What I have never quite been able to make out is how God can become as real to the unbeliever as to the believer.
Let me give an example. In the spring of 1903, on a sunny afternoon at the very beginning of the cricket season, I went off to Fenner's to watch a match. I was in a good humor. That day the world, as it so rarely does, seemed kindly and beneficent to me. No sooner had I taken my seat, however, than the rain started pouring down. Naturally I had not brought my umbrella. Curses, I thought, and went back to my rooms to change.
The afternoon of the next match was equally beautiful. This time, however, I decided to prepare myself. I brought not only an umbrella—an enormous one, borrowed from Gertrude—but put on a raincoat and galoshes. And wouldn't you know it? The sun shone all the day.
The afternoon of the third match, I risked leaving the umbrella behind. It rained again.
The afternoon of the fourth match, I brought not just the umbrella, not just the raincoat and galoshes, but three sweaters, a dissertation, and a paper that the London Mathematical Society had asked me to referee. Before I left, I said to my bedmaker, “I hope it rains today, because then I'll be able to get some work done.”
This time it did not rain, and I was able to spend the afternoon watching cricket.
From then on, I referred to the umbrella, the papers, and the sweaters as my “anti-God battery.” The umbrella I saw as being of particular importance. In order not to have to return it to Gertrude, I bought her a new one, with her initials engraved on the handle.
Usually, in this little game, I got the best of God. But sometimes God got the best of me.
One summer, for instance, I was sitting in the sun at Fenner's with my usual arsenal of sweaters and work, enjoying the play, when suddenly the batsman put down his bat and complained to the umpires that he could not see. Some sort of reflection was casting a glare that got in his eyes. The umpires searched for the source of the glare. Glass? There were no windows on that side of the grounds. An automobile? No road.
Then I saw: on the sidelines stood a portly vicar with an enormous cross hung round his neck. The sunlight was bouncing off the cross. I called an umpire's attention to the ungainly medallion, and the vicar was asked, very politely, to take it off.
That vicar: I remember that, though ultimately he complied with the umpire's request, first he had to protest and argue and deny for a while. He wasn't about to give up his cross without a fight. Of course he had an enormous arse. He belonged to that category of men whom I call the “large-bottomed,” by which I mean something as spiritual as it is physical: a certain complacency that comes from always having your place in the world affirmed. From never having to struggle or feel yourself to be an outsider.
I can't claim credit for the phrase. It has been drifting around Trinity since the eighteenth century, traceable, I am told, to a geologist called Sedgwick. “No one,” he is reputed to have uttered, “ever made a success in this world without a large bottom.”
Of course, the world is filled, and always has been, with large-bottomed mathematicians, most of whom claim to believe in God. And how, I have often wondered, do they reconcile their faith with their work? Most don't even try. They just file religion away in one drawer and mathematics in another. Filing things away in different drawers and not thinking about the contradictions is a classic trait of the large-bottomed.
Some, though, aren't content with this solution. These mathematicians are in many ways more vexing because they try to explain mathematics in terms of religion, as an aspect of what they call God's “grand design.” According to them, any scientific theory can be made compatible with Christianity on the grounds that it is part of a divine plan. Even Darwin's ideas about evolution, which seem to negate the existence of God, can be swaddled in a doctrine that has God stirring the primordial soup, sparking the process of mutation and survival of the fittest with each turn of his magical spoon. Then there are the papers that for some reason large-bottomed men seem always to feel the need to send to me, offering ontological proofs for God's existence. I throw them in the rubbish bin. Because all this effort to make mathematics part of God is part of the effort to make mathematics useful, if not to the state, then to the church. And this I cannot abide.
Only once in my life, I am proud to say, have I made a contribution to practical science. Years ago, before we started playing tennis together, Punnett and I used to play cricket. One afternoon after the match, he asked me for help with a question concerning Mendel and his theory of genetics. A geneticist with the unfortunate name of Udny Yule (the war would later make us enemies) had published a paper arguing that if, as Mendel suggested, dominant genes always won out over recessive ones, then over time a condition known as brachydactyly—leading to shortened fingers and toes, and caused by a dominant gene—would increase in the human population until the ratio of those with the condition to those without would be three to one. Although this obviously wasn't the case, Punnett was at a loss as to how he might counter the argument. Yet I saw the answer at once, and wrote it up in a letter that I posted to Science.
“I am reluctant to intrude in a discussion concerning matters of which I have no expert knowledge,” I wrote, “and I should have expected the very simple point which I wish to make to have been familiar to biologists.” It was not, of course, even though, as I phrased it, “a little mathematics of the multiplication-table type” was enough to show that Yule was wrong and the ratio would in fact remain fixed.
Much to my surprise, this little letter made me famous in genetics circles. Soon the geneticists started referring to my little proof as “Hardy's Law,” which embarrassed me, both because I never in my life wished to have anything so monolithic as a law named in my honor, and because this particular law lent ballast to a theory that has as often been used to argue for God's existence as against it.
Yet I had one reason to be glad. Over the years I had read many newspaper articles decrying what the doctors had just then started calling “homosexuality,” complaining of its prevalence and making predictions that if the “disposition,” already “on the rise,” should continue to “spread,” the human race itself would risk extinction. Of course, in my considered opinion, the extinction of the human race is immensely desirable, and would benefit not only the planet but the many other species that inhabit it. Even so, the mathematician in me could not help but balk at the fallacy behind the warning. It was the same fallacy that Hardy's Law had demolished. Just as, if Udny Yule was correct, there should eventually be more brachydactylics than normal-fingered and -toed men and women, so, if the articles were correct, inverts should soon outnumber normal men and women, when the truth, of course, is that ratio will remain fixed.
Yet all that, ultimately, is beside the point—which, I suppose, is the point, the one that Ramanujan understood better than any of us.
When a mathematician works—when, as I think of it, he “goes into” work—he enters a world that, for all its abstraction, seems far more real to him than the world in which he eats and talks and sleeps. He needs no body there. The body, with its blandishments, is an impediment. I was foolish, I see now, even to bother trying to explain the tripos to O. B. Analogy can only take you a certain distance, and in mathematics, it's not long before you reach the point where analogy fails.
This was the world in which Ramanujan and I were happiest—a world as remote from religion, war, literature, sex, even philosophy, as it was from that cold room in which, for so many mornings, I drilled for the tripos under Webb. Since then, I have heard of mathematicians imprisoned because they were dissenters or pacifists, and then relishing the rare solitude that a gaol gave them. For them, gaol was a respite from the vagaries of having to feed themselves and dress themselves and earn money and spend it; a respite, even, from life, which, for any true mathematician, is not the thing, but the thing that interferes.
A slate and some chalk. That's all you need. Not pianos or thimbles or nails or saucepans. Not sledgehammers. Certai
nly not Bibles. A slate and some chalk, and that world—the real world—is yours.
6
IT IS THREE DAYS after New Year's Day, 1914, and Alice Neville— twenty-four years old and newly arrived in Madras—is sitting by herself in the dining room of the Hotel Connemara, doing battle over a slice of cake with a crow. Behind her a turbaned waiter flaps at the crow with a plumed fan, trying to drive it back to the window through which it flew. Every time the waiter shoos it away, though, the crow spirals up to the ceiling. Then, as soon as the waiter has turned around, it descends again to try to eat the cake. It seems to take a mischievous pleasure in the game. So does the waiter, who brandishes his fan like a sword. So does Alice, who's trying not to laugh. Not far away, at a round table, much too large for them, three English ladies wearing hats decorated with elaborate floral displays arch their eyes in disapproval and anxiety as they watch Alice banter with the waiter and the crow. Then a second crow flies through one of the long windows, and aims with gladiatorial precision at their table. Instantly all three get up and scream. They are dressed, Alice sees, in the fashion of twenty-five years ago: high waists cinched by corsets, bustled skirts hemmed half an inch above the toe. Alice, by contrast, wears a flowing, jade-colored dress that brushes the ground. Flat shoes. (“Heels are a disaster when traveling,” her aunt Daisy told her.) No corsets or stays. Her hair is still wet from the bath. She has no hat on and, perhaps most scandalous of all, she is sitting by herself in a room all the other occupants of which, with the exception of the trio of ladies, are men. Alice is a more proper girl than she pretends: for example, she has never gone to bed with any man other than her husband, and never intends to. Still, she takes a certain pleasure in raising eyebrows.
Now she puts a cigarette in her mouth and the waiter, before she can even ask him, bends down to light it for her. His proximity provokes in her a mild frisson of pleasure that she makes no effort to disguise. After all, the waiter is handsome and dark, dressed in a white robe with red and gold sashes. His attentions to her must outrage the trio of ladies. No doubt they have already marked Alice as a “new woman,” even though today in England the “new woman” is no longer new. In fact the term is rather démodé. Yet if, as she suspects, these ladies have lived all or most of their lives in India, it's to be expected that they should be a bit behind the times. Why, for all they know, she might be an adventuress researching a travelogue, someone like the writer who calls herself “Israfel,” whose book about India is lying open on Alice's table next to the embattled cake slice. Israfel writes in the guise of a man. (Alice knows she's a woman only from Aunt Daisy, who travels in the same circles as the pseudonymous scribe.) For Israfel, the Anglo-Indians are contemptible “ivory apes” with complexions like “kippered herrings or boiled soles.” The typical colonial woman has “never read anything, heard anything, or thought anything; and instead of this blissful state of vacuity making her quite charming, it only makes her dull.” By contrast, how reverently Israfel describes Indian women “in gaudy saris, with silver anklets clinking lazily on their dusky limbs, silver studs in their noses, and lustrous soulless kohl-ringed eyes”! Israfel marvels at a nautch dancer's “tinseled skirts glorious with mock jewels.” She asks: “Do you think she will ever wear a false fringe and high-heeled shoes?”
Alice, certainly, would never wear a false fringe or high-heeled shoes. Like Aunt Daisy, she is an advocate of dress reform. For if a woman did wear high-heeled shoes, how could she tramp around Madras, as Alice intends to do, and would have done already, had the hotel manager not so strenuously urged her, instead, to ride in a gharry driven by a hotel retainer, a man named Govindran, as dark and skinny as his horse? “It is not safe, an English lady alone in Madras,” the manager told her, and entrusted her to Govindran—too ugly and devout, presumably, to pose any threat. And so she has explored Madras not, as she hoped, alone, and on foot, but, rather, in a rickety carriage driven by an old man in a dirty turban who—when she tells him that she wants to get out and look around a bit, drag her skirts, for a moment at least, in the dirt of India— squats on the ground next to his vehicle and chews a leaf that stains his few teeth red. Govindran is her closest companion on this voyage, more so than the waiter who protects her from crows, more so, even, than Eric, whom she has hardly seen since their arrival. When she asks Govindran a question, he nods neither yes nor no but waggles his head in a way that seems halfway between the two. In his company, she has gazed up at pyramidal temples encrusted with delicately painted, bas-relief multitudes: deities, horses, elephants. With astonishing ease, even languor, he has maneuvered her around the swift-running, barefoot rickshaw-wallahs (everyone who does anything in India, it seems, is a wallah), and warded off the clutches of beggar children reaching into the carriage to grab what they can, and parted the crowds of humans and cows, the latter usually more colorfully decorated than the former, as if he were Moses parting the Red Sea. Once he stopped, and they watched as a cow, bejeweled and belled and tied to a post, placidly ate its hay. From its behind, grassy cakes of dung fell blithely, from between its legs a urine stream of stunning pungency splashed against the dirt. Everywhere in Madras there are cow pats to step around gingerly, and puddles of cow urine, which, according to Eric, the local people mix with milk and drink. As for Eric, he's off all day giving his lectures at the University Senate House. Like most of the English buildings in Madras, this one is huge, ostentatious, and, in Alice's view, ugly in the way that only Victorian architecture can be. How much she prefers the narrow streets of Triplicane, the Parthasarathy Temple with its cake decoration deities and the low houses and the doors over which, for good fortune, contorted crosses are painted! Swastikas, they're called. This is the neighborhood, she knows, in which Ramanujan lives, perhaps behind one of the swastika-marked doors. The Senate House, on the other hand, is a Victorian hodgepodge, combining Italianate spires with onion domes and minarets willy-nilly. Its walls are solid British red brick, and though there is the occasional nod to the Indo-Saracenic—in the massive central hall, the stone pillars are carved, like the temple façades, with deities and animals—the final effect is akin to that of her grandfather's sitting room, in which the Indian rugs that he hauled home from his stint in Jaipur underlay a motley of stools and velvet fenders and hulking cupboards stocked with Royal Worcester. Everywhere in that room there were ceramic jars and frilled draperies and lace antimacassars stained a pale yellow by years of hair oil. From the wallpaper, patterned with pansies, a faint but persistent odor of boiled beef emanated. In her diary Alice has written: “My grandparents' sitting room was exemplary of British colonialism, the exotic spoils subdued and made ordinary by what was piled atop them.” She aspires to write. She aspires to be a second Israfel.
Now, at last, the waiters seem to have got the crows out of the dining room. (Why doesn't the hotel just hang beaded curtains?) The Anglo-Indian ladies stand uncertainly by their table; it seems that in the course of the fracas, a teacup was upset, and now several of the waiters are laying fresh linens and putting out silverware. From the look of them, two of the ladies are in their late fifties, but the third is Alice's age or even younger. Alas, she wears an expression no less censorious than those of her elders. Through spectacles, she peers at Alice with a frank disdain that Alice answers by boldly ordering something to drink. The waiter she thinks of, now, as hers brings her a glass of yellow juice over chunks of ice.
Despite it being January, despite the fans, despite the open windows, the air is stifling. She takes a gulp; something viscous courses down her throat, at once tart and almost unbearably sweet. Aside from Alice and the ladies, the dining room is nearly empty, which hardly comes as a surprise. Who, after all, would want to partake of afternoon tea in such sultry weather? Of the few men scattered about the place, reading their newspapers, none is drinking tea. The ladies alone are drinking tea. They are buttering crumpets. “Now some women do not dress,” Israfel has written. “They pack.” Alice's neighbors, in Israfel's words, are “p
acked in the sort of way that necessitates the footman sitting down on the lid when he locks the trunks.” No doubt they will eat fish and roast mutton for dinner. Last night she herself asked the chef to prepare a native dish for her and Eric—“what the locals have” was how she put it—but the chef, whose dark skin had fooled her into assuming him to be an Indian, turned out to be an Italian, and so they were served spaghetti.
Now, from the purse that rests beside her chair, she pulls out a sheet of paper and a pen. She hopes her neighbors will think she's writing a chapter for her travel book, a chapter about them, when in fact it's just a letter to a friend; a female friend.
Dear Miss Hardy,
In all probability my husband has already been in communication with your brother. Nonetheless I trust you will not object to my writing to inform you personally of our safe arrival in Madras. Although the time that you and I spent together, in the weeks before my departure, was brief, I can say with assurance that from the moment of our first meeting I felt toward you an affection sisterly in nature.
Is that too much? The truth is, at first glance, she found Gertrude unnerving, sitting, as she was, with her legs gathered up over her brother's rattan chair, her dark skirt smoothed over her knees, a white cat in her lap. She was smoking, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling with self-conscious lassitude. Her long hair was plaited and subdivided into distinct systems, held in place by a complex and efficient system of pinning. When Hardy introduced them—“Mrs. Neville, Mr. Neville, my sister, Miss Hardy”—Gertrude untangled herself and stood, gaunter than her brother and a bit taller. All bones. Thin enough to make Alice feel ashamed of her uncorseted hips, the slight rounding of her belly, the unseemly protuberance of her breasts. Yet what was most disturbing about Gertrude—it hit Alice only then— was her left eye. It didn't move with the right one.
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