Hardy’s urgings, to be sure, found fertile soil in Ramanujan’s own obsessive bent. Later, he would write Hardy that while the hospital in which he was then a patient was uncomfortably cold,
the bath rooms are nice and warm. I shall go to the bath room with pen and paper every day for about an hour or so and send you two or three papers very soon. This thought did not strike me before. Else I would have written something already. In a week or so I may perhaps have a complaint against me from the doctor that I am having a bath every day. But I assure you beforehand that I am not going to bathe but to write something.
Ramanujan, sick and in the hospital, was apologizing to Hardy for having failed to do more mathematics!
• • •
His marriage in 1909 had induced Ramanujan to stitch himself back into the wider social world. Now, in England, the threads of connection were once again severed. By early 1917, he was a man on a mission, propelled toward his destiny, oblivious to all but mathematics. After three years in Cambridge, his life was Hardy, the four walls of his room, and work. For thirty hours at a stretch he’d sometimes work, then sleep for twenty. Regularity, balance, and rest disappeared from his life.
He was not the first man to sacrifice his health on the altar of mathematics. Jacobi gave this retort to a friend who worried that excessive devotion to his work might make him sick: “Certainly I have sometimes endangered my health by overwork, but what of it? Only cabbages have no nerves, no worries. And what do they get out of their perfect wellbeing?” And before Jacobi, there was Newton himself. “Never careful of his bodily health,” E. T. Bell wrote of him, “Newton seems to have forgotten that he had a body which required food and sleep when he gave himself up to the composition of his masterpiece. Meals were ignored or forgotten.”
In Hardy, Ramanujan had the intellectual companionship he’d long missed. In Cambridge, with its stately stone chapels and quiet courts and great libraries, he had before him all the riches of Western civilization. Yet now he went without much else that had sustained him, perhaps without his realizing it, in India. He went without family. Without dark, familiar faces and open, sunny Indian smiles. Without the sound of friendly Tamil. Now those hidden props to identity and self-esteem, so easy to take for granted or dismiss, had been pulled out from under him. Now there was no one even to prepare meals for him. No one, as Janaki and his mother had done, to place food into his hand as he worked. No one to remind him to sleep. No one to cool his fevered brain with a touch, or a sexual embrace. No one to counsel moderation, to urge him, as it were, to come in out of the rain. Ramanujan was like a balky thoroughbred with no one to groom or feed it. And by early 1917, there had been no one since the day he’d stepped aboard the Nevasa three years before.
Intellectually, he had come home. But Ramanujan was more than a mind; he was a body, a complex of muscle and tissue, hormones and neurochemicals. And his body had needs that his mind scarcely knew.
• • •
A generation before, in 1890, a small book aimed at Indian students, entitled Four Years in an English University, was published in Madras. Its author was S. Satthianadhan, a professor of logic and moral philosophy at Presidency College in Madras. Apparently based on Satthianadhan’s experiences as a student at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, the book purported to tell Indian students what life at Cambridge was really like, and what Indians could learn from it. And one point it conveyed with all the force of fresh revelation was the English emphasis on sports and recreation.
A Cantab [from the medieval Latin for Cambridge] never fails to take his two hours’ exercise per diem in one way or another. Seldom does one find a student in his rooms in the afternoon, however passionately fond of study he may be. One who does so and keeps to his books the whole day long will be looked upon as an abnormal character and be snubbed by the other students of the College. Mens sana in corpore sano,—a sound mind in a sound body,—is a maxim of universal and practical application. These young Englishmen, who pay as much attention to their bodily as to their mental development, are in no way worse off as students. These men, who can walk twelve miles a day or row sixteen, without being tired in the least are just as hardworking as the German students; and it is these strong, healthy, muscular young men who turn out Wranglers and First Class Classics.
If there is one lesson which our students in India must learn from English students, it is this—to pay as great an attention to their bodily as to their mental development.
Ramanujan, it need hardly be stated, did not. He had no interest in sports; if Hardy tried to interest him in cricket it didn’t take. He had always been fat, largely oblivious to his body, almost pathologically sedentary. Still, he was not yet Satthianadhan’s vision of the typical Indian student: “A study-worn, consumptive-looking individual, without any energy, appearing twice as old as he really is, fit rather to be an inmate of the hospital than a frequenter of the lecture room.”
It was as hospital “inmates” that not a few Indian students in England ultimately found themselves. When the Lytton Committee on Indian Students went around the country in 1921 and 1922 it heard one Oxford man observe that the health of Indian students tended to break down toward the end of their second year, almost as if in obedience to natural law. A Darwinian streak that ran through much committee testimony suggested why: in their own country, Indians had adapted to their environment, in particular the hot sun and spicy food. Now, in England, the thinking went, they were faced with alien conditions. The less fit failed to adapt, and so were struck down.
Whatever the scientific validity to such a view, it was true that national identities were less blurred in those days, making for more to adapt to; India was more inviolably India, England more England. There were not, as there are today, Indian restaurants and food stores littering the streets of London and Cambridge. As for the climate, there was no air-conditioning or central heating to moderate its extremes. You either endured it or got out. That was why well-heeled Englishmen journeyed to Italy or Spain during the winter; or why, in India during the worst of the summer heat, they visited hill stations like Simla in the North, or Ootacamund in the South. Those who could not escape, meanwhile, faced the full force of the heat, eased only by feeble fans or, midst the damp and chill of English winters, were left to the mercies of ineffectual coal fires.
Indians come to study in England, of course, could not escape the alien and hostile climate and so, it was believed, risked their health. The director of the University of Edinburgh’s Indian Student Hostel told the committee that the health of Indian students there was generally good, “except perhaps,” he said, “in the case of those coming from the southern parts of India who suffered rather from the severity of the climate and were inclined to develop tuberculosis and disease of the chest.” The president of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh commented that among Indian students tuberculosis was common, it being aggravated by the climate and, in the words of the report, “the fact that the more religious of the Indian students insisted on keeping to the diet of their cult—a regime unsuited to the conditions under which they found themselves.”
Ramanujan did indeed keep to the diet of his “cult,” and from even his first days in England, before the war, doing so had posed problems for him. In a letter to a friend soon after his arrival, he complained about “the difficulty of getting proper food. Had it not been for the good milk and fruits here I would have suffered more. Now I have determined to cook one or two things myself and have written to my native place to send some necessary things for it.” In other letters, he asked that certain provisions be sent him or no longer sent him, gave accounts of shipments gone astray or arriving in poor condition, expressed thanks for those that did arrive intact. Monthly, Narayana Iyer sent him powdered rice in tin-lined boxes. Others sent him spices or pickled fruits and vegetables.
Back in India, Janaki later recalled, Ramanujan would sometimes abruptly stop eating, or else hurry through it, to pursue a mathematical
thought; meals were something to be dispensed with. But now, with no one to cook for him, they had become an awful bother. Preparing from scratch South Indian meals—assembling the ingredients, soaking and grinding lentils, cutting vegetables, boiling rice, and so on, all the way through the final cooking—took time. And time, while working on what to him were the most seductively challenging problems in the world, he resented having to give up. So, as Neville’s wife, Alice, for one, would report, Ramanujan sometimes cooked only once a day, or sometimes only once every other day, and then at weird hours in the early morning.
The simplest “solution,” of course, was a species of asceticism. Back in Madras, he had enjoyed mango, or banana, or jackfruit with his rice and yogurt. And there was brinjal, prepared that special way his mother did it, and … But the great days of good South Indian meals were gone. He had written Subramanian in 1915, “I am not in need of anything as I have gained a perfect control over my taste and can live on mere rice with a little salt and lemon juice for an indefinite time.”
For a time, certainly, he could. But not indefinitely. Ramanujan’s strict vegetarianism had cost him, in High Table, a social outlet that might have helped keep him on a more even keel. Now, during wartime, it risked his health, too.
5. “ALL US BIG STEAMERS”
The streets were dark. The mood was black. The war dragged on.
When Ramanujan became a research student at Trinity College in 1914, he was entered in the same thick Admissions Book as all other Trinity men. He signed his name on page 8 of a volume begun just the previous year, then filled in columns running all across the page with his place of birth, father’s name, school, and other such routine information.
But examine that book today, and you find that on the next page after Ramanujan’s, the stately march of densely filled columns comes to a chilling halt. Suddenly, for the first time, gaps appear in the record, blank spaces. The name of John de Vere Loder appears, but not his signature. Islay Makimmon Campbell’s admission is listed; but he never signed either. Both were young men who, though admitted to Trinity, had taken their places at the front and never reached Cambridge. The next page is worse, like a mouthful of teeth half of which are missing, or a bombed city with every other house reduced to rubble.
Beside many names appears further information: Charles Jervoise Dudley Smith, “killed 16 June 1915.” Donald Holman, “killed 8 Aug 1918.” John Brerton Howard, “died of wounds 6 Sept 1918.” For twenty pages, it goes on like that, white spaces in the Trinity Admissions Book like white marble headstones of the men who died in Flanders and in France.
The university stayed open, but it was only a ghost of what it had been. Trinity was depopulated, its enrollment plummeting from almost six hundred before the war to forty-seven in October 1916. By that time, as one young officer training in Cambridge wrote, “the pulse of the University had almost stopped beating; there were very few undergraduates in residence except boys under military age, Asiatics, and the physically unfit (‘infants, Indians and invalids’).” It was true: those taking the mathematical Tripos in 1916, for example, included names like Tripathi, Mahindra, Prosad, and Saravanamutti.
The war, entered upon with such patriotic fervor, did not end soon, but grew grimmer in its ceaseless toll. The early optimism faded. Deadly static trench warfare replaced sweeping battlefield maneuvers. To gain a hundred yards of machine-gun-swept mud might cost a thousand lives. The sad, stupid reality of the conflict, fed by the awful casualty reports, fell like a pox-ridden blanket across Britain. It must have particularly galled Hardy that when the First Eastern General Hospital moved from Nevile’s Court in March 1915, it was to a temporary hospital built, behind King’s and Clare Colleges, on a cricket ground. All its eleven acres ultimately quartered the sick and wounded.
The war touched everything. “Military Field Boots, Made to Order,” read an advertisement in the Cambridge Magazine. “Best Quality Marching Boots Kept in Stock.” Food prices rose. Shortages set in. By May 1916, the crisp brown stock gracing the cover of the Gazette of the First Eastern General Hospital had given way to flimsy blue paper. By October, with the hospital having already treated thirty-three thousand casualties, the cover was the consistency of toilet paper.
“Never have we had to chronicle so terrible a list of losses as this week’s number [issue] contains,” wrote the editors of the Cambridge Magazine in its issue of October 14, 1916. “Scarcely a day has passed but names familiar to many still in residence have appeared in the official lists.” Then, college by college, it recorded the toll: Hopgood, Hudson, Johnson, Keeling, Knight …
“It is our pride and sad privilege,” said Sir Joseph Larmor two weeks later in addressing the London Mathematical Society after two years as its president, “to recall the names of the cultivators of our science who, in response to their country’s appeal in time of national peril, have already laid down their lives on her behalf. In E. K. Wakeford, Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, not a few of us had recognized a future leader in geometrical science.”
Ramanujan’s tutor, E. W. Barnes, cast a colder, more bitter light on such losses. In a sermon toward war’s end, he declared: “Of my pupils at Cambridge at least one-half, and practically all the best, have been killed or maimed for life; the work that I did [teaching mathematics over the years] has been for the most part wasted.”
Sometimes it seemed everybody died. The proprietor of a grocery back in Hardy’s hometown, Robert Collins, died.
So did artillery battery commander W. Graham, who five years before back in India, had been among those in the Madras administration to contribute to the debate on Ramanujan’s merits.
Later, at Winchester College, a War Cloister honoring Wykehamists who fell during the war would rise on a site near where Hardy had played soccer in the 1890s. It was engraved with the names of five hundred of them.
What Barbara Wootton, writing in In a World I Never Made, best remembered was
an endless succession of memorial services in college chapels or Cambridge churches. In a way, what distressed me most … was the unashamed public grief of the fathers of the young men… . According to the standards of our family circle, tears were to be shed only by children. Very occasionally, women perhaps might weep—but grown men never… . The sight of distinguished professors and famous men whom I had been brought up to regard with awe openly crying in church disturbed me profoundly.
“Things here are sad and sorrowful,” Trinity vice-master Henry Jackson wrote on January 25, 1917. He was cheered a little, ardent militarist that he was, by the tramp of recruits drilling in Nevile’s Court, officers issuing commands, men marching in formation. But: “Many friends are dead. Few are left here. I am anxious about the home people. Gout and rheumatism punish me. Deafness incapacitates me. And there is always the war, the war.”
• • •
In February 1915, Germany had imposed a submarine blockade of the British Isles. In October 1916, it was intensified; now ships would be sunk without warning.
BRITISH SHIPS SUNK
BY SUBMARINES
10,000 TONS LOST
read an unexceptional headline in The Times of London on February 17, 1917. The same edition carried word that ports in America, which had not yet joined the war, were under virtual blockade. Four million bushels of export wheat were locked up in silos in Minneapolis because East Coast ports were clogged with grain that couldn’t be loaded.
On the eve of the war, Britain depended on imports to the tune of two-fifths of her meat, four-fifths of her wheat. Rudyard Kipling had written:
For the bread that you eat and the biscuits you
nibble,
The sweets that you suck and the joints that
you carve,
They are brought to you daily by all us Big
Steamers—
And if any one hinders our coming you’ll
starve!
Now many of the Big Steamers weren’t getting through. And some Englishmen be
gan to starve. There was, it was said, one sure way to tell rich from poor in England. You had only to look at them; the poor were shorter, less physically developed, bore the stigmata of undernourishment. Now poor nutrition became more widespread. Bertrand Russell’s second wife Dora, writing in The Tamarisk Tree, recalled how “people began to feel the effects of the loss of essential fats and other necessities. When I saw my two clergyman uncles in the latter stages of the war, I was shocked to see how these rosy, well-covered men had shrunk.”
Food was rationed. Prices rose; by 1916, the food bill for a working-class family had climbed 65 percent compared to before the war. By early 1917, severe shortages had set in. “The usual weekend potato and coal scenes took place in London yesterday,” the Observer noted on April 8th.
At Wrexham a big farm-wagon laden with potatoes already weighed into shillingsworths was brought into the square by the agriculturalists who at once proceeded to sell them to all comers. The wagon was surrounded by hundreds of clamouring people, chiefly women, who scrambled on to the vehicle in the eagerness to buy. Several women fainted in the struggle, and the police were sent for to restore order.
Even High Table felt the shortages. “We are virtuously obedient to the controller of food,” wrote Jackson on March 26, 1917: “fish and potatoes but no meat on Tuesday and Friday; meat but no potatoes the rest of the week: bread rolls half their old size: portions strangely dwarfed.” But if for Englishmen it was hard getting potatoes and sugar, what of the specialty foods Ramanujan craved that were hard to come by even in peacetime? In June 1914, he had written that the easy availability of “good milk and fruits” had helped ease his food problems. Now, all fruits and vegetables were difficult to procure.
The war had reached Ramanujan.
The Man Who Knew Infinity Page 33
