The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  “But maybe he's happy there. You saw the pretty domestic scene, Hardy. The fire and the puzzle and the piano. Looked pretty cozy to me.”

  “Suffocating's the word I'd use.”

  “But that's you. And she's right about the food.”

  “I don't see how. Ramanujan doesn't seem the least anxious about cooking for himself. In fact, I rather got the impression he's looking forward to it. A respite from those horrific concoctions Mrs. Neville's always dragging out of the George Bernard Shaw cookbook or whatever it's called.”

  “Of course I won't disagree on that point.”

  “I should hope not. You're the one who found him the rooms.”

  “Still, I can't help but wonder if in the end he might not be better off staying under Neville's roof, being cared for—”

  ”—by a woman with a morbid erotic obsession.”

  At this Gertrude laughs. Her laugh surprises Littlewood; it's higher and flutier than he would have expected.

  “What's so funny?”

  “You two,” she says, laughing more.

  “Why?” Hardy asks. “Why on earth are we funny?”

  “Has either of you considered asking him where be wants to live?”

  6

  RAMANUJAN'S TRUNK is packed. It sits by the front door at 113 Chesterton Road, alongside its owner, who stands stiffly at attention, as if he is attending a military or religious ceremony. Before him stand the Nevilles and Ethel. All are dressed to suit the occasion. No one is wearing slippers.

  In a few moments Neville's older brother will arrive in his Jowett car, the same car in which they fetched Ramanujan when his ship docked. The brother will stay the weekend. “And to think, that was only—what, Alice, six weeks ago?”

  “Seven,” Alice says.

  “Seven weeks. I must say, Ramanujan, it feels as if you've always been here.”

  Ramanujan stares at his shoes. His forehead is covered with drops of sweat.

  “We'll miss you around here, won't we, ladies?” Neville puts his arm around Alice, who shudders. But to everyone's surprise it is Ethel, the housemaid, who bursts into tears.

  “Now, Ethel, please,” Alice says, shutting her eyes.

  “I'm sorry, ma'am,” Ethel says. “It's just that it won't be quite the same around here without sir to cut up fruit for.”

  “I can tell you one thing,” Neville says, laughing. “I'm expecting a joint of mutton for dinner tonight.”

  All of them laugh at that. Ethel takes a handkerchief from her pocket and blows her nose.

  Then a honking sounds. “There's Eddie,” Neville says, opening the door to wave. “Right on time as always!” he shouts, before turning to Ramanujan. “No, to be perfectly direct about it, we'll miss you around here. All of us will.”

  “But I won't be so far away,” Ramanujan says. “Only at the college.”

  “Yes, and you can come to dinner whenever you like. Right, Ethel? I promise you, you haven't cooked your last vegetable goose.”

  “Oh, sir!” Ethel says, covering her face.

  Eddie Neville comes inside. He's red-faced and jovial—an older version of Eric. He pats Ramanujan hard on the back, then the brothers hoist the trunk and carry it out to the car. Ramanujan turns to Alice.

  “I thank you very deeply for your kindness,” he says. “And not only that, my mother thanks you.”

  “Does she?”

  “Yes, she wrote so in a letter and asked me to tell you.”

  “And Janaki?”

  “Janaki I have not received a letter from. But I am certain that she too would thank you.”

  They shake hands, then. All very innocent and amiable. And, as Alice reminds herself, it's not as if he doesn't want to go. He could have refused.

  After the men have left, the house seems very quiet. Ethel disappears into the kitchen, no doubt to begin preparing the requested joint. Nor can Alice deny that her own mouth waters a little, at the prospect of meat again after such a long hiatus.

  She walks across the sitting room, toward the piano; notices, for an instant, the puzzle on the table … and takes in her breath. Is it possible?

  Yes. He has finished it. He must have stayed up most of the night. There they are: the quaint-looking guests, the innkeeper. A glass and the top hat rest on the table. Floorboards lead up to the tufted edge of the carpet. And yet—she leans over the table, being careful not to let out her breath. Yes, there is something wrong. A piece is missing. In the lower left-hand corner, where the rug ends and the floorboards begin, the wood grain of the table shows through. Indeed, the real wood and the wood in the picture are so similar in tone that if you didn't look carefully, you wouldn't notice it. But Alice does notice, and as she does, she remembers her sister's tremendous gusts of rage, her own scrabbling on the floor afterward. Of course it makes sense that a piece should have gone missing. Indeed, it's a miracle that more weren't lost.

  With her finger she traces the shape of the gap. She thinks of the old nursery, the settee and the faded floral curtains. Somehow, the last time she swept the pieces back into their box, one, brown with black stripes, must have remained behind. Its absence is what she cups now in her hands, and so she opens them, letting it free into the room: the shape of a butterfly.

  7

  New Lecture Hall, Harvard University

  SOMETIME IN THE mid 1920s (Hardy said, in the lecture he did not give) Mrs. Neville came to see me. I was at Oxford by then, and had been for several years. Neville was at Reading. In fact we had left Trinity the same year, 1919—I because, after the business with Russell, I could no longer bear the place, Neville because his fellowship had not been renewed. Correctly, I think, he suspected that this was in retaliation for his having been such a vocal pacifist during the war. Almost as vocal as Russell.

  We had not stayed in touch, though I had heard, through Little-wood, that the Nevilles had had a child, a boy, and that the boy had died before he was a year old. Littlewood and I were then publishing several papers a year together, written through an exchange of letters. We saw each other at most once every few months.

  I should say that she did not just waltz into my rooms at New College unannounced. She sent a note first, explaining that she and Neville were to be in Oxford for a day as he was giving a lecture at one of the other colleges. Neville himself would be very busy but she had time at her disposal and was hoping that she might call. I replied that of course she would be welcome.

  I instructed my scout to arrange tea and sandwiches with the kitchen—for those of you unfamiliar with such arcana, what we call a “gyp” at Cambridge we call a “scout” at Oxford—and in due course, the polite five minutes after the appointed meeting time, Mrs. Neville arrived, a bit stouter than she had been in her youth, but still with that rather humid look, as if she had just emerged from the bath. The various pins and stays with which it was studded still could not contain her hair, which was still red. Her perfume—of

  Parma violets—was the same as before, the same one my mother had worn.

  She sat down across from me, and, after a few minutes of the most tedious and polite exchange (I did not mention the dead child), she got down to business, explaining that a few weeks previously, an Indian mathematician had come to see her. His name was Ranganathan, and he had recently come to study the workings of the Reading library. Like Ramanujan, this Ranganathan was from Madras, and so, upon learning that Neville was in Reading, he had asked if he could come to talk to them about Ramanujan, who, it seems, in the years since his death, had become something of a myth to the Madrasi mathematicians. Indeed, Ranganathan had it in mind to write Ramanujan's biography.

  Being the woman she is, Mrs. Neville prepared for the visit by brewing Indian coffee and making some sort of Indian sweet, a recipe for which she had found in one of her cookbooks. She made a point of this to me, which, I realize now, I should have recognized as a sign of the outburst to come; back in Cambridge she'd always tried to undermine my friendship with Ramanujan by poin
ting out how much better she “understood” him. And in the case of Ranganathan, the ploy must have paid off, for he was very confidential with her. He arrived in due course at their house, she said, and he was wearing a turban. This simply astonished her, she said, because, back in Cambridge, Ramanujan had often complained to her that he found it a torture to wear a hat. Wouldn't he have been more comfortable wearing a turban? she asked.

  Before I could answer, she was back to her tale. Having absorbed the turban, it seemed that she asked Ranganathan if his wearing it had ever caused him any trouble in England, and he had replied that only on two occasions had anyone even remarked upon his headwear. Once was in Hyde Park, at Speakers' Corner, when a speaker advocating Irish independence pointed to him from his platform and said something to the effect that this “friend from India” should surely understand the persecution by England of a slave nation. The other was when Ranganathan was riding a train to Croydon, a train moving slowly due to some repairs on the track, and the gang coolies stared at him through the window and called him “Mr. A.,” which was what the newspapers were then calling an Indian prince involved in a lawsuit. Neither incident, Ranganathan said, upset him in the least—which led Mrs. Neville to ask him why, then, poor Ramanujan had not been allowed to wear his turban. Ranganathan replied that perhaps at the time, in Madras, it was assumed that a man walking down the streets of an English city wearing a turban would be laughed at or even stoned. Few of Ramanujan's Indian champions, after all, had ever been to England, while his English champions had been away for many years.

  All this Mrs. Neville explained in a voice that, as she spoke, became increasingly agitated, even accusatory—as if, somehow, I was com-plicit in the edict that Ramanujan could not wear a turban, when in fact his wearing a turban would have meant nothing to me. Before I could tell her this, however, she moved from the turban to the kudimi, the religiously prescribed tuft of hair that Ramanujan had had snipped off before his departure. Did Ranganathan still have his kudimi? she asked him, and he told her that he did, and took off his turban to show her the little tuft, at which point, she said, tears filled her eyes, as indeed tears now filled her eyes. “Why in the world,” she asked, “was he forced to cut it off? He would have been so much happier had he been able to keep it.” But again, I had no chance to answer, for she was now on to clothes. Although Ranganathan wore Western-style clothes, he told her that when he was at home, he wore his dhoti, and that his landlady did not mind at all. Nor, Mrs. Neville said, would she have minded had Ramanujan worn his dhoti when he was staying at her house. And why had he not been allowed to wear his dhoti at Trinity? “This may seem a small matter to you, Mr. Hardy,” she said, “but it would have made for Ramanujan the difference between happiness and misery.”

  Please bear in mind that, so far, to this putative “conversation,” I had contributed not so much as a word. Mrs. Neville had not given me the chance. Now, though, she was wiping her eyes, and I took advantage of this brief caesura in her harangue to say, “I agree with you completely. No doubt Ramanujan would have been much happier had he allowed himself these concessions.”

  She looked at me in surprise. “Allowed himself!” she said. “Are you supposing he had any choice in the matter?”

  I said, “There have been Indians at Cambridge for many years. He had Indian friends. Some wore turbans. He could have followed their example. At Trinity, anyway, he wore slippers most of the time, not shoes.”

  “I gave him those slippers,” she said, almost jealously.

  “That was kind of you,” I said.

  She strangled her handkerchief. “It was a terrible mistake, his moving into the college. I'm sure that, had he stayed under my roof, he would never have become ill. He might be alive today.”

  So this was what it came down to. I looked at her with the compassionate disbelief that one reserves for the insane. And in a sense, I think, she was insane at that moment. Women are so inclined to confuse things. Perhaps, through Ramanujan, she was mourning the death of her own child.

  In any case, having now made her point, she pulled back. She became, suddenly, very bright, very friendly, as if the strained intercourse of the past half hour hadn't even taken place. What a pleasure it was to see me again. Was I happier in Oxford than in Cambridge? Eric had asked her to pass on his regards and to say how sorry he was that he would not have a chance to call.

  And then she left. Her odor of Parma violets remained behind. It is a great and painful irony that even accusations of the most unjust and ludicrous sort still leave a sting—of what? Guilt? No, not exactly. Doubt. For now she had put into my head the idea that by moving Ramanujan into the college, I had brought about or at least hastened his death. Such an idea, of course, was madness. What, after all, could where he lived have had to do with his illness? And yet, perhaps, had he been kept away from such a mass of men as was passing through Trinity through the war years, had he not taken to cooking his own food … Do you see? Once the splinter of doubt is under the skin, there is no teasing it out. She had done her job admirably.

  But I have moved ahead of myself; I have moved not only into but beyond the years of Ramanujan's illness, when what I wanted to tell you about were those first happy weeks before the war started, weeks distilled, for me, into the image of him waddling across New Court wearing a pair of slippers. And now I see that it was the slippers that made me remember Mrs. Neville's visit today. Because, as she so bitterly reminded me, she had given them to him.

  Waddle, of course, is not a kind verb. Nor is it an entirely accurate way of describing Ramanujan's walk. If he seemed to teeter a bit, I am convinced, it was mostly due to the constrictions of his clothes, which, as I have said, were too small for him. On this matter Mrs. Neville and I remain in complete agreement: Ramanujan was born to wear a dhoti or some other loose garment. In flowing clothes he would have looked as regal as that “Mr. A.” with whom the coolies confused Ranga-nathan. In English dress, on the other hand, he did come off a bit absurd.

  In any case, as I'm sure you've heard a thousand times before, that was an extraordinarily beautiful summer, that last summer before the war; never before had so many trees so fragrantly shed their blossoms, and so on. As it happened, it was the height of May week when he moved into his rooms, delivered to Whewell's Court by Neville's brother in that terrible motor of his. That same day, the tripos results were posted, the names now in a plain vertical row. Littlewood and I took Ramanujan to see them, and he studied them scrupulously. All a far cry from the old days when a crowd would fill the Senate House to hear the reading of the Honors List… I had put a stop to that, I told him, an achievement in which I took what I considered to be a justified pride. And Ramanujan, I think, understood that pride, he whom exams had so betrayed and cornered.

  The weather being exceptionally fine, Littlewood and I walked him down to the Cam to watch the punts gliding by, the men in their flannels and college blazers, the girls with their bright frocks and colorful Japanese umbrellas. None of this, he later told me, struck him as particularly spectacular—he who was habituated to the bright colors of the women's saris in Kumbakonam, and who had drifted down the holy river Cavary in boats not so different from our punts. All along the banks of the river picnics were laid out. We watched the bumps races for a while—he seemed to find them quite dull—then went over to Fenner's for a cricket match, Cambridge versus the Free Foresters. I am sorry to report that he took as little interest in the match as he had in the bumps race. And then in the evening we attended a rather frivolous entertainment put on by the Footlights Dramatic Club, a revue entitled Was it the Lobster?, at the silly songs and sketches of which, to my amazement, Ramanujan laughed heartily. He had a very memorable laugh, loud enough to startle, at which point he would cover his mouth with his hand.

  If he were alive today, I'm sure he could tell you whether, in fact, it

  was the lobster. That was the sort of thing he remembered. I can tell you only that I shall always recall those d
ays with happiness, and in particular the sight of Ramanujan, his face turned toward the sun, making his way across New Court toward my rooms. It was a sight that filled me with satisfaction and a certain pride, for I knew that he was there entirely thanks to me, that without me he would never have been walking those cobblestone paths.

  He would arrive, most mornings, around nine-thirty. For a few moments he and Hermione would stare at each other. Then we would drink coffee and chat a bit before getting down to work. How was he settling into his rooms? Quite nicely, thank you. And was he comfortable cooking for himself? Quite, thank you. He bought vegetables each week at the market (admittedly, he found them strange and tasteless at first, but he got used to them), in addition to which he was able to order rice and rice powder and spices from a shop in London. A friend in Madras had also sent him a special kind of cooking pot, I forget what it was called, made of brass lined with silver, in which he made one of his favorite dishes, a thin, spicy lentil soup called rasam. In his home province, the people had a taste for food that was sour as well as spicy. At first he tried to give his food the proper note of sourness by squeezing in the juice of lemons, but our lemons, he said, were not nearly so sour as those in India. Fortunately another acquaintance from Madras, a youth also on his way to study mathematics at Cambridge, was due to arrive any day, bearing with him a large supply of tamarind, the preferred souring agent of the region, with which Ramanujan would be able to make rasam almost, if not quite, as tasty as his mother's.

  On one of those occasions, while we were drinking our coffee, he noticed the bust of Gaye. “Who is that man?” he asked. And I explained that he was a dear friend, possibly the best friend that I had ever had, and that he had died, at which Ramanujan looked soberly at his lap. He, too, he said, had had friends who had died. Fortunately he had the good graces not to ask bow Gaye had died.