The Man Who Knew Infinity

by Robert Kanigel

  The astrologer looked for something—anything—by which to inspire hope. But after half an hour’s study of the two horoscopes, laid side by side, he was reduced to nothing beyond suggesting that perhaps Ramanujan and Janaki might wish to live apart for a while.

  That, of course, was just what Komalatammal wanted to hear. “I have been … pleading with my son to send her away to her parents’ house,” she said. “But, alas, he utterly refuses. He has been always an obedient son. But in this matter, his obstinacy is unbreakable.”

  • • •

  Did Ramanujan now know he was dying? According to another of those enduring myths that surrounded tuberculosis, the victim was the last to realize his approaching death. “Buoyed up by spes phthisca, a delusive hope of recovery,” one student of tuberculosis, Nan Marie McMurry, recounts, “the consumption patient was supposed to anticipate a return to health on the deathbed.”

  But Ramanujan suffered no such delusions and often during his final months told his doctor he had lost the will to live. Earlier, it is true, he had said he would accept a university position offered him once he had recovered his health. And as recently as January, around the time he wrote Hardy about mock theta functions, he expressed interest in subscribing to new math journals. But the dark superstitious side of him saw things more blackly—and, as it happens, more accurately. He had long before read his own horoscope as predicting his death before age thirty-five. And brought to Harrington Road, he punned on the name of the Madras suburb, Chetput, in which it was located; “chat-pat,” in Tamil, meant “it will happen soon.”

  During his last months, Ramanujan drew closer to Janaki, with whom, when he wasn’t exploding at her in a fit, he now had a warmer, more relaxed relationship. “He was uniformly kind to me,” Janaki recalled. “In his conversation he was full of wit and humor,” was forever cracking jokes. As if trying to cheer her up, he plied her with tales of England—of his visits to the British Museum, and the animals he’d seen there, of the time in Cambridge when an English guest eating a South Indian dish he had prepared chomped down on a piece of hot pepper …

  His life came down a little from the heights of mathematics to small things, human things. He would summon Janaki with a little bell, or would tap with a stick. He told C. S. Rama Rao Sahib, Ramachandra Rao’s son-in-law, how much he craved the rasam he had enjoyed almost a decade before in those destitute days of 1910 at Victoria Hostel—and loved it when somebody brought him some.

  Still, it was not an easy death. Whatever cheerfulness or equanimity he could muster—and some of his friends preferred later to remember him that way—papered over a grim despair. He was sullen and angry much of the time. His mood was volatile, resting on a hair trigger. Janaki felt later—so had Hardy in England, and so did many of his friends in India—that his illness had affected his mind. He was forever raving at one thing or another. There was a tray kept nearby with lentils, spices, and rice, and once, in a fit of anger and pain, Ramanujan pounded it all together with a stick. Narasimha Iyengar, hurt at finding Ramanujan so sullen and cold when he greeted him at the Central Station, visited him now again on Harrington Road. “I found to my great grief that though physically living, he was mentally dead to the world, even to his once dear friends.”

  Toward the end, “he was only skin and bones,” Janaki remembered later. He complained terribly of the pain. It was in his stomach, in his leg. When it got bad, Janaki would heat water in brass vessels and apply hot wet towels to his legs and chest; “fomentation,” it was called, standard therapy at the time. But through all the pain and fever, through the endless household squabbles, through his own disturbed equanimity, Ramanujan, lying in bed, his head propped up on pillows, kept working. When he requested it, Janaki would give him his slate; later, she’d gather up the accumulated sheets of mathematics-covered paper to which he had transferred his results and place them in the big leather box which he had brought from England. “He wouldn’t talk to anyone who came to the house,” said Janaki later. “It was always maths… . Four days before he died he was scribbling.”

  Early on April 26, 1920, he lapsed into unconsciousness. For two hours, Janaki sat with him, feeding him sips of dilute milk. Around midmorning or perhaps a little earlier, he died. With him were his wife, his parents, his two brothers, and a few friends. He was thirty-two years old.

  At the funeral later that day, most of his orthodox Brahmin relatives stayed away; Ramanujan had crossed the waters and, too sick on his return to make the trip to Rameswaram for the purification ceremonies his mother had planned, was still tainted in their eyes. Ramachandra Rao arranged the cremation, through his son-in-law and Ramanujan’s boyhood friend, Rajagopalachari. At about one in the afternoon, his emaciated body was put to the flames on the cremation ground near Chetput.

  The next day, assigning it Registration No. 228, a government clerk officially recorded his death.

  4. A SON OF INDIA

  The astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar grew up in Lahore, in what was then northern India, moved to Madras when he was eight, attended Presidency College there, then Cambridge’s Trinity College (where he met Hardy), went on to propose the theoretical underpinnings for black holes, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983. In 1920, he was just nine years old, but he well recalls how one day in late April of that year his mother, reading about it in the newspaper, told him of the death of Ramanujan. “Though I had no idea at that time of what kind of a mathematician Ramanujan was or indeed what scientific achievement meant,” Chandrasekhar would tell an American audience almost seven decades later,

  I can still recall the gladness I felt at the assurance that one brought up under circumstances similar to my own could have achieved what I could not grasp.

  The fact that Ramanujan’s early years were spent in a scientifically sterile atmosphere, that his life in India was not without hardships, that under circumstances that appeared to most Indians as nothing short of miraculous, he had gone to Cambridge, supported by eminent mathematicians, and had returned to India with every assurance that he would be considered, in time, as one of the most original mathematicians of the century—these facts were enough, more than enough, for aspiring young Indian students to break their bonds of intellectual confinement and perhaps soar the way that Ramanujan had.

  In the India of the 1920s, he would say at another time, “We were proud of Mahatma Gandhi, of Nehru, of [the Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath] Tagore, of Ramanujan. We were proud of the fact that anything we could do would equate to anything else in the world.” Within Indian mathematics, of course, Ramanujan’s influence extended correspondingly deeper. “I think it is fair to say,” Chandrasekhar would observe, “that almost all the mathematicians who reached distinction during the three or four decades following Ramanujan were directly or indirectly inspired by his example.” (One brilliant young mathematics student at Madras’s Presidency College, T. Vijayaraghavan, deliberately neglected his studies and failed his examinations, the more perfectly to follow in Ramanujan’s footsteps.)

  Such was Ramanujan’s impact on India during the years after his death. But back in the family, preoccupied by the daily cares of life and filled with painful memories of the last difficult years, his death left a wake much smaller, yet just as keenly felt.

  In the 1930s, Chandrasekar, the tuberculosis expert who had treated Ramanujan in his final months, was asked by an old Madras friend of Ramanujan whether anything could have been done to save him. Yes, he replied, flying into a rage, Ramanujan could have been saved, should have been, and his mother and wife were to blame, at least in part. The day after Ramanujan died, he wrote in his diary:

  If he had been allowed to follow my instructions, this double tragedy need not have taken place. The neglect of Ramanujan during his early phase—perhaps partly due to the ignorance of his contemporaries, as well as his relatives’ (mother’s and wife’s) contributory (I almost feel like using the stronger word “criminal”) negligence have contributed to
this double tragedy—a tragedy which is too deep for tears.

  Chandrasekar (who had lost his most illustrious patient, and so may have had his own axe to grind) pictured both wife and mother wallowing in the mire of materialism. But both before Ramanujan’s death and now, after it, they were scarcely in a position to ignore the economic facts of their lives. Whatever else he was, Ramanujan was, through his ample fellowships, a breadwinner. Now he was gone, and yes: there was a grappling for what seemed might be the spoils.

  On April 29, with Ramanujan’s ashes scarcely cold, his eighteen-year-old brother, Lakshmi Narasimhan, wrote Hardy with the news of his death (which Hardy had doubtless already heard). Using language appropriate to a battle dispatch, Lakshmi Narasimhan complained that Ramanujan’s books and papers were “entirely under the control of his wife here.” He had heard through Ramachandra Rao’s son-in-law, he said, that the government would be providing Janaki a small monthly stipend. “I am very sorry that such an arrangement was not made for my family.” Janaki, plainly enough, was not part of the family.

  It was a pathetic plea, and one that hinted at the pressures Ramanujan had withstood as a young man in order to pursue mathematics rather than establishing himself in a good job. His father had gone blind about when Ramanujan left for England, said Lakshmi Narasimhan. His grandmother was lame. “Besides these,” said the young man in whose hands the family’s fortunes now rested, “I have got a corpulent mother who resembles my brother in all his physical features.” As for himself, he had suspended efforts on his own behalf over the past year, in order to help his brother.

  I have no uncles or cousins to protect me. We have no property, as you might have known very well. I have a great desire to study and I wish “to neglect worldly ends, all dedicated to closeness and the bettering of my mind” (Tempest). I have no taste, sorry to say, for Mathematics. I like to read Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and wish to travel in the fairy land “half flying half on foot.” I do not know how to feed them. Therefore, I humbly request you to write to the Madras University to give a monthly allowance to us. I have been told that my brother is entitled to get a sum from the Cambridge University.

  In short, I am a young man. One day passes with great difficulty. I do not know how to protect them. Unless any arrangement is made to support us, we have to go a-begging from door to door. I entrust the whole case into your hands. It is your bounden duty to protect us.

  There is no reason to think Hardy did anything of the kind, and the family drifted back into something like the obscurity that was, save for the accident of Ramanujan’s birth, its natural lot.

  A few months after Ramanujan’s death, his sixty-five-year-old father got sick and was brought to the Pycroft’s Road house of Narayana Iyer. There, Komalatammal and Narayana Iyer’s wife looked after him until, in November, in the house where Ramanujan and Narayana Iyer had stayed up late doing mathematics, he died.

  Komalatammal, meanwhile, never recovered from her son’s death. “She lost her optimism and became very often sullen,” said one old friend of the family, K. Srinivasa Raghavan, who had become a college professor. After making no effort to contact him for the past seven years, in August 1927 she wrote Hardy, invoking the help of a scribe or family friend to cast her Tamil into lucid English. Her son Lakshmi Narasimhan, she reported, had passed his Intermediate examination (the new name for the F.A. exam Ramanujan had always failed) and now worked for the post office in Triplicane. Tirunarayanan attended Presidency College and had earned his B.A. degree early that year.

  Most of the rest of the three-page letter outlined the family’s fragile economic footing, detailed the meager pensions it received, and recounted her troubles. “I sent my son to England in 1914 thinking that my family, ever wedded to poverty, would become rich, and that my son would become famous. Like Achilles, he won everlasting fame; like Achilles, he died young.” Now, she asked Hardy to intercede on her sons’ behalf with the government and with the India Office in London. She wanted for them high positions in the post office department—the better-educated Tirunarayanan as probationary superintendent of post offices, and Lakshmi Narasimhan as inspector of post offices in Madras. Whether or not Hardy interceded, Tirunarayanan did become assistant postmaster. The more flamboyant Lakshmi Narasimhan died while still young.

  Long-time family friend Anantharaman, at whose house Ramanujan ate often as a boy, had been in bed recovering from a leg operation when his uncle told him of Ramanujan’s death. It came as a great shock. Later, during the late 1930s, Komalatammal would visit him and his family in Triplicane and, he would recall, “console herself by seeing us, and say she was feeling as though she were seeing her son Chinnaswami himself.”

  Janaki, meanwhile, had gone her own way. Ramanujan had worried about how she’d be treated by the family after his death. She was a twenty-year-old widow, and widows were virtually an oppressed class in India, apt to be ill-treated and despised. She had no education, no skills. Her brother and mother, who had arrived in Chetput two days before Ramanujan’s death, figured she could expect no help from Komalatammal and the rest of Ramanujan’s family.

  So after the cremation she returned with her mother to Rajendram. Then, for the next six years she lived with her brother, who became an income tax officer, in Bombay. When she learned of the twenty-rupee-per-month pension awarded her by the university in return for her rights to Ramanujan’s papers, she returned to Madras, briefly staying with her sister in Triplicane. Soon she found her own place—a house on Hanumantharayan Street two doors from where she and Ramanujan had lived before he’d left for England. There she stayed for most of the next half century.

  She had learned to embroider and work a sewing machine in Bombay, and so now she scratched out a living making clothes and teaching tailoring to girls. In 1937, S. Chandrasekhar, the astrophysicist, asked by Hardy to try to find a good photograph of Ramanujan next time he was in India, tracked her down in Triplicane. She was, Chandrasekhar reported back, “having a rather difficult life, some of her unscrupulous relatives having swindled her out of such financial resources as R[amanujan] had left her,” and unable even to get hold of a copy of her husband’s Collected Papers, published a few years before.

  Around 1948, Janaki began taking care of a small boy, Narayanan, whose mother was in the hospital and who himself suffered from typhus. She visited him in the hospital, nursed him there, brought him books for school. Later, both his parents died, and Narayanan went to live with her. When she couldn’t both take care of him and support herself as a seamstress, he briefly left to attend a residential school. But when he was about fifteen, he came back to live with her for good, and she adopted him as her son.

  • • •

  At the time of Ramanujan’s death in April 1920, the editor of the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society had fallen so far behind his publication schedule that the issue bearing the news was dated December 1919. Into copies of that issue, small olive green slips of paper, bordered in black, were inserted:

  THE LATE MR. S. RAMANUJAN

  We deeply regret to announce the untimely death of Mr. S. Ramanujan, B.A., F.R.S., on Monday, the 26th of April 1920, at his residence at Chetput, Madras. An account of his life and work will appear in a subsequent issue of this journal.

  Seven months later, the journal carried two obituary notices. One, by P. V. Seshu Iyer, furnished the facts and dates; it may have been at his request that Lakshmi Narasimhan had assembled the family record of Ramanujan’s life. The other, by Ramachandra Rao, reprinted from another magazine, was more lyrical: “And he is no more,” it began—

  He whose name shed a lustre on all India, whose career is understood as the severest condemnation of the present exotic [sic] system of education: whose name was always appealed to, if any one forgetful of India’s past ventured to doubt her intellectual capabilities.

  There was something endlessly appealing about Ramanujan’s life to Indian sensibilities. Some might see his early school failures,
as Hardy did, as “the worst instance that I know of the damage that can be done by an inefficient and inelastic educational system.” To others among the English, his life might seem the stuff of cinema, a rags-to-intellectual-riches story. But to many Indians, it was the idea of the luminous light of his intellect lurking behind the rags that was so compelling, his seeming disdain for the shallow plaudits of the world. “Even when two Continents were publishing his results,” wrote Ramachandra Rao,

  he remained the same childish man, with no style in dress or affectation of manner, with the same kind face, with the same simplicity. Pilgrims came to Ramanujan’s chambers and wondered if this was he… . If I am to sum up Ramanujan in one word, I would say, Indianality.

  Even before his death, he was being seen as a boon to emerging Indian identity: “By his unique mathematical talents and by the amount of useful and original work [he has performed],” the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society said of him, “he has raised India in the estimation of the outside world.” S. Chandrasekhar would observe, accurately enough, that “Ramanujan represents so extreme a fluctuation from the norm that his being born an Indian must be considered to a large extent as accidental.” And India could take pride in many others among its countrymen who had made it in the West, or upon the great stage of the world generally. Still, at least among its scientists, few were more “Indian” than Ramanujan.

  India was a shapeless mass of poverty, of ceaseless struggle for the material necessities of life? Ramanujan, if only reluctantly and only in order to work, shared in that struggle.

  India was the Essential East, standing apart from, and independent of, the West? Ramanujan had spent his formative years, and done much of his most individual work, within a day’s rail journey of his hometown. He had lived a life almost untouched by the seductive charms of the West, had never had any particular desire to leave India. And when the time came that he did, he bristled at his transformation into an English gentleman.