The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  Recollections of Calcutta distract Punnett, and Hardy beats him easily. They shake hands, and he returns to his rooms, wondering whether it's Chatterjee's playing or his handsomeness—a very European handsomeness that the contrasting dark skin only renders all the more unexpected—that has really drawn his attention. Meanwhile Hermione is yowling. The bedder has forgotten to feed her. He mixes tinned sardines, cold boiled rice, and milk in her dish, while she rubs her cheek against his leg. Glancing at the little rosewood table, he sees that the gyp has delivered another postcard from Littlewood, which he ignores as he did the last, not because he doesn't care to read it, but because one of the tenets that governs their partnership is that neither should ever feel obliged to postpone more pressing matters in order to answer the other's correspondence. By adhering to this rule, and others like it, they have established one of the few successful collaborations in the history of their solitary discipline, leading Bohr to quip, “Today, England can boast three great mathematicians: Hardy, Littlewood, and Hardy-Littlewood.”

  As for the letter, it sits where he had left it, on the table next to his battered rattan reading chair. Hardy picks it up. Is he wasting his time? Better, perhaps, just to toss it in the fire. No doubt others have done so. His is probably just one name on a list, possibly alphabetical, of famous British mathematicians to whom the Indian has sent the letter, one after the other. And if the others tossed the letter in the fire, why shouldn't he? He's a busy man. G. H. Hardy hardly (Hardy hardly) has time to examine the jottings of an obscure Indian clerk … as he finds himself doing now, rather against his will. Or so it feels.

  No details. No proofs. Just formulae and sketches. Most of it loses him completely—that is to say, if it's wrong, he has no idea how to determine that it's wrong. It resembles no mathematics he'd ever seen. There are assertions that baffle him completely. What, for instance, is one to make of this?

  1+2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + …= - 1/12

  Such a statement is pure lunacy. And yet, here and there amid the incomprehensible equations, the wild theorems unsupported by proof, there are also these bits that made sense—enough of them to keep him going. Some of the infinite series, for instance, he recognizes. Bauer published the first one, famous for its simplicity and beauty, in 1859.

  But how likely is it that the uneducated clerk Ramanujan claims to be would ever have come across this series? Is it possible that he discovered it on his own? And then there is one series that Hardy has never seen before in his life. It reads to him like a kind of poetry:

  What sort of imagination could come up with that? And the most miraculous thing—on his blackboard Hardy tests it, to the degree that he can test it—it appears to be correct.

  Hardy lights his pipe and begins pacing. In a matter of moments his exasperation has given way to amazement, his amazement to enthusiasm. What miracle has the post brought to him today? Something he's never dreamed of seeing. Genius in the raw? A crude way of putting it. Still …

  By his own admission, Hardy has been lucky. As he is perfectly happy to tell anyone, he comes from humble people. One of his grandfathers was a laborer and foundryman, the other the turnkey at Northampton County Gaol. (He lived on Fetter Street.) Later this grandfather, the maternal one, apprenticed as a baker. And Hardy— he really is perfectly happy to tell anyone this—would probably be a baker himself today, had his parents not made the wise decision to become teachers. Around the time of his birth Isaac Hardy was named bursar at Cranleigh School in Surrey, and it was to Cranleigh that Hardy was sent. From Cranleigh he went on to Winchester, from Winchester to Trinity, slipped through doors that would normally have been shut to him because men and women like his parents held the keys. After that, nothing impeded his ascent to exactly the position he dreamed of occupying years ago, and which he deserves to occupy, because he is talented and has worked hard. And now here is a young man, living somewhere in the depths of a city the squalor and racket of which Hardy can scarcely imagine, who appears to have fostered his gift entirely on his own, in the absence of either schooling or encouragement. Genius Hardy has encountered before. Littlewood possesses it, he believes, as does Bohr. In both their cases, though, discipline and knowledge were provided from early on, giving genius a recognizable shape. Ramanujan's is wild and incoherent, like a climbing rose that should have been trained to wind up a trellis but instead runs riot.

  A memory assails him. Years before, when he was a child, his school held a pageant, an “Indian bazaar,” in which he played the role of a maiden draped in jewels and wrapped in some Cranleigh school version of a sari. A friend of his, Avery, was a knife-wielding Gurkha who threatened him … Odd, he hasn't thought of that pageant in ages, yet now, as he remembers it, he realizes that this paste and colored-paper facsimile of the exotic east, in which brave Englishmen battled natives for the cause of empire, is the image his mind summons up every time India is mentioned to him. He can't deny it: he has a terrible weakness for the gimcrack. A bad novel determined his career. In the ordinary course of things, Wykehamists (as Winchester men are called) went to New College, Oxford, with which Winchester had close alliances. But then Hardy read A Fellow of Trinity, the author of which, “Alan St. Aubyn” (really Mrs. Frances Marshall), described the careers of two friends, Flowers and Brown, both undergraduates at Trinity College, Cambridge. Together, they negotiate a host of tribulations, until, at the end of their tenure, the virtuous Flowers wins a fellowship, while the wastrel Brown, having succumbed to drink and ruined his parents, is banished from the academy and becomes a missionary. In the last chapter, Flowers thinks wistfully of Brown, out among the savages, as he drinks port and eats walnuts after supper in the senior combination room.

  It was that moment in particular—the port and the walnuts—that Hardy relished. Yet even as he told himself that he hoped to become Flowers, the one he dreamed of—the one who lay close to him in his bed in dreams—was Brown.

  And of course, here is the joke: now that he lives at Trinity, the real Trinity, a Trinity that resembles not in the least “Alan St. Aubyn's” fantasy, he never goes after supper to the senior combination room. He never takes port and walnuts. He loathes port and walnuts. All that is much more Littlewood'thing. Reality has a way of erasing the idea of a place that the imagination musters in anticipation of seeing it—a truth that saddens Hardy, who knows that if ever he traveled to Madras, steeped himself in whatever brew the real Madras really is, then that pageant stage at Cranleigh, bedecked with pinks and blue banners and careful children's drawings of goddesses with waving multiple arms, would be erased. Avery, swaggering toward him with his paper sword, would be erased. And so for this moment only can he take pleasure in imagining Ramanujan, dressed rather as Avery was dressed, writing out his infinite series amidst Oriental splendors, even though he suspects that in fact the young man wastes his days sorting and stamping documents, probably in a windowless room in a building the English gloom of which not even the brilliant sun of the east can melt away.

  There is nothing else to do. He must consult Littlewood. And not, this time, by postcard. No, he will go and see Littlewood. Carrying the envelope, he will make the walk—all forty paces of it—to D staircase, Nevile's Court, and knock on Littlewood's door.

  3

  EVERY CORNER OF Trinity has a story to tell. D staircase of Nevile's Court is where Lord Byron once resided, and kept his pet bear, Bruin, whom he walked on a lead in protest of the college rule against keeping dogs.

  Now Littlewood lives here—perhaps (Hardy isn't sure) in the very rooms where Bruin once romped. First floor. It is nine o'clock in the evening—after dinner, after soup and Dover sole and pheasant and cheese and port—and Hardy is sitting on a stiff settee before a guttering fire, watching as Littlewood pushes his wheeled wooden chair from his desk and rolls himself across the floor, without once averting his eyes from the Indian's manuscript. Will he crash into a wall? No: he comes to a halt at a spot near the front door and crosses his legs at the ankles. Socks, no sho
es. His glasses are tipped low on his nose, from which little snorts of breath escape, stirring the hairs of a mustache that, in Hardy's view, does little for his face. (Little for Littlewood.) But he would never say so, even if asked, which he never would be. Although they have been collaborating for several years now, this is only the third time that Hardy has ever visited Littlewood in his rooms.

  “‘I have found a function which exactly represents the number of prime numbers less than x,’” Littlewood reads aloud. “Too bad he doesn't give it.”

  “I rather think he's hoping that by not giving it, he'll be able to entice me to write back to him. Dangling the carrot.”

  “And will you?”

  “I'm inclined to, yes.”

  “I would.” Littlewood puts down the letter. “Look, what's he asking for? Help in publishing his stuff. Well, if it turns out there's something there, we can—and should—help him. Providing he gives us more details.”

  “And some proofs.”

  “What do you think of the infinite series, by the way?”

  “Either they came to him in a dream or he's keeping some much more general theorem up his sleeve.”

  With his stockinged foot, Littlewood rolls himself back to his desk. Outside the window, elm branches rustle. It's the hour when, even on a comparatively mild day like this, winter reasserts itself, sending little incursions of wind round the corners, up through the cracks in the floorboards, under the doors. Hardy wishes that Littlewood would get up and stoke the fire. Instead he keeps reading. He is twenty-seven years old, and though he is not tall, he gives an impression of bulk, of breadth—evidence of the years he spent doing gymnastics. Hardy, by contrast, is fine-boned and thin, his athleticism more the wiry cricketer's than the agile gymnast's. Though many people, men as well as women, have told him that he is handsome, he considers himself hideous, which is why, in his rooms, there is not a single mirror. When he stays in hotels, he tells people, he covers the mirrors with cloth.

  Littlewood is in his way a Byronic figure, Hardy thinks, or at least as Byronic as it is possible for a mathematician to be. For instance, every warm morning he strolls through New Court with only a towel wrapped around his waist to bathe in the Cam. This habit caused something of a scandal back in 1905, when he was nineteen, and newly arrived at Trinity. Soon word of his dishabille had spread as far as King's, with the result that Oscar Browning and Goldie Dickinson started coming round in the mornings—though neither had a reputation for being an early riser. “Don't you love the springtime?” O. B. would ask Goldie, as Littlewood gave them a wave.

  Both O. B. and Goldie, of course, are Apostles. So are Russell and Lytton Strachey. And John Maynard Keynes. And Hardy himself. Today the Society's secrecy is something of a joke, thanks mostly to the recent publication of a rather inaccurate history of its early years. Now anyone who cares to know knows that at their Saturday evening meetings, the “brethren”—each of whom has a number—eat “whales” (sardines on toast), and that one of them delivers a philosophical paper while standing on a ceremonial “hearthrug,” and that these papers are stored in an old cedarwood trunk called the “Ark.” It is also common knowledge that most of the members of “that” society are “that” way. The question is, does Littlewood know? And if so, does he care?

  Now he stands from his chair and walks, in that determined way of his, to the fire. Flames rise from the coals as he stokes them. The cold has got to Hardy, who in any case feels ill at ease in this room, with its mirrors and the Broadwood piano and that smell that permeates the air, of cigars and blotting paper and, above all, of Littlewood—a smell of clean linens and wood smoke and something else, something human, biological, that Hardy hesitates to identify. This is one of the reasons that they communicate by postcard. You can speak of Riemann's zeta function in terms of the “mountains” and “valleys” where its values, when charted on a graph, rise and fall, yet if you start actually imagining the climb, tasting the air, searching for water, you will be lost. Smells—of Littlewood, of the Indian's letter—interfere with the ability to navigate the mathematical landscape, which is why, quite suddenly, Hardy finds himself feeling ill, anxious to return to the safety of his own rooms. Indeed, he has already got up and is about to say goodbye when Littlewood rests his hot hand on his shoulder. “Don't go just yet,” he says, sitting Hardy down again. “I want to play you something.” And he puts a record on the gramophone.

  Hardy does as he is told. Noise issues forth from the gramophone. That's all it is to him. He can ascertain rhythm and patterns, a succession of triplets and some sort of narrative, but it gives him no pleasure. He hears no beauty. Perhaps this is due to some deficiency in his brain. It frustrates him, his inability to appreciate an art in which his friend takes such satisfaction. Likewise dogs. Let others natter on about their sterling virtues, their intelligence and loyalty. To him they are smelly and annoying. Littlewood, on the other hand, loves dogs, as did Byron. He loves music. Indeed, as the stylus makes its screechy progress across the record, he seems to enter into a sort of concentrated rapture, closing his eyes, raising his hands, playing the air with his fingers.

  At last the record finishes. “Do you know what that was?” Littlewood asks, lifting the needle.

  Hardy shakes his head.

  “Beethoven. First movement of the ‘Moonlight Sonata.’”

  “Lovely.”

  “I'm teaching myself to play, you know. Of course I'm no Mark Hambourg, and never will be.” He sits down again, next to Hardy this time. “You know who it was who first introduced me to Beethoven, don't you? Old O. B. When I was an undergraduate, he was always inviting me to his rooms. Maybe it was the glamour of my being senior wrangler. He had a pianola, and he played me the ‘Waldstein’ on it.”

  “Yes, I knew he was musical.”

  “Peculiar character, O. B. Did you hear about the time a party of ladies interrupted him after his bathe? All he had was a handkerchief, but instead of covering his privates, he covered his face. ‘Anyone in Cambridge would recognize my face,’ he said.”

  Hardy laughs. Even though he's heard the story a hundred times, he doesn't want to take away from Littlewood the pleasure of thinking that he is telling it to him for the first time. Cambridge is full of stories about O. B. that begin just this way. “Did you hear about the time O. B. dined with the king of Greece?” “Did you hear about the time O. B. went to Bayreuth?” “Did you hear about the time O. B. was on a corridor train with thirty Winchester boys?” (The last of these Hardy doubts that Littlewood has heard.)

  “Anyway, ever since then, it's been Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart for me. Once I learn, they're the only composers I'll play.”

  He gets up again, removes the record from the gramophone and returns it to its sleeve.

  Dear God, please let him take out another record and put it on the gramophone. I'm in the mood for music, hours and hours of music.

  The ruse works. Littlewood looks at his watch. Maybe he wants to work, or write to Mrs. Chase.

  Hardy is just reaching for Ramanujan's letter when Littlewood says, “Do you mind if I keep that tonight? I'd like to look it over more carefully.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then perhaps we can talk in the morning. Or I'll send you a note. I rather imagine I'll be up most of the night with it.”

  “As you please.”

  “Hardy—in all seriousness, maybe we should think about bringing him over. Make some enquiries, at least. I know I may sound as if I'm jumping the gun …”

  “No, I was thinking the same thing. I could write to the India Office, see if they've got any money for this sort of thing.”

  “He may be the man to prove the Riemann hypothesis.”

  Hardy raises his eyebrows. “Really?”

  “Who knows? Because if he's done all this on his own, it might mean he's free to move in directions we haven't thought of. Well, goodnight, Hardy.”

  “Goodnight.”

  They shake hands. Shutting the
door behind him, Hardy hurries down the steps of D staircase, crosses Nevile's Court to New Court, ascends to his rooms. Forty-three paces. His gyp has kept his fire going; in front of it Hermione now lies curled atop her favorite ottoman, the buttoned blue velvet one. “Capitonné,” Gaye, who knew about such things, called the buttoning. He even had a special cover made for the ottoman, so that Hermione could scratch at it without damaging the velvet. Gaye adored Hermione; spoke, in the days before he died, of commissioning her portrait—a feline Odalisque, nude but for an immense emerald hung round her neck on a satin ribbon. Now the cover itself is in tatters.