The train from Kumbakonam rolled into Kulittalai, the station nearest Rajendram, hours late. And so it was long past midnight before Ramanujan and his mother, on a bullock cart from the station, reached the village. Rangaswamy, his nerves stretched to the breaking point, railed, spoke of calling off the wedding. But Komalatammal, marshaling her considerable persuasive powers, wondered out loud whether a father of five daughters ought to hesitate when opportunity knocked… .
As usual, Komalatammal had her way. The bridegroom’s reception took place at one o’clock in the morning. Then came the kasi yatra, in which the bridegroom makes a show of renouncing domestic pleasures, even starts off for Benares, the sacred city of the North, to become a sanyasi; he gets maybe a hundred yards before being headed off by the bride’s family, who wash his feet in supplication and beg him to return. Finally, on July 14, 1909 Janaki took the saptapadi, or seven steps, that made the marriage irrevocable.
Inauspicious incidents, however, marred the wedding. While Ramanujan and Janaki, in the finest silk sari her family could afford, sat together on the traditional swing being serenaded by singers, the screams of a retarded girl from town shattered the moment’s harmony. At another point, a garland Janaki sought to place around Ramanujan’s neck fell to the ground. Finally, as drummers and musicians entertained them, a fire broke out in a corner of the choultry where the wedding was being held. Though quickly extinguished, it was deemed an ill omen.
Through it all, the doughty Komalatammal remained cheerful, her unflappability winning her sympathy and not a little wonder.
• • •
At first, Ramanujan’s marriage changed nothing, at least outwardly. Janaki wouldn’t actually join him for three years, until after she’d reached puberty. Rather, after a brief spell with his family in Kumbakonam, she would return to her own in Rajendram, there to work with her mother around the kitchen, learn cooking and domestic chores, and be further schooled in the arts of obedience and respect for her parents-in-law and husband.
But though outward circumstances had changed little, Ramanujan had entered a new stage of life. Hindu thinking sees life passing through four stages. As brahmacharya, you are a student, learning the spiritual and intellectual ropes. As grihasta, occupying the longest span, you are a householder, with responsibilities to home and family. As vana prastha, or “inhabitant of the forest,” you begin to throw off the bustle of family life and seek solitude, introspective calm. Finally, as sanyasi, you relinquish everything—family, possessions, attachments—in pursuit of spiritual fulfillment. At his wedding, in heading off for Benares, Ramanujan had ritually opted for this last stage. But in fact, he was now a grihasta. He had responsibilities now. He had a wife. His father was pushing fifty. No longer was he a free spirit, left “ranging with delight” through mathematics, happily on his own. It was time that he assume the mantle of adulthood.
But now a medical problem intervened. Some accounts later found it more delicate to refer vaguely to “kidney trouble,” but in fact Ramanujan had developed a hydrocele, an abnormal swelling of the scrotal sac.
“Hydrocele” is a physical finding, not some particular illness. A subtle, and otherwise harmless, imbalance in the rate of absorption of scrotal fluid can cause it. So can filariasis, endemic in South India, an infection of the lymph system by mosquito-borne parasites. So can other infections, among them tubercular. Usually, there are no symptoms, not even sexual; men sometimes carry a small hydrocele around with them for years. Only when one reaches the size of, say, a tennis ball, does sheer mechanical inconvenience make it a problem and demand surgery. The operation is simple; an incision is made in the scrotal sac to release the blocked fluid. Because the area is so rich in blood vessels, healing is normally rapid, and infection rare, even under poor sanitary conditions.
There was one problem; the family had no money for the operation. Komalatammal asked friends for help, but none was forthcoming. Finally, in January 1910, a certain Dr. Kuppuswami volunteered to do the surgery for free. As the chloroform was being administered, a friend later recalled in wonder, Ramanujan noted the order in which his five senses were blocked.
For a time, Ramanujan was left prostrate. One day, hurrying onto his legs again too soon, he walked with his friend Anantharaman to a village a few miles out of town; the wound began to bleed. But soon, recovered, fueled by the new resolve a long rest can bring, Ramanujan began to go out to the wider world beyond the pial.
Since discovering Carr, he had turned his back on anything—school, family, friends—that took him away from mathematics. During that period, he’d probably needed to be left alone, undistracted, free to follow his mathematical muse. But now, after six years, maybe it was time to stitch himself into the broader social fabric again. It is tempting, of course, to see the hand of his mother in all this—that, consciously or not, she’d realized that if her son was to achieve anything, he had to reach out to the world, and that his marriage would force him to do that. In any event, that’s what happened. Ramanujan was a grihasta now, and even if inwardly kicking and screaming, he gave up the social wilderness that had long been his home.
2. DOOR-TO-DOOR
Ramanujan sought now not a scholarship, nor even the chance to be a mathematician, but just a job, a chance at a future, a new life. For the next two years, the sheer desperation of his lot sent him across South India, first from Kumbakonam as his base and then, increasingly, Madras.
Once again, he took to the rails, though he would often have to depend for his ticket on friends and well-wishers. To the English, even first-class seats were a bargain. But for Ramanujan, round-trip to Madras at a quarter-anna or so per mile for the crowded third-class carriage was worth more than a week’s pay to his father, the equivalent of more than a hundred pounds of rice.
Early during this period, at least, he had no real home, but camped out with friends. At one point, he showed up at the house of a friend begging for a place to stay and was directed to quarters he might share with an old monk. For a while in 1910, he stayed with Viswanatha Sastri, whom he had tutored in Kumbakonam and who was now a student at Presidency College in Madras. Viswanatha lived at the Victoria Student Hostel near the college, a large red and black brick structure whose turrets and three stories of brick-columned arches looked as if they had been transplanted intact from England. Ramanujan joined him there, heading out each morning in search of students to tutor.
But apparently his reputation as a tutor of unworldly bent preceded him, for he drew few students. At night, Viswanatha Sastri recalled later,
he used to bemoan his wretched condition in life. When I encouraged him by saying that being endowed with a valuable gift he need not be sorry but only had to wait for recognition, he would reply that many a great man like Galileo died in inquisition and his lot would be to die in poverty. But I continued to encourage him that God, who is great, would surely help him and he ought not to give way to sorrow.
It was an emotionally fragile period; even so thin a ray of pleasure as the thin, peppery soup, or rasam, the hostel served, would loom large in Ramanujan’s memory across the years.
Later in 1910 and on into the following year, Ramanujan lived on Venkatanarayan Lane, in a neighborhood called Park Town near the red buildings of Central Railway Station. This time he lived on the sufferance of two old Kumbakonam friends, K. Narasimha Iyengar and his brother, K. Sarangapani Iyengar (whom he’d apparently forgiven for scoring higher than he on the arithmetic exam ten years before). Back in Kumbakonam, the brothers had sometimes footed the bill for his clothes and rail fares. Now, they were helping him again.
Narasimha was a student at Madras Christian College, a school run by Scottish missionaries, and Ramanujan tutored him in math. As the F.A. examination approached, Narasimha, who was no mathematician, became nervous and depressed, even weighed skipping it altogether. On the day of the exam, Ramanujan walked the four miles from Park Town to Presidency College, where it was being held. There, he located his friend, con
vinced him to take the exam, gave him a little pep talk, and supplied a few last-minute tips. Whatever he said worked, if only barely: Narasimha squeaked by with the lowest passing score.
One day probably soon after this Ramanujan appeared, delivered by horse cart, at the doorstep of his friend from Pachaiyappa’s days, R. Radhakrishna Iyer. He was sick again, perhaps suffering the effects of his operation earlier that year. Radhakrishna took him in, saw that he was properly fed, and called in a doctor. Ramanujan, advised Dr. Narayanaswami, needed constant nursing. So Radhakrishna took Ramanujan to Beach Station, near the harbor, and put him on the train back to his family in Kumbakonam. But before he left, in a moment that Radhakrishna would remember always, Ramanujan turned to him and said, “If I die, please hand these over to Professor Singaravelu Mudaliar [from Pachaiyappa’s] or to the British professor, Edward B. Ross, of the Madras Christian College,” to whom he’d recently been introduced.
And with that, Ramanujan handed him two large notebooks stuffed with mathematics.
• • •
Ramanujan’s notebooks were no longer for him merely a private record of his mathematical thought. As the preceding incident suggests, they were his legacy. And they were a selling document, his ticket to a job—“evidence,” as his English friend Neville would later put it, “that he was not the incorrigible idler his failures seemed to imply.” Propelled by necessity, he had begun calling on influential men who, he thought, could give him a job. And slung under his arm as he called were—just as photographers have their portfolios, or salesmen their display cases—his notebooks. Ramanujan had become, in the year and a half since his marriage, a door-to-door salesman. His product was himself.
In India more than elsewhere, it wasn’t elaborate correspondence and formal application to anonymous bureaucrats that got you a hearing or landed you a job, but personal connections to someone at the top. Armed with an introduction from a friend of the family, or the family of a friend, you’d plunk yourself down at his doorstep. The physical blurring of the line between inside and outside in South Indian homes was matched by the permeability of South Indian social life; private and public realms were not so rigidly walled off as in the West. Often, you’d be admitted into the Great Man’s presence. No day was so crowded, it seemed, no time so squeezed, that it couldn’t accommodate one more job-seeker.
Ramanujan’s refrain was always the same—that his parents had made him marry, that now he needed a job, that he had no degree but that he’d been conducting mathematical researches on his own. And here … well, why didn’t the good sir just examine his notebooks.
His notebooks were his sole credential in a society where, even more than in the West, credentials mattered; where academic degrees usually appeared on letterheads and were mentioned as part of any introduction; where, when they were not, you’d take care to slip them into the conversation. “Like regiments we have to carry our drums, and tambourinage is as essential a thing to the march of our careers as it is to the march of soldiers in the West,” Indian novelist and critic Nirad C. Chaudhuri has written of his countrymen’s bent for self-promotion. “In our society, a man is always what his designation makes him.” Ramanujan’s only designations were unemployed, and flunk-out. Without his B.A., one prominent mathematics professor told him straight out, he would simply never amount to anything.
Ramanujan, then, had the toughest sort of selling job. But he brought to it qualities that, as he hawked his wares across South India, brought him a warm reception. People liked him.
• • •
“He was so friendly and gregarious,” one who knew him later in Madras would say of him. He was “always so full of fun, ever punning on Tamil and English words, telling jokes, sometimes long stories, and going into fits of laughter when relating them. His tuft would come undone and he would try to knot it back as he continued to tell the story.” Sometimes he’d start laughing before reaching the punch line, garble its telling, and have to repeat it. “He was so full of life and his eyes were mischievous and sparkling… . He could talk on any subject. It was hard not to like him.”
Not that Ramanujan was the hail-fellow-well-met type. More often he seemed shy, his geniality emerging more among a few friends than in a crowd. Nor was he particularly attuned to interpersonal nuance. More than one otherwise fond reminiscence is like that of N. Hari Rao, a college classmate from Kumbakonam, who visited Ramanujan in Madras during this period. “He would open his notebooks and explain to me intricate theorems and formulae without in the least suspecting that they were beyond my understanding or knowledge.” He just didn’t pick up. Once Ramanujan was lost in mathematics, the other person was as good as gone.
And yet, ironically, this same want of social sensitivity conferred on him a species of charm. For its flip side was an innocence, a sincerity, upon which all who knew him invariably remarked.
“Ramanujan was such a simple soul that one could never be unfriendly toward him,” recalled N. Raghunathan, a high school classmate who himself went on to become a mathematics professor. His humor ran toward the obvious. His puns were crude. His idea of entertainment was puppet shows, or bommalattam; or else simple street dramas, terrukutu, that ran all night during village festivals and to which Ramanujan would go with friends, cracking jokes and telling stories along the way. Ramanujan wore his spirits on his sleeve. There was something so direct, so unassuming, so transparent about him that it melted distrust, made you want to like him, made you want to help him.
In Kumbakonam a few years before, an old woman from the neighborhood had taken Ramanujan under her wing, often inviting him in for midday snacks. “She knew nothing of mathematics,” one of Ramanujan’s Indian biographers would note. But it was “the gleam in the eyes of Ramanujan and his total absorption in something—it is these that had endeared Ramanujan to her.” And that unstudied absorption drew others to him, too.
People didn’t take to Ramanujan because he was sensitive to them, or because he was especially considerate. They might not understand his mathematics. They might even flirt with the idea that he was a crank. And they might, in the end, be unable to help him. But, somehow, they couldn’t help but like him.
• • •
Sometime late in 1910, Ramanujan boarded a northbound train from Kumbakonam and, about halfway to Madras, got off at Villupuram, just west of Pondicherry, the coastal city then still in French hands. At Villupuram, he changed trains for the twenty-mile trip west to Tirukoilur, a town of about nine thousand that was headquarters of its district. In Tirukoilur, V. Ramaswami Iyer held the midlevel government post of deputy collector. (Iyer, also spelled Aiyar, was the caste name of Brahmins who worshipped Siva, and was ubiquitous in South India.)
What made Ramaswami especially worth traveling to see was that he was a mathematician; in particular, he had recently founded the Indian Mathematical Society. Everyone called him “Professor,” though he held no academic post. Back while a student at Presidency College, it seems, he had contributed mathematical articles to the Educational Times in England. Its editors, assuming he was a college professor, addressed him as such, and the name stuck.
Now, as ever, Ramanujan came armed with his notebook. The Professor looked at it. He was a geometer, and the mathematics he saw before him was mostly unfamiliar. Still, at least in the glow of memory, “I was struck by the extraordinary mathematical results contained in it.” Did that mean he would give Ramanujan a job in the taluk office? Hardly. “I had no mind to smother his genius by an appointment in the lowest rungs of the revenue department,” he wrote later. So he sent him on his way, with notes of introduction, to mathematical friends in Madras.
One of them, a charter member of the Mathematical Society, was P. V. Seshu Iyer, a pinch-faced man with glasses who’d been one of Ramanujan’s professors at Government College. Since about 1906, they’d not seen one another. Now, four years later, Seshu Iyer had moved up to Presidency College in Madras. Ramanujan met him there, notebooks in hand, but also this
time with Ramaswami Iyer’s recommendation. He left with leads and yet other notes of introduction.
He went to see S. Balakrishna Iyer, then himself just starting his career as a mathematics lecturer at Teachers’ College in the Madras suburb of Saidapet. Would he, Ramanujan asked, recommend him to his English boss, a certain Dodwell, for a job as a clerk? It didn’t matter how poorly it paid; anything would do. Balakrishna served him coffee, looked at his notebooks, which he didn’t understand, and later went to see Dodwell three or four times on Ramanujan’s behalf. Nothing came of it. “I was not big enough,” apologized Balakrishna Iyer later—not important enough to exert any influence.
In December, Ramanujan went to see R. Ramachandra Rao, who was indeed “big enough.” Educated at Madras’s Presidency College, he had joined the provincial civil service in 1890, at the age of nineteen, and in time rose to become registrar of the city’s Cooperative Credit Societies. Now he was district collector of Nellore, a town of about thirty-five thousand, a hundred miles up the East Coast Railway from Madras. Earlier in the year, he had been named “Dewan Bahadur,” which was something like a British knight. All this, and he was a mathematician, too, serving as secretary of the Indian Mathematical Society, the group Ramaswami Iyer had founded four years earlier, and even sometimes contributing solutions to problems posed in its Journal. Intelligent, wealthy, and well connected, R. Ramachandra Rao was just the kind of paternal figure, at the head of a retinue of family and friends, through whose offices one got things done in India.
Just how Ramanujan got an audience with him is unclear, though accounts agree that Ramachandra Rao’s nephew, R. Krishna Rao, was the final intermediary. Ramanujan’s friend, Radhakrishna Iyer, to whom he’d earlier given his notebooks for safekeeping, said he wrote his father-in-law, an engineer in Nellore, to arrange the meeting. Seshu Iyer said later that he paved the way. Ramanujan’s English friend, Neville, later speculated that Seshu Iyer did indeed supply Ramanujan with a letter of introduction to Ramachandra Rao—but that Ramanujan was “too timid” to use it. He may, then, have needed some extra push to go and meet this powerful man. If so, he got it from C. V. Rajagopalachari.
The Man Who Knew Infinity Page 10