In misery at Matlock, Ramanujan was not alone.
• • •
But there were other reasons why Ramanujan was—and had been, and would be—unhappy during the period of his care.
In September 1917, Hardy had written Subramanian of Ramanujan’s seemingly improved prospects. In his letter, he’d noted that “it was only a few months ago—when he was for a time in a Nursing Hospital here—that we discovered that he was not writing to his people nor, apparently, hearing from them. He was very reserved about it, and it appeared to us that there must have been some quarrel.”
There is a certain shock of revelation here, a sense almost of having been caught napping. We discovered … apparently … it appeared … some quarrel. The vagueness is distinctly un-Hardylike. And in the way Hardy attributes his ignorance to Ramanujan’s reserve, there is even a trace of defensiveness.
A little later, another hint: writing Hardy from Matlock, Ramanujan seems to be acquainting him for the first time with some of the most rudimentary facts of his personal life:
It is true that I promised my mother that I was going home at the end of 2 years; I wrote them several letters 11/2 years ago that I was coming over there for the long vacation; but I had many letters of protest from my mother to the effect that I ought not to come to India till I took my M.A. degree. So I gave up the idea of going there.
It is not true that I am getting letters from my wife or brother-in-law or anybody. I had only a few formal letters from my wife just explaining to me why she had to leave my home… .
The initial S. in my name stands for Srinivasa which is my father’s name. I haven’t got a surname, really speaking.
Ramanujan had not returned home in 1916 because his mother had implored him not to? His wife was not writing him? She had left his family’s home? And Ramanujan had no real first name?
It was all news to Hardy.
There was, indeed, trouble back home; “quarrel” was scarcely the word for it. And it had reached across the waters to upset Ramanujan in England. Making matters worse, Hardy had known nothing of it, and so could hardly have done much to ease his distress.
Sometime in early 1917 something had gone badly wrong with Ramanujan’s body; he had come down sick. But by the end of the year, it was not only his body that was troubled, but his mind. By then, certainly, he was not a happy man. Happy men do not try to kill themselves.
7. TROUBLE BACK HOME
Ramanujan got no letters from Janaki not because she didn’t write them but because his mother intercepted them.
One time, with a package destined for Ramanujan prepared for pickup and her mother-in-law out of the house, Janaki slipped into it a brief note. But Komalatammal returned early, spied the note, opened it, read it, dismissed it as childish or silly or stupid, and refused to send it. Janaki was upset. But what could she say? Or do? She was a girl of seventeen, and her mother-in-law was, well … her mother-in-law. So she said nothing, consoling herself that that was just how things were.
That was just how things were in the Indian extended family. Mother-in-law and wife troubles were a given in many Indian households, perhaps most. They were the stuff of jokes—and, as usual, the butt of moralistic opprobrium from Western observers, whose sensibilities were offended by so much of what they saw in India. The institution of child-brides, wrote Herbert Compton in 1904, was abomination enough, but the girl’s customary fate in her new home was, if anything, even worse.
It is pitiable for the child-wife, torn from a home that contained all she knew of happiness, to be obliged to submit herself to the temper, caprice, and often tyranny of her husband, but when to this is added the despotism and cruelty of several elderly women, who often avail themselves of her helplessness, and if she fails to find favour in her husband’s eyes, almost invariably take their cue of unkind conduct from him, her lot may be better imagined than described. She has absolutely no place to go to for comfort and sympathy if it is not to be found in her new home. There is no escape, and no matter what her sufferings, her parents’ home is closed to her. An appeal to them meets with a rigid command to submit herself to her husband.
Some years before, the Hindu had gone to the trouble of defending Indian culture against such criticism. “The tyrannical mother-in-law,” it argued, “is not the rule in Hindu society; and even she is not so black as she is painted. Nor is she so persistent and unchanging in her cruelty to the girl-wife.” In its very defensiveness, of course, the editorial spoke some kernel of truth.
An Indian marriage was a mating—or a clash—of families. The wife, a newcomer to her husband’s family, was apt to be deemed an interloper, a threat to the household sway long held by her mother-in-law. Besides, she was just a child. Her mother-in-law, who had undergone the same trials when she was a bride, was there to shape her, just as the hard-bitten drill sergeant does new Marines. But here “boot camp,” as it were, extended over years—until the wife bore her own children and then, in the course of time, became a mother-in-law herself. Only then might she take a dominant place in the household. In the meantime, her husband normally acted toward her, at least publicly, with a species of indifference. The wife’s lot was to defer, unquestioningly, to her mother-in-law and the other older women of the house. In some homes, she would not even hand something to her husband without giving it to her mother-in-law first, who in turn would pass it to him.
Plainly there were seeds of domestic tension in such a situation. And in the case of Ramanujan’s family, they grew in more than usually fertile soil. For one thing, Komalatammal’s identification with her son—his birth long sought and the object of fervent prayers—was particularly strong. And while young Indian men were often more attached to mother than to wife, Ramanujan was more than usually so; he looked like her, thought like her, shared the ardency of her temperament. Then, too, Komalatammal, close to fifty by now, was a formidable figure of a woman, by one account “insanely jealous” of her son, while Janaki was a meek and callow teenager.
Seven decades later, Janaki, eighty-eight years old, was a stooped old woman, living in Triplicane, Madras, with her forty-five-year-old adopted son, Narayanan, his wife and three children. Their modest house stood behind a low wall with an iron fence, a few feet back from a busy street accented by coconut palms heavy with fruit. Inside, wrapped in a burgundy sari, Janaki sat on a bare wood bench against a wall, where she had only to look up to see a bronze bust of her late husband, garlanded with flowers, the gift of his admirers from around the world. Her skin was glossy, stretched over bones barren of fat. Hunched and frail, she got around the house only by painfully pushing a wooden chair, which functioned as a walker. Nearly deaf, she could hear Narayanan only when he shouted through a rolled-up magazine into her ear. As she replied, in loud staccato bursts, to questions asked her, her face would sometimes grow contorted with the effort of simply listening and speaking. At other times, it would break out into a broad, captivating smile.
According to some who knew her, Janaki was more confident and assertive now than in years past. And yet, such was a daughter-in-law’s place as she had been brought up to accept it that even now, nearing ninety and known to be bitter about her treatment at Komalatammal’s hands, she took pains to show respect for her long-dead mother-in-law. Through Narayanan, she expressed gratitude to her for the opportunity to marry Ramanujan. And she asked that certain difficulties in their relationship be couched in properly respectful circumlocutions; that it be said, for example, that they were simply “not able to see eye to eye”; and that she fled the household at one point merely because she “wanted to change the atmosphere.”
Those close to Janaki, however, suggested some of the basis for her resentment. While Ramanujan remained in India, Komalatammal apparently kept them from sleeping together as husband and wife. Once he had left for England, Janaki was given only the coarsest material for saris. She got no money of her own, but depended on her mother-in-law for the merest trifle. She was made to trek across
town to the banks of the Cauvery for water with never a word of thanks. She was the butt of her mother-in-law’s abusive language. Finally, of course, her letters to Ramanujan were intercepted, as his were to her. At one point, apparently, Ramanujan wrote his mother asking that she have Janaki join him in England. His mother, not telling Janaki, wrote back that it was out of the question.
Komalatammal’s side of the conflict does not come down to us, except that, by some accounts, she blamed Janaki, on the basis of her horoscope, for Ramanujan’s ill health; had he married someone else, she was certain, he would not have gotten sick. It may be, however, that she bore toward Janaki no special animosity at all, but merely wrote her off as the child she still was. Almost forty years her senior and used to having her way around the house—and with Ramanujan—she could scarcely be expected to give Janaki much voice or autonomy until she grew up. It demands little imagination, then, to see her dismissing with scarcely a wave of her hand Janaki’s pleas and protestations.
Whatever the precise family dynamics, it was a scene rife with hard feelings and harsh words. Things were so bad that, at one point, even Ramanujan’s half-blind father, who had at first opposed the marriage of Janaki to his son and scarcely ever figures in accounts of family life, stood up for her against his wife.
Finally, Janaki found an excuse to get away. Her only brother, Srinivasa Iyengar, then working in Karachi, in what is now Pakistan, was getting married. The wedding would be back in her hometown of Rajendram, where she and Ramanujan had been wed. Obviously she would have to go. Through mutual friends in Kumbakonam, her parents had known something was amiss, and it may have been their idea to use the wedding as pretext to get Janaki out of Komalatammal’s clutches.
A little later, Janaki, now at her brother’s house in Karachi, wrote Ramanujan, and this time the letter got through. Could he send her some money for a new sari and for a wedding gift for her brother? Dutifully, Ramanujan sent the money. But by now bitter at the long silence from his wife and knowing only what he heard from his mother, he let no warmth or feeling slip into his reply.
The trouble at home had overflowed its banks, distorting Ramanujan’s relationship with his whole family. His letters home first dropped off, then stopped altogether. In 1914, Ramanujan had written home three or four times a month. By 1916, sometimes two or three months passed before he wrote. During 1917, the family heard from him not at all.
For a long time, perhaps shamed at feeling abandoned by his own family, Ramanujan kept silent about it. But finally, while in the Cambridge nursing home, he could hold it in no longer. He told Hardy. And he told his friend Chatterji. Visiting him one day, Chatterji found him looking unhappy. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Oh, my house has not written to me,” Ramanujan replied, using a common South Indian idiom for “my wife.”
“Well,” joked Chatterji, though familiar with the idiom, “houses don’t write.”
• • •
The “quarrel” disturbed Ramanujan’s equanimity, made for a tangled snag in his emotional lifeline back to India. That was bad enough. But that Hardy knew so little of his personal side at this late date, three and a half years after he came to England, testified to something more—and, perhaps, worse. Presumably, Hardy was his best friend in England. At least before he got sick, the two had seen each other almost every day. And yet, of Ramanujan’s lack of letters from home—and, very likely, of the strain of his adjustment to England, and of the winds of loneliness that sometimes blew through him—Hardy had, at least until recently, known nothing.
Why, if they were bosom friends, hadn’t Ramanujan been able to tell him long before?
The fact is, they were not intimate friends. Ramanujan was cut off from India. He was cut off from the English. And, by a chasm of personality, culture, and circumstances, he was cut off from Hardy as well.
8. THE NELSON MONUMENT
For one thing, as keen an interest as Hardy took in Ramanujan, he had other things on his mind. He was an international mathematical figure. He was involved in many areas of mathematics other than those Ramanujan pursued; of forty-five papers he wrote from 1915 to 1918, only four were collaborations with Ramanujan, though others were influenced by their joint work. Hardy was active in the London Mathematical Society, attended its meetings, served as officer, sometimes took on seemingly petty “journalistic” chores for it; in January 1917, for example, he undertook to draft a leaflet advising authors on the writing of their papers. In the Cambridge Philosophical Society, too, he was active. In 1917, he campaigned for splitting the society’s Proceedings into two separate journals, thereby presumably upgrading the pure mathematics one of them would carry.
Hardy was deeply involved in the world outside mathematics, too, in particular against the war. When Tresilian Nicholas, a young Fellow of Trinity briefly back from war service, showed up in Cambridge in 1915, he found himself seated next to Hardy in Hall. Surprised Nicholas knew nothing of some recent college business, Hardy asked him, “Whatever have you been doing?” “When I said I had been on war service in the Mediterranean,” Nicholas recalled, “he gave me a look of extreme disapproval and talked to his other neighbor for the rest of the dinner.”
From its onset, the war had divided Cambridge. G. E. Moore, philosophical guru of the Apostles and Hardy’s “father” from fifteen years before, agonized over his stance on it. And Hardy, as Paul Levy writes in his biography of Moore, “soon became one of the people whose opinions on the war most interested [him].” For two years Hardy’s views appeared regularly in his diary. “Hardy just back [from vacation],” Moore wrote on September 25, 1914, “thinks we ought to make peace as soon as France and Belgium are safe.” (They never were.)
During this period, Trinity was torn by the Bertrand Russell affair. The leading mathematical philosopher of his day, Russell had already become the impassioned antiwar campaigner he would remain on into Vietnam days. A pacifist, he was unpopular among conservative senior fellows who now, with the junior fellows at the front or otherwise involved in the war, ran Trinity. In April 1916, a schoolteacher named Everett, a conscientious objector granted exemption from combatant service, was called up for service in the noncombatant corps; he refused, was courtmartialed, and sentenced to two years hard labor. Russell, active in the Non-Conscription Fellowship, came to his defense in a leaflet, and went on record as its author. He was convicted for making statements prejudicial to recruitment and discipline, and stiffly fined.
On July 11, 1916, Trinity dismissed Russell from his lectureship. “Trinity in Disgrace,” ran a headline in the Cambridge Magazine lamenting the college’s action. Hardy, who later chronicled the affair in Bertrand Russell and Trinity, was among those fellows—Littlewood, Barnes, and Neville were others—who protested the action. (Hardy’s “little book,” one review said of it, “is a reminder of a way of life where the participants did their best to hurt each other by day and dined together by night.”)
When, on May 5, 1917, Cambridge Magazine carried a small ad for the Cambridge Branch of the Union of Democratic Control—billed as “an Association for the expression of independent opinion concerning foreign policy and the settlement after the War”—readers were informed they might seek “further information from G. H. Hardy, Trinity College.” Earlier, Hardy had helped keep at least one mathematician out of the war by building a case for the importance of his work to the national interest. And later, in 1918, he would protest the firing, because of his antiwar views, of an otherwise competent university librarian. “It is not, so far as I know, that Dingwall has done anything,” Hardy would write. “It is purely and simply that he holds views which are held to be obnoxious … Russell’s case (bitterly as I resent the Council’s action) was quite different: he had done things, right or wrong, but at any rate perfectly tangible and definite.”
Hardy, in short, was busy, busy with matters that siphoned off time and energy from his relationship with Ramanujan. As closely as the two men often worked,
Ramanujan was, inevitably, less the beacon of Hardy’s life than Hardy was of Ramanujan’s.
• • •
But even if Hardy weren’t so busy, an immense personal and cultural gap stood in the way of real intimacy between the two men.
Some years later, the English mathematician Alan Turing would complain of Hardy’s lack of even superficial friendliness. It was 1936, Hardy was spending the year at Princeton, and Turing found him “very standoffish or possibly shy. I met him in Maurice Pryce’s rooms the day I arrived, and he didn’t say a word to me.” Hardy loosened up later, but as Turing’s biographer, Andrew Hodges, observes, “although ‘friendly,’ the relationship was not one that overcame a generation and multiple layers of reserve”—this though Hardy “saw the world through such very similar eyes.”
Hardy and Ramanujan, who saw the world through such very dissimilar eyes, had far more to overcome.
Whatever its psychosexual roots, Hardy had lowered about himself a lovely, lacy veil of personal defenses that was even more formidable than that of the ordinary Englishman’s. An Indian admirer of Hardy would remark on his “parental solicitude” toward Ramanujan. It was an apt choice of words; their relationship was marked by distance, not comradely intimacy. Ten years older than he, Hardy remained always the parent, a kind and obliging parent, perhaps, but forbidding, demanding, and remote, too.
If you stand in the middle of London’s Trafalgar Square, which commemorates Admiral Nelson’s defeat of the French in 1805, at the base of the Nelson Column you’ll see, up close, sculpted depictions of his various naval campaigns. But as you lift your gaze to the top of the great 167-foot-tall fluted column, Nelson himself is just a cloaked figure in a three-cornered admiral’s cap, too high to make out even the bare outline of his features. One day, offered the hypothetical choice between being commemorated by such a statue, glorious but distant, and a lower, more approachable one, Hardy would choose the former. He preferred the safety of barriers, privacy, distance.
The Man Who Knew Infinity Page 35
