The Indian Clerk (53 page)

"Yes, that is exactly what I was thinking," he said. "Tell me, Hardy, would you mind writing out a letter for me? I feel too
weak to hold a pencil."

"Of course." I took some stationery from the table. "To whom is the letter to be addressed?"

"To Dewsbury, the registrar at Madras."

"Ramanujan, you're not going to—"

"Please, will you write it?"

"But you'd be a fool to tell them to lower the offer—"

"Please do as I ask."

I heaved a sigh—loud enough, I hoped, to signal my disapproval. Then I said, "All right," and took out a pencil. "I'm ready.
Go."

"Dear Mr. Dewsbury," he dictated, "I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of 9th December 1918, and gratefully accept
the very generous help which the University offers me."

"Very good," I said.

"I feel, however, that after my return to India, which I expect to happen as soon as arrangements can be made, the total amount
of money to which I shall be entitled will be much more than I shall require. I should hope that, after my expenses in England
have been paid, £50 a year will be paid to my parents and that the surplus, after my necessary expenses are met, should be
used for some educational purpose, such in particular as the reduction of school fees for poor boys and orphans and provision
of books in school."

"Very generous, but wouldn't you like to control how the money is disbursed?"

"No doubt it will be possible to make an arrangement about this after my return. I feel very sorry that, as I have not been
well, I have not been able to do so much mathematics during the last two years as before. I hope that I shall soon be able
to do more and will certainly do my best to deserve the help that has been given me. I beg to remain, sir, your most obedient
servant, etc., etc."

"Etc., etc.," I repeated, handing him the letter to sign.

"Are you sure about this?" I asked, putting it into the envelope.

"I am sure," he said.

Obviously he was determined to keep the money out of his parents' hands.

I suppose now I might as well tell the anecdote. I don't much like to tell it these days. It's been told too much; it feels
as if it no longer belongs to me.

Any speculation, mathematical or otherwise, as to what might have lain behind Ramanujan's answer I leave to you to ferret
out.

I had gone to see him in Putney. I suppose this must have been in February, a month or so before he boarded the ship for home.
And he must have been feeling poorly, because the curtains were drawn, and he only kept the curtains drawn on bad days.

He was in bed, and I sat in the chair up next to his bed. He said nothing, and I had nothing particular to tell him. No special
motive lay behind my visit. Still, I felt the need to break the silence. So I said, "The taxi I took from Pimlico today had
the number 1729. It seemed to me a rather dull number."

Then Ramanujan smiled. "No, Hardy," he said. "It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the
sum of two cubes in two different ways."

Here Ramanujan's story ceases to be mine. Of what remained of his life—a little over a year—I can tell you almost nothing,
because he lived these months out in India, while I remained in England.

What I know I picked up secondhand. It seems that instead of getting better upon his return to India, as he was supposed to,
he got worse. The university authorities put him up in great luxury, in a series of splendid villas loaned to him for the
duration, with a break in the summer during which he was whisked away from the city to the banks of the River Cauvery, on
which he had played as a child. Thence back to Madras. What Komalatammal, used to living in a shack with mud walls, must have
made of the splendid Raj villa in which her son spent his final months I cannot guess. I have seen a picture of the place.
The stairway, its banister carved from teak, descends to a vast sitting room with carved moldings and a granite floor. "Gometra,"
the house is called, in the suburb of Chetput, which Ramanujan called "Chetpat": in Tamil, "It will happen soon."

Soon enough Janaki arrived with her brother. It will not surprise you to learn that Komalatammal was not remotely glad to
see her. She even tried to bar Janaki from the house, but Ramanujan insisted that his wife stay with him, and in deference
to his condition, I suppose, his mother demurred, or at the very least made a show of having reached an accord with her daughter-in-law.
(With what rancid remarks she showered the girl in private I can but guess.) All told, the situation was fraught with tension,
and Ramanujan must have felt the unease ricocheting between the two women as they competed for the coveted spot by his bedside.
No doubt concern as to who would benefit most from his legacy intensified this frantic contest to see which of the women he
would allow to nurse him, to change his sweat-soaked pyjamas, to feed him milk from a spoon.

Now there were no longer those spells of improved health that in England punctuated the long torpor of his sickness. The atlas
of his life centered on a mattress low down on the cool granite floor, from which he rose only when the sheets had to be changed.
And yet, despite his declining health, he still had intermittent bursts of productivity. During one of these he came up with
an idea that I suspect will prove to be among his most fruitful, that of the "mock theta function." This was the subject of
his last letter to me, a letter that he wrote in bed, and that consisted entirely of mathematics.

I am told that upon his return, India greeted him as a hero, and that India wept at the news of his demise. Quite an ending
to a story that began so modestly, and would in all likelihood still be going on, modestly, had I not intervened.

Had Ramanujan stayed in India—had he survived—he would now be on the brink of fifty. Instead he died at thirty-three.

Tuberculosis was given as the cause.

My sister, dear devoted Gertrude, remains on the faculty of St. Catherine's School to this day.

Daisy and Epee have given rise to several generations of fox terriers.

The Nevilles are in Reading. Miss Chern is a tutor at Newnham.

Russell was reinstated at Trinity.

True to my word, in 1920 I left Cambridge for Oxford, taught there happily until 1931, then returned, drawn like the proverbial
moth to the flame that will singe his wings, to the college where I had begun my career, the college that had perpetually
betrayed and bullied me, the college on whose grounds I am fated to end my days.

I still collaborate with Littlewood.

The hospital on the cricket grounds was dismantled.

Thayer I never saw or heard of again.

There is only one story left to share.

Earlier this year—it was April, I believe—I was taking a stroll through Piccadilly Circus. It was late afternoon, a light
rain was falling, and as I stepped off the curb onto Coventry Street, a motorcycle hit me.

Let me admit right now that the accident was entirely my own fault, and not the cyclist's. I wasn't looking where I was going.
No doubt my mind, as it is so often these days, was on the Riemann hypothesis.

The next thing I remember I was lying on the pavement a full thirty feet from where I'd been walking. The motorcycle had dragged
me that far. And now the cyclist, a fair-haired youth, was gazing anxiously into my eyes. "Are you all right, sir?" he asked.
And then his face was gone, replaced by that of a bobby. "Are you all right, sir?" the bobby asked.

"I'm fine," I said.

"There, there," the bobby said, "give the gentleman room, move on, move on."

Then the bobby lifted me, in one motion, onto my feet.

"I think I'm fine," I said. "Just had the wind knocked out of me." No sooner had I said this, though, than my knees crumpled
under me, and the bobby had to stop my fall.

A crowd had formed. "Step out of the way," he ordered, and then he led me across the street, out of the rain, until we were
standing under the arches of the Palladium.

"Thank you," I said.

"You ought to look where you're going, sir," he said, propping me up and dusting me off, as if I were a child.

"Yes, I ought to."

"There you are." He stepped back; took off his helmet. "It's Mr. Hardy, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said. "How do you know me?"

"You don't remember me, do you, sir?"

"Should I?" And I looked at his face: the brown eyes, the thick mustache.

Then I did remember.

"Richards."

His mouth broadened into a smile. "That's right, sir. It was me that was there when you came in to fetch Mr. Ramanujan—how
long ago was it?"

"I can't think . . . twenty years?"

"A bit less. The autumn of 1917, before the war ended."

"Yes. And what a happy coincidence. I'm glad to see you. I've often wished I'd looked you up, back then."

"Did you now? I wish you had, too. A pity. Still, better late than never, my wife says."

"You're married then?"

"Indeed I am, sir, with three daughters. Funny, though, I always knew I'd run into you one day. I just knew. And now look
where we are."

"Yes. Under the arches of the Palladium."

He smiled. I smiled. Then suddenly his face grew stern. "A sad thing about Mr. Ramanujan, sir. Of course we could see back
then he wasn't well. And then I read the obituaries, and I thought, well, now it all makes sense."

"Yes, I suppose it does."

"And to think that he wasn't made an F.R.S. until 1918."

"1918, yes."

"But when you came in, sir, you told us he was already an F.R.S., and that was 1917."

"Oh, did I say that?" And I smiled again—less because I'd been caught out in a lie than because the lie in which I'd been
caught out was one that, until that moment, I'd forgotten.

"Well, he was almost an F.R.S."

"So you admit you lied."

"I don't see why it matters."

"Are you suggesting the law doesn't matter, sir?" Richards frowned. "It's a serious business, lying to Scotland Yard, sir.
Perjury. I could have you sent up for it."

"Oh, bosh. It was years ago! And besides"—I gestured vaguely toward Coventry Street—"I've just been hit by a motorcycle."

Then Richards laughed. He laughed and laughed. "Had you there, didn't I?" he said.

"Yes, you did," I said.

And then the most extraordinary thing happened. Perhaps it was a hallucination brought on by the shock of the accident—to
this day I'm still not sure—but it seemed as if he pushed down on my shoulders. And whether it was because I wanted to, or
because I was weak, I sank to my knees.

Suddenly all the noises of the street drained away. I could see the last rays of the sun broadening across a pool of puddled
water. I could see, in the distance, umbrellas closing as the rain let up.

Very calmly he put his hands on my head, dug his nails into my scalp, and pulled my face deep into the woolly, animal blackness
of his uniform trousers.

Only for a moment. Then he let me go.

"Come on, get up." I stood, still wobbly on my feet. "You'll be wanting to get home now, sir," he said, and, turning me around,
he pointed me into the street, the claxons blaring, wet faces smudged in the dusk.

"Thank you," I said. By way of reply, he gave me a gentle push, tipping me over the edge of the sidewalk onto Coventry Street,
toward the stairs that led to the Underground.

Suddenly he was surrounded. Hands shook his, mouths came intolerably close to his face, murmuring congratulations and asking
questions. The questions he answered with the voice he had used to deliver the lecture, while inside him the other voice,
the secret voice, recalled that night in Pimlico when Gaye's spirit, summoned or conjured from the ether, depending on one's
point of view, sat on the edge of his bed and warned him to beware a man in black and the hour of twilight.

As it happened, it was the hour of twilight. Voices to which he could not attach names asked if he wished to rest before dinner,
and he said that he would. Others offered to escort him to his hotel, and he waved them away. No, he would go on his own.
The walk would do him good. And so, released at last into solitude, he hurried out of New Lecture Hall into the vesperal air;
walked fast across commons and amid the shadows of red brick buildings, paying no attention to where he was going. For the
point was not to arrive anywhere; it was to put as much distance between himself and the ghosts he had summoned as he could.

Soon he found himself in Harvard Yard. The sight of two undergraduates wearing leather gloves and throwing a ball back and
forth arrested his attention. Ever since his first trip to "the States," American baseball had fascinated him. Now he stood
on the cement path that cut a diagonal swath across the yard and watched the young men play, his gaze transfixed by the bent
posture each assumed as he reached back to throw the ball; the arc that the ball described over the green grass; the satisfying
thump when the hard white leather of the ball's surface hit the soft brown leather of the glove. It did not matter that the
sun would soon be setting; he knew these young men would play until the last light was drained from the sky, until the twilight
was drunk down to its lees.

Why should it still surprise him that he knew so little of Ramanujan? He was too old to believe any longer that he had touched
more than a fragment of that vast, infernal mind. None of them had—not Littlewood, not Eric or Alice. Ramanujan had come into
their world, and for a time their lives had revolved around him, much as distant planets revolve around a star of which they
can discern only the weakest penumbra. And yet that star, for all its remoteness, governs their orbits and regulates their
gravity. Even now, dreams of Ramanujan pulled Hardy from sleep each morning. And when he went to bed, a darting radiance suffused
his dreams, like the light reflected off a varnished cricket bat, or a Gurkha's raised sword.