The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  I pray you will not take offense at my familiarity, nor, I hope, object if, during my stay here, I write on occasion to share with you those aspects of our adventure that might fail to engage my husband's attention. Mathematicians are more brilliant than most of us, but heaven help us if Mr. Baedeker were to ask them to write his guides!

  A good line. But will Gertrude think so? Gertrude, she knows, writes verse. Caustic and clever verse. Verse of a sort that betrays a certain— well—ambivalent feeling about her life as art mistress at a provincial girls' school:

  There is a girl I can't abide.

  Her name? I'll be discreet.

  I feel I'd need some savoir dire

  Should I her parents meet!

  She says “I never could do Maths.

  When Daddy was at school

  He could not add!” I'd love to say

  “Then Daddy was a fool!”

  When Gertrude showed Alice these verses, published in her school magazine, Alice smiled wanly. How could she admit that she herself could never do maths ? She, the wife of a mathematician ? Gertrude, Alice suspects, despised her at first, because she was everything Gertrude was not: feminine, fertile, beloved of a man whom she, too, loved. Or perhaps Gertrude despised her because she assumed that Alice must by necessity despise tweedy, twiggish Gertrude. This would have been ridiculous. The truth is, from the start, Alice only admired Gertrude— her wit, the humor at once cool and cutting. Here was a woman, like Israfel, who did not suffer fools gladly, a woman thin as an exclamation point, and just as emphatic. There was this to be said for invisibility: Gertrude could observe the world from the hidden safety of corners into which Alice, with her large hips, could never possibly fit.

  I am sorry to say that I have not, as yet, had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ramanujan. However, Mr. Neville is to meet him to-day. Indeed, I suspect that Mr. Ramanujan may be the reason why my husband is late returning to the hotel for dinner!

  Is that cruel, reminding Gertrude of what she, Alice, has that Gertrude never will? Or, more accurately, what Gertrude has chosen never to have? For if she is a spinster, Alice suspects, it is mostly by choice. Like her brother, Gertrude considers herself far more hideous than she actually is, which is perhaps why, instead of finding a job in London, she has elected to live enisled among pupils whom, if the girl in the poem is any example, she loathes totally:

  “In dictée I got minus two;

  There's not a verb I know;

  I always write the future tense

  Of 'rego,’ 'regebo.’”

  Her brother is just as strange. A few months before she and Eric boarded the ship for India, he came to tea at their house with Littlewood: two good-looking men, both short of stature, one blond and the other dark. They behaved, she later told Eric, like a married couple, finishing each other's sentences. “Don't tell Littlewood that!” Eric replied.

  All through that tea, Hardy ignored her. More than anything, he reminded her of a squirrel, alert and bustling and timid all at once. He talked only with Eric, and only about the Indian, whom he claimed might be another Newton. Littlewood, at least, made an effort. He said he thought the William Morris wallpaper “very aesthetic.” He complimented her dress and told her that she would be invaluable to her husband on the journey.

  Please tell your brother that I send him my warmest regards and that he may rest assured that my husband and I will do all we can to persuade Mr. Ramanujan to come to Cambridge. That said, I feel that I can confess to you, Miss Hardy, how deeply discomfited I am at the prospect. Like you and your brother, I do not consider myself, in any puritanical sense, to be a Christian. Yet does our decision to live outside the bounds of organised religion give us the right to treat another's piety as superfluous or absurd?

  As if in chastisement, a church clock strikes five. Now Eric really is late. Although dusk has yet to fall, the light coming through the windows is getting more diffuse. Through a blur she sees that the men with the newspapers are leaving. The ladies in the plumed hats are fussing with their handbags, preparing to return, no doubt, to husbands awaiting suppers. And suddenly it dawns on Alice that once the ladies leave, she will be the only customer remaining in the vast room. The waiters, without ever betraying their impatience, will continue to light her cigarettes, pretending not to care that she alone is keeping them from getting on with their work, keeping them from replacing the teacups and teaspoons with fish knives and forks and dinner plates: the endless changing of table settings that signifies the progress of morning into afternoon into night, one day into the next … Something to write about? Her glass is mostly empty now. What's left of the tart, sugary drink the melted ice has rendered pale yellow. She looks at her watch and discovers that Eric is an hour late.

  That afternoon in Cambridge, when the four of them were sitting together in Hardy's rooms—Hardy, Gertrude, Eric, and herself— Hardy said something that disturbed her. This was just before the conversation turned to suffrage. Eric was talking about the Austrian Wittgenstein, how Wittgenstein had said that if it could be proven that something could never be proven, he'd be glad to know it. “What do you think of that?” Eric asked Hardy. And Hardy answered, “Any proof pleases me. If I could prove by logic that you would be dead in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but the sorrow would be very much mitigated by my pleasure in the proof.”

  After that, there was silence for a moment. Then they all laughed. Gertrude, tangled up in the rattan chair, laughed so hard the cat jumped off her lap.

  “But then my Parents cannot write

  Or speak a foreign tongue.”

  Sweet maid, how much the world had gained

  If they had both died young!

  Oh, where is Eric? Has he been run down by a gharry? Is he lying, unconscious, in some hospital? If so, the Anglo-Indian ladies—they might help. Surely they know doctors, magistrates. But they have gone. She is alone with the waiters. She looks up at the ceiling, and notices another crow, making figure eights among the balustrades. A line comes to her from Israfel—“the spirit of dance incarnate”—and then, with a kind of baleful grace, the crow dives and grazes her table, upsetting the glass, so that the yellowed water spills over the letter she's writing, the book, the tablecloth, and onto her lap.

  Instantly the waiter is back with his fan. As he beats at the crow, one of his colleagues mops up the spill, waggling his head and murmuring apologies. For the first time she notices his red teeth. “It's all right, it's nothing,” she says, standing uncertainly, while above her, out of reach, the crow swoops and circles.

  Is it looking at her? Does it want something from her? On the way home from Hardy's, she asked Eric about Gertrude's unmoving left eye, and Eric said, “It's glass. A childhood accident, I've heard. And to think, she's utterly devoted to him!”

  The juice has stained her dress. Probably ruined it. She wants to weep or cry out, because the truth is, she's no adventuress, just a young girl in a strange city who will never tramp the dirt alleys of Triplicane, never taste a native dish, never be brave enough, even, to wander out of Govindran's protective gaze. She misses Aunt Daisy. She misses her husband. She misses a doll she had as a child.

  Alice steps away from the table. It's time to return to her room, to change her dress, to do what she can to salvage Israfel. And yet, for the moment, she does not want to go back to her room. She wants to stay right where she is, with the waiters in their glorious robes. Eric bursts in, and she hardly hears him as he fills the echoey chamber with his apologies, his exuberance, details of his meeting with the Indian that he cannot keep from tumbling forward. She stops his hand as he reaches for her waist; points at the ceiling. “Look at the crow,” she says. And he looks.

  “How did that damned thing get in here?” he asks. “Oh, what happened to your dress?”

  “It's nothing,” she says. She wants to laugh, as Gertrude laughed. Hand in hand, they walk out of the dining room, Eric talking about the Indian, Alice remembering how, as her
brother moved about the room, one of Gertrude's eyes followed him, while the other remained focused on a bust on the mantelpiece, its gaze so steady and merciless you could have sworn it was seeing.

  7

  19 January 1914

  Hotel Connemara

  Madras

  My dear Miss Hardy,

  A thousand thanks for your kind reply to my earlier letter, which arrived only yesterday. I am delighted to learn that you are recuperating from your head cold, and hope that, as I write this, no symptoms remain to trouble you. Thanks as well to your brother for his kind words of greeting. Please tell him that my husband and I look forward greatly to seeing him upon our return to England.

  I am especially glad to learn that I have interested you in the writings of Israfel, whose book Ivory Apes and Peacocks has meant so much to me on this journey. I do hope the work gives you as much pleasure as it has me. Alas, I can tell you little about the author's true identity, save that, despite the masculine nom de plume, she is, in fact, a Lady, of whom my aunt Daisy has briefly made the acquaintance. Out of respect for this Lady's wish to remain anonymous, Aunt Daisy has refused to share her true name even with me. I do know that she is “musical” and that, among her other works, there is a collection of “Musical Fantasies” including portraits of Paderewski, De Pachmann, and Isaye. Do you go often to concerts? Perhaps, one week-end when we are both in London, we could go together to one. It is a pity that your brother shows so little interest in music. One can only hope that Mr. Littlewood will prove to be a positive influence on him in this regard!

  On to other matters: I know that Mr. Neville has written to Mr. Hardy to tell him of his meetings with the Indian genius Ramanujan. Of the four meetings that have taken place so far, I was privileged to be present at two. Mr. Ramanujan is short and of robust stature, with skin less dark than that of most of his countrymen, though of course quite black by our standards. His face is rotund, with eyebrows low over the eyes, a broad, squat nose, and a narrow mouth. The eyes are startling and dark—it would take an Israfel to describe them. His forehead is shaved, while he keeps the rest of his hair gathered back in a sort of tuft known as a kudimi. He dresses in the orthodox manner, in a robe and dhoti. He wears no shoes, only the flimsiest of sandals.

  Fortunately, as soon as my husband and I had sat down with Mr. Ramanujan to partake of Indian tea, any alarm that his outward appearance might have provoked in us fell away. Rarely have I met a man of such grace, charm, diffidence, and delicacy of manner. Mr. Ramanujan's English, while not unmarked by the accent of his native tongue, is fluent, his vocabulary much larger and more precise than that of the average British working man. And though he can come across, at first, as shy, once he reaches a stage of comfort with those in his company, the floodgates open and he reveals himself to be the most congenial of conversationalists.

  Our first meeting took place at the canteen of the University Senate House—a building, I might add, Miss Hardy, of incomparable hid-eousness. My husband launched the conversation by asking Mr. Ramanujan to tell us something about his education. A tale of frustration, disappointment, and injustice now poured from his lips. He comes from a family of high caste but little money, and was raised in the town of Kumbakonam, south of here, in a poor little house on a street with the remarkable name of Sarangapani Sannidhi Street. He is the eldest of three sons. The father is an accounts clerk; from the little Mr. Ramanujan said of him, we understood that the man was unassuming to the point of irrelevance.

  For his mother, on the other hand, he had only the highest praise, explaining that, despite her having had only the most rudimentary education (a plight common, I might add, to Indian women), this lady showed from the start an intuitive appreciation of his gifts and did all she could to foster them; that is to say, though she could be of no actual help to him in his studies, she made sure that, while he worked, the house was quiet, his favorite foods were at the ready, and so on. She is also, he said, a gifted astrologer, and, from early on, told him that she had read his stars and that his stars had said he was destined for greatness.

  Alas, his schoolmasters showed no such solicitude! Perhaps the truly original are always doomed to be misunderstood. In the case of Mr. Ramanujan, his astonishing talent was largely overlooked. In part this was because, from the earliest days of his schooling, the intensity of his interest in mathematics led him to pay scant attention to the other subjects in which he was obliged to show some facility. The result was that he did not do as well as he might on the examinations necessary for his advancement.

  One tale he told I found particularly touching. By way of a mathematics prize, he was presented one year with a volume of Wordsworth's poems. Such a collection, which either of us would have cherished, meant nothing to him. Yet his mother treasured the volume, and today it has pride of place in the tiny habitation he shares with her, his brothers, his grandmother, and his wife on a poor little unpaved alley called Hanumantharayan Koil Street.

  Unhappily, this victory was an exception in a career marked, rather, by discouragement and failure, than by support and success. Having done his time at what is known here as the “high school,” Mr. Ramanujan won scholarships, first, to Government College in Kum-bakonam and then to Pachaiyappa's College in Madras. On each occasion, his interest in his own mathematical researches was so all-consuming that he neglected his more quotidian studies, with the result that he failed his examinations and lost his scholarships. For by this point his explorations of the mathematical universe were all that mattered to him.

  He was now adrift. The educational system had rejected him utterly, and he found himself marooned, with no livelihood, income, or prospects, at his mother's house on Sarangapani Sannidhi Street. How, you may ask, did he maintain, through all this, his sense of self-worth? What gave him the confidence to persevere, when every authority had cast him off? This was the next question that my husband put to him.

  At this, Mr. Ramanujan rested his hand on his head and thought for a while. Then he looked Mr. Neville in the eye, and explained that he could give no simple answer. There were moments, he said, when his despair became so great that he thought seriously of giving mathematics up altogether. On one or two occasions he contemplated suicide. But then a great rage would well him in him at the institutions that had pronounced him worthless, and he would be seized by a sudden determination to prove them wrong.

  Alas, the energy that such tantrums roused in him invariably flagged after a few days. More crucial to his ability to soldier on was the unyielding support of his mother, who bolstered him in his pursuit of matters far beyond her ken with her reassurances and ministrations.

  Yet there was another facet to his persistence in those lean and unhappy years. It was this: he remained, quite simply, besotted by numbers. During his days as a scholar, even his mathematical studies were unsatisfactory to him, as he was compelled to drive down well-trodden avenues and engage his fertile imagination in tedious exercises and the exploration of territory of little interest to him. Now that he was cut loose from the academy, however, he could do what he wished. He was no longer beholden to systems in which he believed no more than they believed in him. Instead he was free to spend his days, as he preferred, sitting on the front porch of the house in which he had spent his childhood, working away at formulae and equations on his slate (he could not afford paper), dreaming and inventing. Indeed, he told me that his friends used to make fun of him because his elbow was black; it took too long, he said, to erase the slate with a rag, so he used his elbow instead!

  I feel that I should make clear now, Miss Hardy, that our conversation, that afternoon, did not proceed exactly along the lines that I have described. Instead it seemed that Mr. Ramanujan was forever being distracted from his own compelling tale by points of mathematical interest of which some anecdote or other had reminded him. He would then share these points with my husband, writing down figures on scraps of newspaper and packing paper that he keeps in his pocket (yet another sign of h
is poverty), and the two of them would launch off into a discourse of which I could make neither head nor tail, until Mr. Neville, observing my bewilderment, gently steered the conversation back to subjects within my reach. And though I appreciated my husband's kindly impulse, yet I also regretted that poor Mr: Ramanujan, by virtue of my ignorant presence, was losing a rare opportunity to amplify on matters of which my husband was, without doubt, far more cognizant than anyone he had ever met. Indeed, Mr. Ramanujan's high degree of animation during these rounds of mathematical intercourse convinced me that, should he not come to

  England, he would be depriving himself of some essential source of nutrition.

  I now asked him about his wife. Here he frowned. As you may know, Miss Hardy, matrimony is in India a far more ritualized business than in our own country. For instance, when Mr. Ramanujan married Janaki (this is the girl's name), she was only nine years old. The marriage was arranged between the families in consultation with astrologers. Before the wedding, the bride and groom met only once; after—again, in keeping with tradition—she returned to her family, and only took up residence in her husband's house when she was fourteen.

  Given the circumstances, you might think that Mr. Ramanujan would regard his wife merely as an accessory or impediment. Instead, much to our surprise, he spoke of the girl with affection. True, marriage had brought with it burdens—he could no longer afford to pass his days on the porch doing mathematics; he would have to get work and earn money—yet while he acknowledged these burdens, he never expressed the slightest vexation with the girl who was their cause. Fortunately, over the years, a few gentlemen both English and Indian, some of them amateur mathematicians, had come to recognize Mr. Ramanujan's genius without necessarily grasping its nature. On these gentlemen he had in turn come to depend not just for moral but sometimes financial support. One of them now obtained for him the clerkship at the Port Trust Authority, which enabled him to move his mother and wife to a house in Triplicane, virtually in the shadow of the Parthasarathy Temple.