The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  “And I'm sure,” Gertrude said, “that Mr. Ramanujan has been grateful for your company. Haven't you, Mr. Ramanujan?”

  “Oh yes,” Ramanujan said.

  “Yes, we have been talking all the time,” S. Ram said. “We have discussed all sorts of topics, personal, political, war, Indian social customs, Christian missions, marriage, the university, the Hindu question, and I can say without question that at no time did Mr. Ramanujan seem to me at all to have ‘gone off the rails.’”

  “Really.”

  “I have also carefully observed his temperature whenever the nurse takes it and written up charts of his temperature, his eating habits, and his bowel movements. Here, let me show you.” And he removed from his jacket pocket three sheets of paper, which he proceeded to unfold on the table. “As you can see, for breakfast yesterday Mr. Ramanujan took scrambled eggs, toast, and tea.”

  “He ate eggs?”

  “Yes. I too was surprised. In our religion, Mr. Hardy, eggs are, shall we say, a gray area. For instance, neither of my parents take eggs, though my brother does. My sister does not, nor does she allow her children to take eggs. I would normally not take eggs were I not in England and needing to keep up my strength for horse riding, but then again I am not of the same caste as Mr. Ramanujan, and thus less scrupulous in the practice of vegetarianism—”

  “But you were telling us what he had eaten.”

  “Yes, of course. Lunch was plain boiled rice with chilies and mustard seeds fried in butter—I should add that there is a new cook at Matlock, much better, Mr. Ramanujan tells me, than her predecessor. Then for tea more or less a repetition of breakfast, and dinner more or less a repetition of lunch with a glass of milk added. Obviously this is not a very toothsome menu, and, in the interest of improving Mr. Ramanujan's situation, I consulted with Dr. L. Ram as to whether he should be prohibited for reasons of health from eating pungent stuff like curry. Dr. L. Ram said that he could eat anything that he liked. But this contradicts what I have been told by friends at Jarrow, namely that chilies and pickles and other pungent items should be avoided by consumptive patients, and in any case the cook here is no expert at Indian cookery. I then asked the matron if I might be allowed to cook something myself for Ramanujan and she was most rude with me, refusing to let me go into the kitchen though she did allow me to write out a recipe to give to the cook. Unfortunately when the cook tried out this recipe—it was for a very simple Madrasi soup, called rasam—she botched it.”

  “How unfortunate.”

  “Yes. I had hoped to make more of an impression on her in the three days that I was here. And yet I do feel that my presence has been a benefit to Mr. Ramanujan—so much so that I am considering extending my stay for several more days.”

  “No, Ram, there's no need for that,” Ramanujan said.

  “Of course not. You must have your holiday,” Gertrude added.

  “No, I have made up my mind,” S. Ram said. “My duty is here. So long as I am free, before I return to India, I shall pledge myself to assisting Mr. Ramanujan and improving his material conditions so that he can continue to bestow upon the world his wonderful capabilities.”

  Ramanujan put his hand to his forehead. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked, and he waggled his head, and said he hoped we wouldn't mind if he took a short nap; he would meet us again for lunch. Time was not pressing, I assured him; we had taken rooms for the night at an inn in Matlock. So he slunk off, leaving the three of us alone, this time, with the indefatigable Mr. A. S. Ram.

  Actually, in lampooning Ram this way, it occurs to me that I am being unfair to him. Gertrude would certainly say I was. For though, it is true, his “logorrhea” could be fatiguing, he meant well, and may have done more actually to help Ramanujan than anyone else who came into his orbit during the years he spent in England, including myself. For instance, as was becoming quickly clear, he took a different—and decidedly more Indian—view of Ramanujan's case to mine and Littlewood's; that is to say, where we saw the solution to “the Ramanujan problem” in terms of approbation, he saw it in terms of food. “I have been a bit harsh with him,” he told us, “and tried to impress upon him that he must cease to be cranky and headstrong. More important, he must choose between controlling his palate or killing himself. So what that he does not like porridge or oatmeal? I do not like porridge or oatmeal. Yet I have learned to stomach porridge and oatmeal because I want to be strong in order to pass my test in horse riding. And he must learn to stomach them too. He cannot live on pickles and chilies and rice. He must drink more milk. The other day we heard Dr. Ram tell a patient, ‘You must take milk or you will go to hell!’”

  “Really.”

  “Indeed. And though I can help him to a certain degree—I shall seek out for him tinned maize, which is very hard to get but healthy, and, if I can, desiccated coconut, as opposed the moist coconut kernel from which most coconut cakes and biscuits are made … this is very different from what we are used to in South India, where a dish that I grew up eating—and Ramanujan too, I suspect—was a delicious coconut chutney. We would eat this with sambar. Do you know sambar? It is a stew of vegetables spiced with—”

  “You were saying how you might help him?”

  “Oh yes. Well, I can get him some cashew kernels too, and of course I shall share with him the provisions sent by my people, but in the end how he fares is up to him. He must eat plenty of porridge, tomatoes, bananas if he can get them, macaroni and cream. But unless I am here to force him, I fear he will continue to take only boiled rice with chilies. So I have thought that it would be best if he were to leave Matlock for another institution.”

  “An interesting idea,” I said. “Unfortunately his friends at Cambridge sought in vain, last year, for a sanatorium that served vegetarian food.”

  “They are correct. There is none. And here the cook is mostly unhelpful. For instance, a friend sent him some—aplams, we call them, they are more often called pappadum—they are good for him to eat, not too pungent or acidic or sour. They simply want frying in oil, exactly like chips, but when I arrived I discovered that Ramanujan was eating these, along with some dried vegetables, raw, and the bottles of ghee and gingelly oil that I had sent him were unopened. He says he prefers to eat these things raw, but this is just to protect the cook. No, he must go elsewhere. I have three proposals to make.”

  “What are they?”

  “The first is sending him to Southern France or Italy. If this is permitted he can be moved in a Red Cross carriage and a hospital ship. The climate of Italy would no doubt help him.”

  “I don't think that would be practical before the war ends.”

  “The second is that we obtain him an Indian soldier to act as his cook. I think we could propose this to the military, and while it might be argued that requisitioning a soldier to act as a cook would be misusing soldiers, it is worth pointing out how many soldiers are now on munitions like myself, in effect doing civilian jobs. I daresay I could probably get a hold of one or two lascars—colored workers on merchant marine ships—there are many knocking about in Newcastle, but these are highly unreliable, even though some are quite good cooks, and they would likely desert Ramanujan as swiftly as they desert their ships.”

  “What is the third alternative?”

  “To move him to an institution in London. My sense is that he is pretty keen to be in London, as there he could easily obtain Indian condiments and dishes. Of course I am not entirely convinced that is a good idea—he might do irreparable harm to his stomach, gorging on spicy foods and sweetmeats. And yet if he would be happier in London … I don't know if this is pertinent, but in the course of my military training, I passed the second year's examination in ambulance and first aid work, and for Ramanujan's sake, I would not mind taking the qualifying exam in sick nursing, in which case I might put off my departure—”

  “No, I don't think that will be necessary,” I said. “We don't want you to jeopardize your career. Still, we might look into your
suggestion of finding a place for him in London.” After all, though Scotland

  Yard had demanded that Ramanujan must spend a year in an institution, they had not specified that it be a particular institution.

  “But would London be the best place for his stomach?”

  “There are occasions,” Gertrude put in, “when the condition of a man's heart must be put ahead of the condition of his stomach.”

  This point was not one against which S. Ram seemed able to muster an argument, and he agreed to help us. As I subsequently learned, he left Matlock the next morning for London (Ramanujan was greatly relieved), where he proceeded to make a tour of every nursing home and private hospital in the city and, based on his findings, drew up a list of what he considered the ten most likely to suit Ramanujan's needs. Of these, the one he preferred, for its food and the quality of its beds, as much as for the medical attentions it promised, was a hospital called Fitzroy House. And so it was to Fitzroy House, early in August, that we moved Ramanujan, carrying him in Miss Chern's cousin's motor car in order to insure him a comfortable ride.

  Fitzroy House was located on Fitzroy Square, off Euston Road, and within walking distance of Regent's park and Ramanujan's beloved zoo. In contrast to Matlock, the severe façade of which suggested a public school or an orphanage, it had a shabby, genteel air about it. The rooms, with their Persian carpets and chintz curtains, reminded me of the ones in Mrs. Chern's house. Ramanujan's was crowded with furniture, including an elaborately frilled lamp hanging from its ceiling, a bureau with an attached mirror, and a sort of mechanical armchair, covered in brocade, that stretched out into a chaise longue when you pushed a button. In this last contraption he seemed to take particular pleasure. On more than one occasion when I came to visit him, I found him spread out on the thing, or opening and closing it in an effort to deduce the mechanism by which it operated.

  Yet the differences between Fitzroy and Matlock were more than decorative; they were intrinsic. For whereas Matlock was a sanatorium specializing in the treatment of tuberculosis, Fitzroy was simply a hospital catering to the wealthy. It had no doctors on its staff; the patients brought their own. The nurses wore aprons that made them look like maids. All told it was a gentle and indifferent place. Not here would a doctor be likely to tell a patient that if he did not drink his milk, he would go to hell. Instead the patients ate and drank what they liked. Most of his meals Ramanujan ordered from a nearby Indian restaurant, which sent the dishes over in a peculiar stacked arrangement of round tin boxes fitted with a handle that he called a “tiffin bell.” First he would unpack the boxes and then range round him his tray. One contained rice, one pickle, one some variety of curried vegetables, and the fourth a peculiar whole wheat flat bread in which he would wrap mixtures of the other three. If he was having this meal during the day, he would refer to it as his “tiffin.” If he was having it in the evening (which was more rare), he would call it his “dinner.” If I happened to be visiting, I would sometimes watch him eat, or even share the meals with him, and wonder what S. Ram would think, to learn that Ramanujan was partaking of such “pungent eatables.” No matter what damage it might have been doing to his stomach, however, the food seemed to lift his spirits, and this was the thing that mattered.

  He began to work again. When the weather grew cold—as it did, sometimes, even in September—he would be given a fire in his room. No longer was exposure to the elements part of his treatment. For by now, I think, it had become obvious to all of us who knew him that Ramanujan was not, in fact, suffering from tuberculosis at all, and that the regimen imposed upon him at Matlock, far from doing him any good, might have been doing him harm. Now his mood was brighter, but his physical condition had deteriorated. The feverish attacks, after a long period of leveling off, began to increase in both frequency and intensity. He complained of rheumatic pains, and continued to lose weight, though he was eating more, and better.

  Once again, a fleet of doctors was called in. The old warhorses, gastric ulcer and liver cancer, were trotted out and dismissed, the mysterious “Eastern germ” was again invoked; and a doctor named Bolton declared that both Ramanujan's fever and his rheumatic pains were due to his teeth and could be cured by extraction. Fortunately the dentist who was supposed to perform the extraction couldn't come, saving Ramanujan's teeth, and paving the way for yet another doctor to propose yet another theory, that Ramanujan was suffering from lead poisoning, which might have made sense had there been any evidence that he had been consuming lead. Theory after theory … and all of them Ramanujan greeted with a kind of placid indifference. The truth was, I think he had become habituated to his illness. He sought neither cause nor cure. He was preparing to die.

  One afternoon in September I took him to the zoo. The American air assault had just begun, and in London there was a feeling of optimism in the air that no one seemed quite sure how to exploit. Bus conductors (women, most of them) and nurses and mathematics professors handled it gingerly, the way an old bachelor might handle a baby. Ramanujan was waiting in the sitting room of Fitzroy House when I arrived, dressed in one of his old suits. The jacket hung off him, and I realized how rarely, in recent weeks, I had seen him wearing anything but pyjamas. As a surprise, I had brought Littlewood along. He was in uniform, which made a great impression on Ramanujan, and we headed off together jovially—on foot, at Ramanujan's insistence, though I made him promise to alert me if he flagged so that I could hail a cab. He did not flag, though, and twenty minutes later we were walking through the zoo.

  It was a warm afternoon. Mothers were out with children, and a man was selling balloons. It occurred to me that it had been a long time since I'd seen a balloon, and this reflection made me recognize the degree to which, for years, we had been deliberately draining our daily lives of color and light. Today, though, there were balloons everywhere, reds and greens and bright oranges. Children were running down the corridors between the cages, the colored balls were colliding in the sky like the bombers over France. I looked at Ramanujan, wondering if all that color would remind him of home, of that more vivid landscape of which he sometimes spoke, all hot pinks and gilt and silver thread. To my surprise, though, he seemed not even to notice the balloons. Instead his attention was fixed on the animals, some of whom he greeted by name. Though he had not seen them for years, he remembered them, in particular an elderly giraffe and a lion named Geraldine. Yet there was one animal he was particularly keen to visit, and to this creature's cage Littlewood led him with the expertise of a jungle guide. Like children, they stood with their hands on the bars, and Ramanujan, his face open with simple astonishment, smiled and said, “Winnie, how big you've got!”

  It was true. The cub he had known was now a huge black bear, and was sitting in a corner of her cage picking nits out of her fur. If she remembered Ramanujan, she did not show it. She did not even acknowledge him. Instead she focused on her nits, occasionally letting out a grumble that sounded like a belch. And still Ramanujan smiled. “I remember the first time I saw her,” he said. “She was just so—” And he held his hand at the level of the abdomen where his pain resided.

  Afterward, we went and took tea. I tried to remember the last time the three of us had been alone together, and realized that it must have been before the war started, during Ramanujan's brief summer of happiness, his “Indian summer”—the words came to my lips almost before they came to my mind. “Remember your Indian summer, Ramanujan?” I asked. And to my relief, he laughed, and said that he did: the balls, and the tripos results being posted, and Was It the Lobster? Then, for an hour or so, until Littlewood had to return to his post, we talked about the zeta function. We talked about Mrs. Bixby, and Ethel, and Ananda Rao. I told Littlewood about S. Ram—“Rarely in my life have I met anyone who talked quite that much,” I said—and Ramanujan, with great enthusiasm, said, “But I just got a letter from him!”

  “Is he back in India?”

  “Yes, he arrived two weeks ago.”

  “Thank g
oodness. How long is the letter?”

  “It is twenty-seven pages long. Almost the entirety of it consists of advice about food—what I should take, what I should not. It seems he has been consulting doctors in Madras about my case.”

  “What a funny man he is.”

  “Yes. At the end of the letter he wrote, ‘Now then hurry up and begin eating and devouring plenty and get fat. That is a good boy.’” Ramanujan sipped from his teacup. “You know he wanted to take me to India with him. He promised he would care for me on the voyage. It was all I could do to stop him from buying me a ticket.”

  “Did you ever consider going with him?” Littlewood asked.

  “I would have had to jump off the boat.”

  We laughed. A silence fell. Then Littlewood said, “Well, take his advice. Get well, get fat, come back to Trinity. We've much work to do. We still haven't proven the Riemann hypothesis.”

  “Yet, but I think I must return to India when the war ends,” Ramanujan said. “At least to see my wife …”

  “Of course,” I said. “A long visit.”

  “A long visit,” Littlewood repeated.

  And Ramanujan stared into the dregs of his tea.

  In October, we put him up a second time for a Trinity fellowship. It was a tricky business. Given what had happened the year before,

  Littlewood thought there would be a greater likelihood of Ramanujan being elected if he, rather than I, proposed him. As it happened, Littlewood was in Cambridge himself right then, recuperating from a concussion he had suffered when, he claimed, a box of bullets had fallen on his head; my guess was that in fact he had got drunk and fallen, and then dreamed up the box of bullets to excuse the injury.

  We had our work cut out for us. There was at the time a cabal of Trinity fellows who considered it their duty to oppose Ramanujan's candidacy on racial grounds. As it happened, Littlewood had a spy in the enemy camp, his old tutor Herman, who also opposed Ramanujan but was too naïve to dissemble. From him we learned the worst. R. V. Laurence, for instance, had said that he would sooner resign than see a black man made a fellow of Trinity. His allies, seizing on rumors of the suicide attempt, pointed to a statute prohibiting the “medically insane” from being named to fellowships. Even Ramanujan's status as an F.R.S. these swines managed to pervert into a “dirty trick” perpetrated by Littlewood and me purely to put pressure on Trinity. As if we had the power to manipulate the Royal Society for our own ends … And yet I have learned over the years that prejudices are bred in the bone. Neither logic nor pleading will ever prevail over them. Such an enemy you can only fight on his own dirty terms.