Finding numbers that were the sum of one pair of cubes was easy. For example, 23 + 33 = 35. But could you get to 35 by adding some other pair of cubes? You couldn’t. And as you tried the integers one by one, it was the same story. One pair sometimes, two pair never—never, that is, until you reached 1729, which was equal to 123 + 13, but also 103 + 93.
How did Ramanujan know? It was no sudden insight. Years before, he had observed this little arithmetic morsel, recorded it in his notebook and, with that easy intimacy with numbers that was his trademark, remembered it.
While Ramanujan was at Colinette House, he got some good news. All through the war, the authorities in Madras had kept up with him through Hardy, periodically extending his leave of absence from the Port Trust and his fellowships from the university. In 1917, Ramanujan’s mother had come to Madras and learned that her son would be named University Professor, earning at least 400 rupees per month—six times what he made as a research scholar before he left. Now, in the wake of his F.R.S., the Madras authorities were fairly falling all over themselves to see what they could do for him. And in late December 1918 or early in the new year, he learned the university had granted him a 250-pound-per-year fellowship. This was on top of a like amount awarded him by Trinity. And it was good for six years. And it permitted him periodic trips back to England.
Ramanujan too well remembered the days in Kumbakonam when he’d lost his scholarship and had to drop out of school; and the period in Madras when he’d scraped by on Ramachandra Rao’s patronage and the few rupees he made from tutoring. Besides, he was embarrassed by his comparative lack of productivity over the past year and a half. And so, on January 11, 1919, he wrote to Dewsbury:
Sir,
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.
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 schools. 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,
S. Ramanujan
About a month later, on Monday, February 24, Ramanujan was well enough to tend to the business of getting his passport. “Age: 30,” the clerk recorded the information. “Profession: Research Student.” Sitting for his passport photo, he held his head, with its full shock of straight black hair, cocked a little to one side, and, with luminous eyes, peered slightly up at the camera. The resulting Hollywood-handsome image was not the Ramanujan his friends knew back in India, nor the Ramanujan Hardy knew in 1914, but that of an ill, much thinner man. His shirt, buttoned to the top, was loose around the neck. Layers of fat no longer pressed against his jacket which—now ill fitting in the other direction—was two sizes too big around his neck and shoulders.
About two weeks later, on March 13, 1919, two short notes by Ramanujan appeared in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society; in them, he revealed new congruence properties of the partition function and a new link between the first and second Rogers-Ramanujan identities. That same day, lightened by notebooks and other papers he had left with Hardy, but encumbered with, among other things, at least a dozen books, a box of raisins for his younger brothers, and a big leather trunk filled with papers, he boarded the Pacific and Orient Lines ship Nagoya.
The Nagoya, of the same recent vintage as the Nevasa only a bit smaller, was steaming for Bombay.
• • •
The India to which Ramanujan was returning had not gone unscathed by the conflict that had bled Europe. Indeed, Madras itself had become a battleground. Immediately upon the declaration of war, the German light cruiser Emden had struck sea lanes in the Indian Ocean, taking prizes and destroying merchant ships. One night she appeared outside Madras. Wartime or not, the harbor lights burned brightly, illuminating the red-striped white tanks of the Burma Oil Company. Mistakenly advised of the Emden’s sinking, British officials were at a dinner party celebrating when the German marauder began to shell the harbor, setting fire to the oil tanks. Later, from ninety miles out at sea, the night sky was still aglow from the fires ashore.
The attack had little strategic impact, but it struck terror in the local citizenry, which may have included Ramanujan’s parents and wife. Many natives, fearful of the Emden’s return, fled the city.
The war purged India of all but about fifteen thousand British troops. A volunteer Indian army of more than a million men had been raised, many of whom, at least in Madras, were untouchables; local recruiters promised them, “When you wear the King-Emperor’s uniform, you will be able to walk through the Brahmin quarter and spit where you like.”
Politically, it was a time of great new strides toward independence. In 1915, Annie Besant, English social reformer and president of Madras’s Theosophical Society, began agitating for Home Rule with the publication of her daily newspaper, New India, and the formation of the Home Rule League. In the same year, Gandhi, already famous for the nonviolent methods of civil disobedience he had forged for the defense of Indian immigrants in South Africa, returned to India, where he began using his new social weapons to form a mass movement; five years later, he would become head of the Indian National Congress.
Change—a chafing at the bonds of the caste system, an awakening of the Indian masses, a resurgent Indian nationalism, a rediscovery of indigenous Indian ways—marked the years Ramanujan was away. All across the subcontinent, the giant was feeling its strength.
Intellectual India, too, felt it. In late December 1916, the Indian Mathematical Society held its first conference, in Madras. Lord Pentland himself opened the proceedings, being met on the steps of Presidency College by R. Ramachandra Rao, the society’s fourth president. “At the present time,” Lord Pentland told the conference, “a young Indian student, Mr. S. Ramanujan”—cheers erupted from the audience—“is studying at Cambridge whose career we in Southern India are watching with keen interest and high anticipation. You know the story of the discovery of his unusual talent and all here will be glad to hear how entirely he is justifying the efforts which were made to give it full scope.”
Everyone knew the story by now. Back in May 1914, the Nevasa having borne him away barely two months before, Ramanujan was already being heralded in the Madras papers.
Mr. S. Ramanujan of Madras, whose work in Higher Mathematics has excited the wonder of Cambridge, is now in residence at Trinity. He will read mainly with the two Fellows of the College—Mr. Hardy and Mr. Littlewood. They are going through masses of work he has already done, and are making some surprising discoveries in it!
When he received his degree, they heard about it back home. When he was named an F.R.S., Madras rolled out the red carpet for him in absentia, in the form of a meeting to honor him at Presidency College. One classmate of his from Pachaiyappa’s College days, K. Chengalvarayan, later recalled how when he met old school friends during these years, “the emergence of Ramanujan into fame was usually one of the topics of talks.”
Ten weeks before Ramanujan’s arrival in Bombay, the Indian Mathematical Society met there for its second conference. Ramanujan’s “brilliant career,” his “very humble origin,” and his elevation to the Royal Society were on every speaker’s lips. He was returning at a bad time, though, at the height of a flu epidemic that would kill ten million people;
among the mathematical society’s small membership alone, it had claimed five lives already. Others who had died during Ramanujan’s time abroad were E. W. Middlemast, the Presidency College mathematics professor who had given him one of his earliest recommendations; and, at the age of forty-two, Singaravelu Mudaliar, his mathematics professor at Pachaiyappa’s College.
Now the lead page of the society’s Journal, dated April 1, 1919, bore the news of Ramanujan’s return. But he was coming back, it advised, “in somewhat indifferent health.”
2. RETURN TO THE CAUVERY
“Where is she?” asked Ramanujan of his mother as he stepped of the ship into the maw of Bombay on March 27, 1919. She was Janaki. His mother was there, and his brother Lakshmi Narasimhan; the two of them had set out for Bombay on the twenty-first. But not his wife. Why fret over Janaki? sniped Komalatammal. Scarcely off the boat, Ramanujan had dropped into the family snake pit. Domestic conflict had sabotaged his last three years in England. Now they dampened his arrival in India.
In fact, the two sides of the family had been out of touch for more than a year. No one knew just where Janaki was. Perhaps back in Rajendram. Or, if she had learned of Ramanujan’s arrival, maybe with her sister in Madras. So, Lakshmi Narasimhan was dispatched to write two identical letters to Janaki asking that she come meet Ramanujan in Madras.
She was back in Rajendram, it turns out, where she’d gone for her brother’s wedding more than a year before. She did know of Ramanujan’s return—but only thanks to the Madras papers, not because her mother-in-law had bothered to inform her. Her brother, R. Srinivasa Iyengar, had advised her not to rejoin the family in Madras. Komalatammal hated her; why place herself within the tiger’s jaws once again? But then the letter came from Lakshmi Narasimhan. Ramanujan, it said, wanted her. That was all it took. She and her brother set off.
“When I go back I shall never be asked to a funeral,” Ramanujan had told Neville before he left. It was one form of the taint he expected to bear, in the eyes of strictly orthodox Brahmins, for going to England. To help remove it, Komalatammal had planned to take her son directly to Rameswaram, for purification ceremonies in the great temple to which the whole family had gone for a pilgrimage in 1901. But now, in Bombay, one look at him decided her against it; Rameswaram, all the way south almost to Ceylon, was another five hundred miles and another hard day on the train beyond Madras. He was just too sick. And so, after a few nights in Bombay, Ramanujan, his mother, and brother boarded the Bombay Mail for the overnight trip to Madras.
• • •
“When I met him alighting from the railway train,” Ramachandra Rao would recall of Ramanujan’s arrival in Madras on April 2, “I foresaw the end.” He looked awful. Making things worse, there was still no Janaki. Why? he asked his mother. This time Komalatammal said something about Janaki being off to tend her father, who was unwell.
Ramanujan was bundled on to a jutka, a two-wheeled, horse-drawn vehicle, which soon pulled away from the bustling area around Central Station. His old friend K. S. Viswanatha Sastri, one of those who’d seen him off from Madras five years before and whom Ramanujan had once tutored in math, followed on behind by bicycle. About three miles south of the station, they reached a large, lovely bungalow on Edward Elliots Road owned by a wealthy trial lawyer. When Viswanatha Sastri got there a little later, Ramanujan was already eating yogurt and sambhar. “If I had this in England,” said Ramanujan, “I would not have gotten sick.”
The weekend before his arrival in Madras, the local papers carried an account of his life prepared by Dewsbury’s office. “This,” Sir Francis Spring scrawled on an interoffice memo, “does not seem to go far enough in satisfying legitimate public interest in a man whose mathematical genius may yet do great things for the world and has already.” He directed Narayana Iyer to rummage through the Port Trust’s Ramanujan files and assemble a much fuller biography. This appeared on April 6. “Mr. S. Ramanujan is a native of Kumbakonam in the Tanjore District of Madras Presidency. He was born in 1888 [sic] of poor and, so far as English goes, illiterate parents of the Vaishnava sect of Brahmins… .”
Ramanujan was offered a university professorship, which he said he would accept when his health improved. Madrasi notables trooped by to visit the convalescing genius, South India’s conquering hero of the intellect, who had shown the Britishers the stuff of which South Indians were made. Now and over the next year, they rushed to pick up his medical and other expenses. They offered him their homes. Top people from the Hindu came by. So did Ramachandra Rao, of course, and Sir Francis Spring, and Narayana Iyer.
To shield him from visitors a little, Ramanujan’s doctor, M. C. Nanjunda Rao, had him moved a half mile or so south to a place called Venkata Vilas on Luz Church Road, named for a nearby Portuguese church (known locally as Kattu Kovil, or Jungle Temple). Now, far from the teeming Triplicane and Georgetown of his youth, he was in the very heart of cultured Madras, peopled by high-born Brahmin intellectuals, lawyers, and scholars, who lived in large compounds, luxuriant with banana trees and betel gardens. It was here, finally, on April 6, that Janaki and her brother caught up with him, followed, about a week later, by Ramanujan’s father, grandmother, and younger brother, from Kumbakonam.
Later that month, on the twenty-fourth, Ramanujan wrote Dewsbury asking for an account of his expenses in England and the trip back and requesting payment of his fellowship in monthly installments. He was settling in for the long haul.
For three months Ramanujan stayed at the bungalow on Luz Church Road. And here, he and Janaki began to forge something like a real relationship. Janaki had been just thirteen when he left. Now she was eighteen. As they never really had before, they began to talk, perhaps now each coming to discover how Komalatammal had intercepted their letters, perhaps finding time for physical intimacy as well.
But the man Janaki, his family, and friends saw was much changed from the man they had known. There were the small superficial changes, of course. He drank coffee now, which he hadn’t much before despite its popularity (more than tea) in South India. His tuft was gone. He was a bit lighter in complexion. He was much thinner; Janaki, seeing him so emaciated and coughing up phlegm, only now realized how sick he was.
But it was the change in his personality that upset his friends most. K. Narasimha Iyengar, with whom Ramanujan had lived for a time in Madras around 1912, had been there to greet him at the train platform. “I found him not a cheerful, chummy and affectionate Ramanujan,” he said later, “but a thoroughly depressed, sullen and cold Ramanujan, even after seeing me, a close and affectionate friend.” Recalled Anantharaman, who visited him at Luz, bearing a bunch of Kumbakonam bananas: “He was not the original Ramanujan. He could [scarcely] speak and his illness had made him peevish.” He was bitter, impatient, sour. His faith was tarnished, too. Once, Anantharaman’s older brother, Ganapathy, said something about gods and temples, and Ramanujan snapped back that “it was foolish talk, and they were only devils.”
Janaki was not immune from his wrath and found him quick to jump on her when disturbed while working. In his passport photo, she thought, he seemed troubled, and the same look crossed his features often over the next year. Other accounts have him yelling at his brother for wasting money, or impetuously scattering things around the house, or even chewing on thermometers placed in his mouth.
The family’s own record of events in Ramanujan’s life, reconstructed after his death (probably by his brother Lakshmi Narasimhan) is over the next year often ambiguous, its cryptic scrawl bearing fragmentary references like “Tamil books,” and “paradox about points,” and “rumor that he was mad.” It records the comings and goings of family members, visits to the house, the receipt of letters, and much other daily minutiae, most of it not fleshed out enough to reconstruct today. But one notation, recorded over and over during the year, leaves little ambiguity: quarrel. Sometimes the quarrels were between Janaki and Komalatammal, sometimes between Janaki and Ramanujan’s grandmother. Sometimes the antagoni
sts went unrecorded. Twice during April the family scribe mentioned quarrels, twice again in July, another time in August, again in September, again in October, and at other times later.
For much of the year, during which the family moved repeatedly, the household was a hellhole of simmering resentment. Once, a battle apparently broke out over whether Ramanujan should go to a sanatorium, another time over some donation or another. Ramanujan’s letter from Colinette House, suggesting that some of his fellowship money go toward scholarships, was another irritant; Komalatammal preferred that her son shower more of his new affluence on the family, not strangers. Janaki was probably no more immune to money’s allure than Komalatammal; years later she recalled how Ramanujan, in his final days, “said he had five thousand rupees in his savings to buy me diamond eardrops and a gold belt.”
• • •
With the approach of the Madras summer and its daytime temperatures over a hundred degrees, Ramanujan’s doctors advised him to head inland to escape the heat and humidity. One possibility was Coimbatore, a city about the size of Kumbakonam located in hill country most of the way west across the southern spine of the Indian subcontinent. Coimbatore would be drier, and ten degrees cooler. But Ramanujan’s mother opted instead for Kodumudi, a sleepy little town of a few thousand people known for its Magudeswara temple, which was unusual in offering common worship to Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. Kodumudi formed one vertex of a twenty-mile-wide triangle of which Namakkal and Erode, Ramanujan’s birthplace, were the other two. For Komalatammal’s side of the family, especially, Kodumudi was like going home.
The district comprising Kodumudi, with rainfall only half as heavy as that of Madras, was mostly brown and bare. But the town itself, occupying a site on the southern bank of the Cauvery, was green. The river, beside which a fertile levee had built up over the years, was broad here, a line of palm trees on the north shore distant enough to savor of a foreign country.
The Man Who Knew Infinity Page 40