The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  How can I impress upon you the peculiarity of his situation in those months? Let me describe the two visits that I made to him at Matlock. The first took place in January of 1918, the second in July. On the first occasion, I went with Littlewood, who managed to borrow a motor from his brother so that we might avoid any difficulty with the trains. It was a very cold day—snow had fallen the night before—and as we drove through the gates I was startled by the sight of tuberculosis patients sitting outdoors at tables and in chaises longues, swaddled in wool blankets. Ramanujan himself we found inside, but in a room without windows: a sort of verandah that must have served, during Matlock's hydropathic heyday, as a sun room. Although he too was swathed in blankets, he was shivering from the cold, and his teeth were chattering. We had not wired to alert him to our arrival, and when he saw us striding toward him he looked, at first, taken aback. Then he smiled, threw off his blankets, and stood to greet us.

  He had lost even more weight, and his face was haggard. We shook hands, and he immediately took us on a tour of the place, which he conducted with that combination of indifference, disgust, and pride that a schoolboy exhibits when performing the same office for his parents. First he showed us his bedroom—bare of any decoration, and, again, freezing—and then the dining room with its long refectory tables and jugs of cold milk, and then a sort of sitting room cum library, the shelves of which were stocked almost entirely with detective thrillers. Finally he introduced us to Dr. Kincaid, the director of the place, a mild-seeming man in his fifties who greeted us with the bored cheerfulness of a headmaster. At Dr. Kincaid's suggestion we returned to the open verandah and had tea. By now Littlewood and I were both extremely cold, even though we had on coats and gloves, and we drank the hot tea fast. Other patients were also lying about on the verandah; they stared at us, and our tea, with envy.

  Having first congratulated him on his being named an F.R.S., we asked Ramanujan how he was faring. I will admit that I hoped he would answer by declaring brightly that his health had improved, or, better yet, pull from his pocket some sheets of paper scrawled with mathematical figures. Instead he began to complain. First he complained about the cold. When he had arrived at Matlock, he said, he had been allowed to sit for a few hours before what the staff called a “welcome fire.” Since then, however, he had been allowed no fires at all. Even when he asked Dr. Kincaid to provide him with a fire for an hour or two each day, so that he might work on his mathematics, Dr. Kincaid refused. His fingers got so cold he could not hold a pencil.

  Next was the food. Despite what he had been promised, the cook had not proven amenable to his dietary requirements. She had spoiled the pappadums that one of his friends had sent him, and claimed that she had no butter in which to fry potatoes for him. Mostly he subsisted on bread and milk. Every day the nurses tried to impose oatmeal and porridge on him, both of which he despised. An effort at curried rice had been disastrous, as the rice had arrived so undercooked as to be inedible. Even plain boiled rice the cook could not make properly.

  Even in the best of circumstances, there is something pathetic about the grumblings of the invalid, in that they reveal the bereftness of his world, the degree to which his life has been systematically reduced to a ceaseless pursuit of the most basic comforts. And in Ramanujan's case, illness was even less a factor than in most. For if his efforts to satisfy his needs for warmth and for food now consumed his attention, it was mostly because Matlock House deprived him deliberately of those necessities for no good reason. Cold weather and cold milk might benefit the tubercular patient, but they did not benefit Ramanujan, whose condition, in any case, remained the same, and who still showed no symptoms of the disease.

  What disturbed me most was his sour, scowling tone. After all, this was the same man who had laughed at Was It the Lobster?, who had sat on the pial of his mother's house and deduced, entirely without instruction, the Prime Number Theorem. He was an F.R.S.! And now here he sat on another sort of pial, and all he could talk about was his dislike of macaroni custard. If there was some cheese in it, he said, it might be tolerable. But the cook claimed she could find no cheese, just as she claimed she could find no bananas. Whereas Chatterjee had written to him the other day that in Cambridge he could still buy bananas for 4d. each. Well, if you could get bananas in Cambridge, why couldn't you get bananas in Matlock? Littlewood promised that as soon as he got back to London he would arrange for some bananas to be sent on.

  After a suitable pause we asked him how his work was going. At this Ramanujan leaned in close, as if to deliver a confidence. “I have discovered,” he said, “that there is one room in the place that is always kept very warm, and that is the bathroom. And so every afternoon I go into the bathroom with my notebook and pencil and lock the door. Then, for a short while, I am able to do some work.”

  “And what work are you doing?”

  “Still partitions.” And he started talking. As he did—Littlewood told me later that he noticed it as well—his face changed entirely. I have no recollection at all what he said—I suppose it must have been some quite trivial point he was making, the sort to which, at Cambridge, I would have responded with a raised eyebrow or a comic yawn, or not responded at all. Only we were not at Cambridge— Littlewood and I knew perfectly well what our function was—and so we reacted with the sort of exaggerated enthusiasm one usually reserves for shy children who need to be “brought out.” We opened our eyes wide, we opened our mouths and raised our hands into the air and begged him to go on. And as he did, much to our surprise and regret, his spirits, rather than rising, sank. I suppose he must have recognized the ruse. “If only I could have more time in the bathroom!” he lamented. “But there is a lady called Mrs. Ripon, and it seems that she is out to bedevil me. Every time I go in there, and get settled, she starts banging on the door, wanting her bath. Oh, I wish she would leave, or die! She had a terrible coughing fit last week, so I was hopeful …”

  We left soon after. On the way back to London we did not speak much. Each of us had private troubles to contemplate. Much else was wrong in our lives besides the poor Indian trapped in a dismal hydro in Derbyshire. Others rode in that car too, a woman who lived in Treen and a soldier who might very well have been dead.

  That spring, the Russell affair erupted again. In February, Russell published his notorious article in the Tribunal, in which he wrote that whether or not the American garrison, then en route to Europe, proved “efficient against the Germans,” they would “no doubt be capable of intimidating strikers, an occupation to which the American Army is accustomed at home.” This reckless sentence resulted in a visit to his flat by two detectives, his subsequent arrest on the charge of making “certain statements likely to prejudice His Majesty's relations with the United States of America,” his conviction on that charge, and a sentence of six months in Brixton prison, at the gates of which he arrived early in May in a taxi. Prison life seemed to suit him. The sameness of the days, he said, made him wonder if his true vocation was to be a monk in a contemplative order, and he got a lot of philosophical writing done. In the meantime, at Trinity, Thomson was inducted as the new master, and while we hoped his arrival (and Butler's departure) would help our case, we didn't bank on it.

  So far as the war went, the tide appeared to be turning against Germany. For any Englishman who was alive then—even a pacifist like me—it is still a humiliating thing to admit that this was entirely due to the arrival of you Americans. Yet the fact is, your troops made a huge difference, and the day that news drifted back to Cambridge of your victory at Cantigny is one I shall never forget. It was the end of May—what should have been the season of balls—and while I recall working hard to hold back in myself any emotion as reckless as optimism, I also recall thinking, “Yes, the war will end. There will once again be life without war.” Make no mistake, our troubles continued. Young men kept dying, while at Cambridge a perfectly benign librarian named Dingwall was fired for his antiwar views. And yet the charge in the air was as di
stinct as the smell of the summer stealing back into England and brushing away the last dirty snow piles that have survived the spring. This, I recognized, was what it felt like to be on the winning side, and though I didn't give up my pacifist stance, secretly I reveled in the sensation.

  In June I returned to Cranleigh, to Gertrude, whose passive stubbornness had proven effective: I had given up any hope of persuading her to sell the house. We were friends again, and resumed our usual summer habits, even the games of Vint with Mrs. Chern, whose niece Emily made a redoubtable fourth. Miss Chern, whose mother was American, was reading mathematics at Newnham—she kept a newspaper photograph of Philippa Fawcett, the woman who had beaten the senior wrangler, over her desk—and asked often after Ramanujan, whom she looked upon as a kind of mysterious prophet. Indeed, many people looked upon him this way. Clippings of articles about him periodically came my way, courtesy of friends in America and Germany and India, articles misrepresenting his achievements and offering somewhat romanticized versions of his story. From reading them, you might have thought he spent his days parading about Cambridge performing feats of mental arithmetic while a retinue of admirers strewed flowers in his wake, when in fact he remained under lock and key at Matlock.

  I wondered if he had any idea that he was becoming a famous man, or if sending him some of the articles would contribute to his improvement. For he was improving, if only a little. As Littlewood and I had hoped, the news that he had been elected an F.R.S. boosted his spirits to some degree. Unfortunately, my efforts to persuade Dr. Ram to lift the ban on travel and allow him to go to London for the induction ceremony proved unsuccessful, and he had to write to the Society to ask if the ceremony might be postponed. I don't know that it mattered to him much. The worst of the winter weather had passed, resolving, at least temporarily, the crisis of cold, and though the crisis of food persisted, at least he was working. Indeed, he had entered into a new period of productivity, sending out from the bathrooms of Matlock all sorts of new contributions to partitions theory, including the famous set of identities that you know today as the Rogers-Ramanujan identities.

  And that was the least of it. During May and June of 1918 it seemed that every week I would receive at least two or three letters from him, most concerning a paper we were writing together on the expansions of elliptic modular functions, some concerning partitions, still others offering, almost as afterthoughts, those odd, seemingly random arithmetical observations of which he made a specialty. It may seem strange to a non-mathematician that when I remember Ramanujan, I remember, in addition to his barking laugh and his black eyes and his scent, the fact that in a letter from Matlock he once threw off, almost as an aside, the following remarkable equation:

  And yet it was just such identities upon which his imagination, in its wanderings, would stumble; that he would pick up like curious pieces of fauna to study and preserve and then later, with an ingenuity that always took me by surprise, pull out of his sleeve and reveal to be the missing pieces in complex proofs to which, on the surface at least, they bore no connection. Since he had become ill, I had missed his habit of arriving in my rooms in the mornings bearing the fruits of his nightly labors, the messages that he claimed the goddess had written on his tongue. Now those messages came in the form of letters, and though I lamented his remoteness, nonetheless I was glad to see that he was back on form.

  In July, I went to see him, once again, at Matlock. As a treat, I brought along Gertrude and young Emily Chern, who undertook the expedition with the noble gravity of a disciple. Summer weather had remade Matlock, which no longer looked like a resort out of season. The trees were in flower, and the verandah on which we had discovered Ramanujan freezing the January before now provided an amenable and comparatively warm oasis.

  He was not alone. With him was a young Indian who stood to greet us almost as soon as we walked through the door. “Mr. Hardy, what an honor,” the Indian said, taking my hand. “I am Ram—A. S. Ram, not to be mistaken for Mr. Ramanujan's doctor, who is L. Ram. You may call me S. Ram if you think that will help to avoid confusion.”

  “How do you do,” I said. And I introduced him to Gertrude and Miss Chern, whose hand he kissed.

  We sat down. He was a good-looking youth, not tall, with hair at once curlier and finer than most of his countrymen's. As he rapidly explained, he had met Ramanujan back in 1914, when Ramanujan had just arrived in England and both of them were staying at the Indian Students' Hostel on Cromwell Road in London. “We struck up a friendship,” he told us, “though very quickly circumstances and the war divided us. Mr. Ramanujan went to Cambridge, and I took a position as an assistant engineer on the North Staffordshire Railway. I have neglected to mention that I come from Cuddalore, near Madras, and have a degree in Civil Engineering from King's College, not the famous King's College of Cambridge but the one at University of London. In any case, when the war broke out, I joined His Majesty's forces, and after sixteen months with the army, a small part of which I spent with the Indian contingent, I was released to work on munitions at Messieurs Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company in Jarrow. I continue to be employed there—but you are probably wondering how I came to be back in contact with Mr. Ramanujan and what I am doing here today!” And here he laughed—his laugh high, shrill, distinctly out of tune with his speaking voice, which, though swift, was deep.

  He paused, took a breath. Gertrude was staring at him in amazement. I suppose in those gloomy days we were not used to talkers of this vintage.

  He went on. As he spoke I glanced at Ramanujan, who was in turn gazing at his own lap. I had hoped he would look healthier than he did; in fact he looked much the same as he had in January—if anything a bit gaunter. In some ways, though, gauntness suited him; brought out his beauty. He was wearing a yellow jumper that contrasted garishly with his skin, and Miss Chern was gazing at him with the sort of adoration that young girls usually reserve for cinema stars. It was obvious that she was not listening to a word that S. Ram was saying.

  As for this S. Ram, it was becoming rapidly clear to Gertrude and me what he was: an admirer, a “fan,” if you will, who had taken it upon himself to oversee Ramanujan's rehabilitation. And like most “fans,” he was really much more interested in exhibiting his own virtue and selflessness than in contributing to the well-being of the friend on whose behalf, he was telling us, he had just taken a “most beastly journey, all night long, the train stopping all the time.” For S. Ram, it seemed, had arrived at Matlock two days previously and been put up in an empty room there. “You see,” he said, “since the rationing scheme took effect here in England, my good people back in Cuddalore have worried, it seems to me, rather excessively about my condition, and thinking I must be starving they have made it their habit to send me by post parcel after parcel of eatables, so much that it remains a problem how I am to dispose of these and I have had to send a cable home saying ‘Stop pause Sending pause Food pause Ram.’ I should put in here that while I am a vegetarian, I am not of the same caste as Mr. Ramanujan, thus I have not been, since my arrival here in England, a vegetarian staunch and strict. For instance, I take eggs on occasion, as well as beef tea and sometimes Bovril. You see, I am determined to keep up my health, as lately I have had a bit of luck and, on condition that I pass a test in horse riding in Woolwich at the end of this month, I have been promised release by the army so that I may sail for home on or about the end of September next in order to take up a civilian service position in the Indian Public Works department. So I have of late been eating eggs to keep up my strength in order that I can stick to my work at Palmers and also have some riding practice at Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.” Again he paused. Through this whole monologue, it seemed, he had not taken a breath. Would he go on like this all afternoon? I looked to Gertrude for help, which, to my relief, she provided. (As she later explained to me, in her work at St. Catherine's she had become accustomed to dealing with men and women of this stripe, inveterate talkers whose fondness for their own voices was in fact s
ymptomatic of a mental disorder called logorrhea. “Many teachers are logorrheacs,” she said.)

  Now she turned her steady, prim gaze on S. Ram and said, “Quite fascinating. And tell me, how did you come to renew your acquaintance with Mr. Ramanujan?”

  Across the table, S. Ram looked at her with a kind of gratitude; it seemed that he appreciated being brought back to the subject at hand. “You see,” he said, “it was the food,” and proceeded to explain to us how, upon finding himself with a surplus of “eatables” sent over by his parents, he remembered Ramanujan and his fondness for Madrasi-style dishes. “It was at this point,” he said, “that I wrote to you— though you may not recollect it, Mr. Hardy.”

  “You wrote to me?”

  “Yes,” S. Ram said. “I wrote inquiring after Mr. Ramanujan's health and to see if he would share some of these foodstuffs with me. And you replied giving me his address as Matlock House, Matlock, Derbyshire.”

  “Did I? Oh, of course I did.”

  “And so I began a correspondence with Ramanujan, and in response to his request for some ghee—this is Indian clarified butter, Miss Hardy—I forwarded to him intact two parcels containing three bottles, two of ghee and one of gingelly oil for frying purposes, as well as a small quantity of Madras pickle. As you are no doubt aware of the difficulty and bother involved in sending bottles by post, you can well imagine that it was most convenient merely to send on the packages prepared by my people, already sealed.”

  “Much more convenient,” I said.

  “And of course they had sent much more than I could possibly consume. I then proposed a visit. Owing to changes in my schedule I was unable to postpone my holidays to July thirty-first to suit my riding examination, and had no choice but to take the previous fortnight. With nothing particular to do during this holiday I wrote to Ramanujan … and now I am here.” He smiled. Ramanujan continued to gaze into his lap.