In his letter, Ramanujan sought to distance himself from what, in Cambridge’s view, had been a year’s obdurate refusal to go. “Now I learn from your letter and Mr. Neville that you are anxious to get me to Cambridge,” Ramanujan wrote, as if hearing of it for the first time. “If you had written to me previously I would have expressed my thoughts plainly to you.” Meeting with Davies back in February, he suggested, he’d been a helpless pawn under the sway of his “superior officer.” Why, he had not even supplied the language of his earlier letters; that, too, had been the work of his superior. As for his own religious scruples, or that of his family, or the trip to Namakkal, Ramanujan said nothing.
The whole scheme may have been the work of Narayana Iyer, or at least carried out with his willing complicity. In any case, it would not be the only time Ramanujan bent the truth to avert embarrassment. Visiting Kumbakonam early in 1914, just before leaving for England, he told the family of his friends Anantharaman and Subramanian that he had come to say good-bye. He was leaving, he announced—for Calcutta. Under the circumstances, the lie may have been well-advised. When their father learned the truth, and fearing that Ramanujan’s example might lure his sons to England, he went to Madras to try to dissuade Ramanujan from going.
• • •
The key obstacle removed, Neville set about addressing Ramanujan’s other doubts. Money to get to England and live there? Don’t worry, Neville assured him, that would be taken care of. His English was not very good? It was, Neville said, good enough. His vegetarianism? That would be respected. And examinations? Having flunked virtually every one he’d ever taken in college, he was pained at the prospect of taking any more—yet knew that doing so was the inevitable lot of Indian students in Europe. No, Neville reassured him, he would not have to take any.
In opting for England, Ramanujan still went against a large body of opinion. His father-in-law, for example, wondered why he could not pursue mathematics in India. His mother worried that his finicky health might suffer in the English cold; that remaining vegetarian, without good Indian food available, would be difficult; that he might encounter outright prejudice from the locals—or, on the other hand, that he’d be beset by English girls. (Before he left, she was upset when some English women, come to meet the dark genius bound for Cambridge, actually shook his hand.)
Some of Ramanujan’s friends, meanwhile, saw the trip, in Neville’s words, as “a mean attempt to transfer to the English university the glory that belonged to Madras.” Neville, taking no chances, set about wooing them, too. “Lest he should be harassed by attempts to dissuade him, I addressed myself to the task of convincing his Indian friends that the proposal was in Ramanujan’s own interest, and in fact embodied the only chance of placing him on the pinnacle where they longed to see him.”
Next, Neville wrote Hardy to say that it was now time to address the financial obstacles to Ramanujan’s visit to England. He, Neville, would try to find money in Madras. But should he fail, as he later paraphrased his letter, “the money must somehow be found in England… . Financial difficulties must not be allowed to interfere.”
Hardy apparently forwarded Neville’s pronouncement to the India Office, because he soon received from C. Mallet, secretary for Indian students (who a year before had relayed word of Ramanujan’s refusal to go to England), a worried reply. “Mr. Neville’s letter rather alarmed me, because it seemed to me that he was encouraging Ramanujan to come to England without any real prospect of providing for him when he got here.” Too often, he had found, Indian students arrived without enough money, only to meet with “disappointment and misery.”
In the bluntest terms, Mallet advised Hardy that “no money for this purpose can be got from the India Office.” Furthermore, he doubted whether Trinity or Cambridge would come up with any, and he didn’t think Madras could either. He was not sanguine. And he infected Hardy with his pessimism. “I’m writing in a hurry to catch the mail,” Hardy wrote Neville, a bit frantically, “and warn you to be a little careful”; the money had to be there, else Ramanujan couldn’t come. He and Littlewood might together contribute fifty pounds a year for the contemplated two years of Ramanujan’s visit—“Don’t tell [Ramanujan] so”—but that came to only about a fifth of Ramanujan’s needs.
Perhaps influenced by correspondence with Hardy or the India Office that does not survive, Neville would later cast Hardy’s concern as a case of intellectual, not financial, cold feet, as jitters about Ramanujan’s real abilities. “We have heard of these unknown geniuses before,” he paraphrased (or misconstrued, or misrepresented) the India Office letter Hardy had forwarded. “They dazzle their friends in India, and when we bring them to England we see them for the precocious schoolboys they are; in a few weeks they fizzle out, and more harm than good has been done by our benevolence.” Neville would laugh at the timidity he imputed to Hardy for, presumably, endorsing such doubts. Of course, he added, “I had seen the notebooks and talked with Ramanujan, and Hardy had not.”
In any case, by the time he’d heard from Hardy, Neville already had money matters well in hand. Littlehailes had introduced him to people influential in the university or government, and everywhere he talked up Ramanujan. “The discovery of the genius of S. Ramanujan of Madras,” he’d written Francis Dewsbury, registrar of the university, on January 28, “promises to be the most interesting event of our time in the mathematical world.” It was a thoughtful, rather grandly stated letter, all aimed at precisely one end—funding Ramanujan’s stay in England. “I see no reason to doubt,” it concluded,
that Ramanujan himself will respond fully to the stimulus which contact with Western mathematicians of the highest class will afford him. In that case, his name will become one of the greatest in the history of mathematics, and the University and City of Madras will be proud to have assisted in his passage from obscurity to fame.
Next day, Littlehailes himself took up the attack, formally asking Dewsbury for a 250-pound-per-year scholarship, coupled with a 100-pound grant to equip Ramanujan with Western clothes and book passage to England. “Ramanujan,” he wrote, “is a man of most remarkable mathematical ability, amounting I might say to genius, whose light is metaphorically hidden under a bushel in Madras.”
The following week Lord Pentland himself, governor of Madras, became the target of this bombardment of Madras officialdom on Ramanujan’s behalf. Sir Francis wrote Pentland’s private secretary, C. B. Cotterell:
I am anxious to interest him in a matter which I presume will come before him within the next few days—a matter which under the circumstances is, I believe, very urgent. It relates to the affairs of a clerk of my office named S. Ramanujan, who, as I think His Excellency has already heard from me, is pronounced by very high mathematical authorities to be a Mathematician of a new and high, if not transcendental, order of genius.
Spring had just learned that the university was prepared to set aside ten thousand rupees, equivalent to more than six hundred pounds, or enough for two years in England. But the decision hinged on higher approval. And here, he said, “His Excellency may perhaps be able to interfere with advantage.”
“The best gentleman and by no means the worst brain we ever sent to India,” it was once said of Lord Pentland. Born John Sinclair, he was a slim, slight man with a full mustache who had graduated from Sandhurst, the British West Point, and served eight years in the Royal Irish Lancers. Then he’d turned to politics, most recently serving as secretary for Scotland under Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Only the previous October he’d come to Madras as governor of Fort St. George, in which capacity he ruled over forty million people. He believed that the state’s function, according to one who knew him, should be “to secure for all its members the best procurable conditions for the full development of personality.” Now, in the case of Ramanujan, he had the chance to act on it.
He had already gone to bat for Ramanujan once when, the year before, he had consented to his special research scholarship. Now he was ready
to “interfere with advantage” again. “His Excellency cordially sympathizes with your desire that the University should provide Ramanujan with the means of continuing his researches at Cambridge,” his secretary wrote back to Spring, “and will be glad to do what he can to assist.”
The scholarship was approved. The last roadblock was gone. Ramanujan was going to England.
5. AT THE DOCK
On February 26, Binny & Co. sent Ramanujan his second-class ticket.
On March 11, Sir Francis wrote the steamer agents to make sure he got vegetarian food en route.
On March 14, Ramanujan accompanied his wife and mother to Madras’s Egmore Station. There, in its compact waiting room, flanked by two rows of columned arches, they awaited the train. Ten years before, he had arrived here to begin his studies at Pachaiyappa’s College. Now, he wept: he was dispatching his family to Kumbakonam, so they would not have to witness his painful transformation into a European gentleman.
Janaki, one day while her mother-in-law was at the temple, had asked him to take her with him to England. But influenced by Ramachandra Rao, among others, Ramanujan said no, explaining to her that if he had to tend to her in England he would not be able to concentrate on mathematics; that, besides, she was so young and pretty he’d have only to turn his back and the Englishmen would be upon her… .
Nobody who saw Ramanujan during those last busy days recalled seeing in him any exhilaration, anticipation, or joy. “He was not very jubilant over his future journey,” Ramachandra Rao would recall. “He seemed to [move] as if … obeying a call.”
His friends coached him in Western ways. Still taking a proprietary interest in his young protégé, Ramachandra Rao decreed that his kutumi, the long bunched-up knot of hair at the back of his head, had to go. And it was done. Further, Ramanujan must wear Western clothes. Soon Richard Littlehailes was driving him around town on his motorcycle, Ramanujan in the sidecar, shopping for collars and ties and stockings and shoes and shirts.
For a few days Ramanujan stayed in the country, at the house of a friend of Ramachandra Rao’s who lived European-style, learning how to use knife and fork—though “under the strict stipulation,” as his patron observed, “that nothing but vegetable food should be served.” But even this tentative step into alien ways left Ramanujan unhappy. “He did not relish food being served by strange servants.”
Ramanujan worried about how he would stay vegetarian in England. He hated his Western haircut. He was miserable about the clothes he had to wear. The day before he was to leave, he walked into the faculty common room at Presidency College with a big suitcase, opened it up, and laid out on the table the Western clothes purchased for him. How, he pleaded, was he to wear them? Making the knot on his tie confounded him, to everyone’s amusement. Ramanujan tried to joke about it, but his old Kumbakonam friend, Raghunathan, now on the staff of the college, thought he looked distinctly uncomfortable. Later, when his mother got a photo of him from England, all squeezed into collar, tie, and jacket, she wouldn’t recognize him.
That night, K. Narasimha Iyengar and his cousin had Ramanujan over to their place in Triplicane. Outside, the streets were filled with carts drawn by bullocks with bells jingling from painted horns, with bare-chested men in dhotis, with women in saris, their nose-rings and bangles gleaming against their dark skin. The pungent smell of burning cow dung filled the air. To Ramanujan, it was all he’d ever known. But England? What was to come? All night his friends stayed up with him, tried to calm his jitters, prepare him for the great adventure.
On March 15, the British India Lines ship S. S. Nevasa had arrived in Madras through the new northern entrance of the harbor, built during Sir Francis’s tenure. Most ships still tied up within the protected breakwaters of the harbor, then had their cargoes transported by lighter to the docks. But a special wharf to bring in passengers, troops, and horses had been built at the south end of the harbor, with a timber-decked dock, like a little boardwalk, projecting into the harbor from the breakwater. It was here that the Nevasa tied up.
The Nevasa was brand-new, designed expressly for the India run. Her hull was painted black, except for red accents and a thin ribbon of white running fore and aft. She was a smart-looking vessel, graceful in her way, her single funnel, about midships, set with a modest rake.
The morning of its departure, an official send-off was held in Ramanujan’s honor, organized by Srinivasa Iyengar, the advocate general. On hand were Professor Middlemast and Sir Francis Spring, prominent judges, and Kasturirangar Iyengar, publisher of the Hindu. So was Narayana Iyer who had worked so closely with Ramanujan, the incessant clicking and scraping on their slates keeping people in his house up all night. “My father made a strange request to him,” his son N. Subbanarayanan would record many years later. “As a memento my father wanted to exchange his slate with Ramanujan’s slate, [a request that] was granted. Perhaps my father thought that he may get an inspiration from the slate during [Ramanujan’s] absence.”
Ramanujan was introduced around. Madras’s director of public instruction, J. H. Stone, wished him success, told him he had written friends in England who would take care of him. Among the passengers, Ramanujan met a man in the Salvation Army bound for Southampton, and a Dr. Muthu, a tuberculosis specialist. He met the captain, too, who joked that they’d get along fine so long as Ramanujan didn’t bother him with mathematics.
For most everyone, it was a time of good cheer and light banter. But not for Ramanujan who, recalled a friend, “was in tears.”
Finally, there was nothing left to do. Ramanujan was on board, his well-wishers left behind. At about ten o’clock on the morning of March 17, 1914, the Nevasa slipped slowly away from the dock.
CHAPTER SIX
Ramanujan’s Spring
[1914 to 1916]
1. OUT OF INDIA
The Nevasa’s paint still gleamed. Barely a year had elapsed since she’d been delivered to her owners by a Glasgow shipyard and set out on her maiden voyage to the East. At nine thousand tons, she was by far the largest ship in the British India Lines fleet. Her four wide decks were airy and comfortable. She had been designed expressly for service in the tropics. Yet Ramanujan could find no comfort aboard her, no relief from the pitching seas that left him, on his first ocean voyage, seasick and unable to eat.
Temporary relief came with the ship’s first stop in Colombo, capital of Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka), the large island just off India’s southeast coast. Long before the Nevasa docked, passengers could smell Colombo’s cinnamon gardens. Blue hills rose above the harbor and the houses of the city, with their red roofs and walls of shimmering white.
On March 19, the Nevasa steamed out of port, skirted south of Cape Comorin, at the tip of the subcontinent, and made direct for Aden, a week’s passage across the Arabian Sea. For Ramanujan, now past his seasickness, the voyage grew pleasant. Now he could enjoy the ship’s roominess. He had his vegetarian food. He’d met several among his two hundred or so fellow passengers. Sometimes, the story goes, he withdrew to his second-class cabin and played with numbers suggested by the dimensions of the cabin or the number of passengers.
Ramanujan was not an introspective man—was not, as Hardy would put it, “particularly interested in his own history or psychology.” But now, in the coat and collar that tortured him, midst a limitless expanse of sea, as day by day the Nevasa steamed west at fourteen knots and fresh sea breezes swept across the deck, it would have been hard for half-formed thoughts not to spill over into consciousness.
Five years ago, he was alone on the pial of his house in Kumbakonam—unknown, unmarried, boy more than man; now, the Madrasi elite had turned out to see him off to England.
Then, he was a dropout from Government College, Kumbakonam; now, he was bound for Trinity College, Cambridge.
Back then, getting to Madras by train, a matter of about three rupees, was no trifling expense; now, to the four-hundred-rupee fare to England aboard this great steamship he need give no thought.
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Then, the thought of violating the bar on overseas travel would scarcely have crossed his mind; now, influential men, orthodox Brahmins among them, had urged him to break it.
What had wrought such changes? Plainly, he had not overnight become a better mathematician. What had changed was that he had thrust himself onto the world. His mother ordaining that he marry, he had set out from door to mathematician’s door in search of livelihood. Then, with much persistence and a little luck, one thing had led to another… .
And the future—is it conceivable he never thought of it? Probably, he felt a vague fear of the unknown. Possibly, his disquiet took more concrete form. Until now, even in that impetuous flight to Vizagapatnam, he had never left South India, where fair-skinned Englishmen were the one-in-a-thousand exception; soon, in England, he would be the conspicuous one, his face would stand out, his accent would seem alien. The future meant Neville, and Hardy, and Littlewood, and Cambridge, and Trinity. But only Neville was a face, a person; Hardy was just a few letters. The rest were names, disembodied abstractions, mysteries.
After a week of steady steaming, more than two thousand miles out of Colombo, the Nevasa put in at Aden, at the southernmost end of the Red Sea. Now began the part of the journey that many among the English passengers, at least, had learned to dread—the fourteen-hundred-mile passage up the Red Sea, where day after day the ship baked in a desert heat that never deviated much from a hundred degrees. The passage gave the language a new word: if, outwardbound to India, you got stuck in a starboard cabin, you absorbed the full heat of the sun all afternoon and by bedtime your cabin smoldered; portside cabins, meanwhile, had the whole afternoon to cool down. On the homeward passage, it was all reversed. Not surprisingly, VIPs managed to land the cooler cabins, which were designated “Port Outward—Starboard Homeward” and granted the acronym POSH.
The Man Who Knew Infinity Page 25
