,989 by 864,726. In less time than that he could add 8,396,497,713,826
and 96,268,393. In the time it would take the average schoolboy to divide 31,021 by 12, Ramanujan could find the fifth root
of 69,343,957, or give the correct answer to the problem: What weight of water is there in a room flooded 2 feet deep, the
room being 18 feet 9 inches by 13 feet 4 inches, and a cubic foot of water weighing 62½ pounds?
This article concluded by comparing Ramanujan to an American "boy calculator" known as "Marvelous Griffith." "Could Ramanujan
really perform those calculations?" Miss Chern asked, and I laughed. It seemed to me unlikely; more to the point, it seemed
to me beside the point. And I wondered, not for the last time, if this was how my friend would end up being remembered: not
as a genius of the first rank, but as a circus sideshow attraction, the freak at whom members of the audience throw numbers
like fish for him to gobble, only to watch as, without recourse to pen and paper, he spits out the sums.
I was not getting into London very often. Still, we wrote to each other at least twice weekly. It seemed that Ramanujan had
entered into another one of those spells of productivity that punctuated his listlessness, and was working on a dozen things
at once: partitions, Waring's problem for fourth powers, theta functions. Once again he raised the possibility of his returning
to India—as the war was over, there was no longer any risk (at least any non-spiritual risk) in crossing the ocean—and with
his permission I wrote to Madras on his behalf. As I saw it, there was no reason for him to stay if he wanted to leave. His
fellowship did not require him to be in residence at Trinity, nor did it bind him to any particular obligations. And while
he continued to refer to the impending trip as "a visit," I think I knew, even then, that he was going to die.
He gained a little weight. The fevers, he said, had ceased to be irregular. He no longer suffered rheumatic pains. Perhaps
for this reason, in November he left Fitzroy House and moved into a nursing hostel called Colinette House in Putney. This
was an altogether more modest (and cheaper) affair than Fitzroy—a stalwart brick house with eight bedrooms, fully detached
and indistinguishable from most of the others that lined Colinette Road until you stepped inside and saw the array of medical
equipment piled in the sitting room. An impressive staircase led to the first floor, and to Ramanujan's room, which had a
bow window and overlooked the front garden. The ceilings were high and the moldings elaborate. At the time of his stay, he
was one of only three residents, the others being a retired colonel whose dementia led him to believe that he was still in
Mangalore and an elderly widow named Mrs. Featherstonehaugh who took a curious liking to Ramanujan and amused him when she
explained that her name was pronounced "Fanshawe."
Because I could get there quickly from Pimlico, I visited Ramanujan more often at Colinette House than I had at Fitzroy Square.
Usually I took a taxi. His health had stabilized by then, if only into an unvarying routine of sickness; much as during the
months he'd spent on Thompson's Lane, feverish nights gave way to peaceful, tired days. And yet he was less irritable and
obstinate than he had been at Matlock. Every morning he ate eggs for breakfast, and when one morning I interrupted him in
the middle of his meal—I had come to help him sort through some financial details—he looked up at me from his plate and waggled
his head in the old way, as if to say: yes, I have given up. It doesn't matter so much anymore. Eggs no longer matter.
Then his health, with the onset of the cold weather, started to decline. At least he was allowed a fire. When I arrived one
morning in January, I was surprised to find him still in bed. He greeted me with a wave, and told me that he had received
a letter from the University of Madras—the same university that had once shut its doors in his face—offering him an income
of £250 per annum upon his return to India—this on top of the same sum from Trinity. "But Ramanujan, that's marvelous!" I
said, taking my coat off and sitting down. "Five hundred pounds a year will be a fortune in India. You'll be a rich man."
"Yes, that is the trouble," he replied.
"How so?" I said.
"I don't know what I will do with so much money. It is too much."
"But you need not spend it all on yourself. You may have children. And whatever's left over you can give to charities."