The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  “And he says he can't work without you!”

  “Don't blame him.”

  “Why not? I have to blame somebody.”

  “Blame Kitchener, then. Blame Churchill. You've never even met Hardy.”

  “Only because you never—”

  “Ssh. That's his sister.”

  Anne looks up. Two women are strolling down the path, toward the tiger's cage.

  Without thinking she pulls her hand out of Littlewood's. He stands.

  “Miss Hardy, Mrs. Neville. What a lovely surprise.”

  Gertrude gives Anne an assessing glance. “Hello, Mr. Littlewood,” she says. “And what brings you to the zoo?”

  “Simply—a lovely afternoon. And you?”

  “It's a little ritual of ours,” Alice says. “Whenever I happen to be in London.”

  “Oh, may I introduce Mrs. Chase?”

  Anne gets up too now. She has to shake Gertrude's hand with her left hand, because the handkerchief is balled up in the right.

  “And may I offer you ladies some tea?” Littlewood asks, ever the gallant, ever able to adjust to what confronts him.

  “Oh no,” Alice says. “We wouldn't want to interrupt.”

  “You're not interrupting.”

  “Well, if you're sure …”

  “No, we must be going,” Gertrude says firmly, and takes Alice by the arm. “A pleasure to see you, Mr. Littlewood. And a pleasure to meet you, Mrs …”

  “Chase.”

  “Chase. Good day.”

  They move on. A few feet along the path they stop before the elephants, at which they peer with academic earnestness. They don't seem to be talking.

  He and Anne sit down again, and all at once Anne begins to laugh. She laughs so hard she has to wipe her eyes again.

  “What on earth's the matter now?”

  “It's nothing, it just seems so funny … Well, I mean, who cares anymore? If they guess everything.”

  “I hate to tell you, darling, but we're hardly a state secret.”

  “I know. That's why I'm laughing.”

  “Why didn't you want to stop for tea?”

  “Because they were obviously having a row. Or something.”

  “But who is she?”

  “Can't you see?”

  “Oh! … But he introduced her as Mrs. Chase.”

  “Well, how do you expect Russell would introduce Ottoline Morrell?”

  They are approaching the bat house. Gertrude's expression is one of wicked amusement, but for Alice, it's as if a new idea has entered the world. Russell and Mrs. Morrell. Littlewood and Mrs. Chase.

  Well, why not?

  She resolves, then, that she will meet Mrs. Chase again. She will seek her out. That woman with the brown hair and the sun-darkened skin and that look of—well—radiance, Alice would call it—even in tears, a kind of radiance—this is a woman she can talk to. This is the kind of woman she might, if she's lucky, end up learning how to be.

  5

  New Lecture Hall, Harvard University

  IN THAT LECTURE he did not give, Hardy said: There is, I believe, an unfortunate tendency today—one, I suspect, that will only intensify as the years pass—to portray Ramanujan as one of those mystic vessels into which the inscrutable East has poured its essence. This isn't surprising. Here we have, after all, a young man who never wore shoes until he boarded a ship for England; who would not eat the food in Hall for fear of contamination; who claimed publicly that the formulae he discovered were written on his tongue by a female deity. Nor did he discourage this myth of himself—on the contrary, he did much to enhance it—which is why, for those who did not know him, his legacy will always carry the scent of incense and temples. And yet, for those of us who did know him, how do we explain that the myth has nothing to do with the man we knew?

  The Ramanujan I knew was, above all else, a rationalist. Despite his occasional eccentricities of behavior, in my company he was never less than sane, reasonable, and shrewd. By temperament he was an agnostic, by which I mean that he saw no particular good and no particular harm in Hinduism or any other religion. As he told us that afternoon when we went to watch The Tempest in Leintwardine, all religions were for him more or less equally true. In Hinduism, as I understand it, observance matters far more than belief. Belief, as a concept, belongs to Christianity. It is part of Christianity's pernicious effort to enslave its disciples by holding before them the bejeweled dream of a new Jerusalem, a reward to be paid out in recompense for a life of piety. Nor is it sufficient to go through the motions. The Christian must accept in his heart that God is real if he expects to reach heaven.

  The Hindu's fate in the afterlife, on the other hand, hinges entirely on how he behaves. If he heeds the rules, he will be reincarnated as a member of higher caste. If he breaks the rules, he will return as a beetle or an untouchable or a weed or some such thing. It does not matter what he believes. And so when the Hindu adheres to certain prohibitions and strictures for the sake of propriety and decorum, rather than because he accepts the doctrines of his religion as literally true, he is not acting as a hypocrite in the way, say, that I would be if I were to attend chapel, or participate in a mass, or thank the Lord for my supper.

  I can guess how Mrs. Neville would react to this statement. She would say, “Well, Hardy, if that's the case, then why didn't he just eat meat? Especially once the war started, when it became so difficult to obtain supplies from India, why did he elect to ruin his health rather than violate his religion's dietary proscriptions? It must have been because he believed.”

  No, Mrs. Neville, it was not because he believed. He remained vegetarian, first of all, because vegetarianism was second nature to him. He had never in his life eaten meat and found the idea of doing so repellent. Also he worried that, if word got back to his mother that he was adopting Western ways, she would make things very difficult for him when he returned to Madras. For Komalatammal, as she was called, was hardly the devout and devoted figure whom her son's Indian admirers have portrayed. This must be put on the table once and for all. On the contrary, she was what my old bedmaker, Mrs. Bixby, would have called a “right piece of work.” She was clever, possessive, and exploitative. It would not surprise me to learn that she employed other Indian students in Cambridge as spies in order to insure that her son did not stray from the path of righteousness. She might also have hounded him, or threatened to hound him, through occult means.

  An admirer of Ramanujan's recently sent me her picture. In it, a very short woman sits in a very tall chair, so tall that her bare feet barely touch the ground. She has a low, mean face, not stupid in the way, say, that a sheep's face is stupid: no, in this face there is the gleam of a primitive intelligence. She stares boldly into the camera as if to challenge its potency, or mesmerize the viewer, by drawing him into the black dot painted between her eyes. No, it is not a picture that I can look at for long.

  Let me give a brief account of her life. She came from a poor but cultured Brahmin family. Her father was some sort of petty court official and, as is the usual thing in India, her parents arranged her marriage for her. From what I have gathered, for the first few years after she was married she could not get pregnant, and so her father and grandparents decided to intercede by praying to the goddess Namagiri. Reportedly the grandmother already had an established relationship with Namagiri, occasionally going into trances during which the goddess would speak through her, and on one of these occasions she had announced that if Komalatammal bore a son, she would speak through him, too. So they got on their knees and prayed to the goddess to grant Komalatammal fertility and, lo and behold, nine months later she gave birth to a boy.

  From then on, whenever she spoke of her son's conception, Komalatammal invoked the name of the goddess. She never mentioned her husband, Kuppuswamy, even though he must have had something to do with the business. Nor did Kuppuswamy protest. From what I have been told, he was a meek, ineffectual person, who recognized early on the advantages of keep
ing out of his wife's ferocious path. For Komalatammal was nothing if not ambitious. Early on, it is said, she read her son's horoscope and deduced from it that he would either become famous all over the world and die young or remain obscure and live to a ripe old age. Reputedly she was quite proficient at matters both astrological and numerological. She must have decided that if there was a chance that he was going to die young, she should take advantage of his talents while she could. Accordingly, from the moment when he first showed signs of mathematical precocity, from when he was three or four, she enlisted his assistance in the various numerological manipulations in which she indulged toward the end of interpreting her own future and insuring that harm should come to her enemies. With the father simpering in the background, mother and son labored together, their bond in many ways more intimate than that of husband and wife.

  Not surprisingly, Komalatammal also professed to be a skilled interpreter of dreams, and to have passed on this skill to her son, who later claimed proficiency at it. I have no doubt that the latter part of this statement, that Ramanujan claimed proficiency at the skill, is entirely true. For it would have been just like him to pretend to possess psychical capacities if by doing so he could secure his social footing or assist a friend. Nearly all so-called prophecy, after all, is mere inductive reasoning dressed up in gypsy scarves.

  Two examples, taken from letters sent to me by Ramanujan's Indian acquaintances, will suffice.

  In the first, Mr. M. Anantharaman writes to say that once, in the Kumbakonam of their childhood, his older brother described a dream he had had to Ramanujan. Ramanujan then interpreted the dream to mean that there would soon be a death in the street behind their house—and, lo and behold, a few days thereafter, an old lady who lived in that street died.

  Let us look at the case closely. Ramanujan had lived in Kumbakonam nearly all his life. He would have known most of the townspeople, and, through his mother, been up to date on their financial misfortunes, the conditions of their marriages, and the various ailments from which they suffered. Imagine, then, that Ramanujan's mother informs him one day that old lady X, who lives in the street behind the brothers Anantharaman, is at death's door. The next day he is asked to interpret a dream. It would require no psychic talent to foresee—and announce—this old lady's imminent demise.

  The second example comes from Mr. K. Narasimha Iyengar, who also hails from Kumbakonam and, for a time, shared lodgings with Ramanujan in Madras. In his letter, this gentleman describes preparing for an examination at Madras Christian College, the mathematics portion of which he feared he would fail. As he recalls, on the day of the examination, Ramanujan “instinctively felt” that they should meet, and, when they did, provided him with “prophetic tips” as a result of which he was able to pass the mathematics exam with the required minimum score of 3 5 percent. Without Ramanujan's intervention, Mr. Iyengar says, he would have failed.

  This is, of course, a more subtle case. What Mr. Iyengar is implying is that the “tips” for the exam were provided to Ramanujan by an outside force. Perhaps they were written on his tongue. In fact, though, as a mathematician and a longtime victim of the Indian educational system, Ramanujan would have known exactly what types of problems Mr. Iyengar was likely to encounter on such an exam. By explaining these problems patiently, and then crediting his insight to spiritual intervention, he was able to reduce the youth's anxiety and instill in him the confidence he needed to score better. For he was above all else—and this is often forgotten—a kindly man.

  I offer these examples because I want to emphasize that Ramanujan, though he may have acted the role of the devout Hindu, and even claimed supernatural capacities, was in fact not remotely susceptible to the vagaries of the so-called religious sentiment. He was, instead, at heart and soul a rationalist. This may sound like an oxymoron. In my view it describes him perfectly. If, on occasion, he practiced economies of truth, he did so because he had weighed the pros and the cons and concluded that in certain cases it was necessary, if not to lie, then to allow certain false impressions to linger. For instance, you will recall that, when it came to traveling to Europe, a very convenient “dream” made it possible for him to sidestep the Brahminic injunction against crossing the ocean. His mother had this dream. She, too, I suspect, is far from the reverent creature she has been portrayed as being. On the contrary, she understood the advantage to herself of his going to England, and, just as she had exploited his talents in his childhood by compelling him to assist her in her numerological enterprises, she tried to leech from him not just a certain measure of fame, as the saintly mother of the “Hindoo calculator,” but, after his death, a certain quantity of cash.

  Yes, Mrs. Neville, I hear you. You protest. I am judging the poor woman too harshly. She sacrificed much for her son, labored hard to pay for his schooling and to care for him, never wavered in her faith in his genius even when all doors were shut in his face. All of this is true. And still she was a grasping, self-interested woman.

  Nowhere is this more evident than in her dealings with his child-bride, Janaki.

  Of Janaki herself, I have an uncertain impression. Ramanujan seemed to feel very fondly toward her. He called her “my house.” When, after a long time in Cambridge, he still had not received a single letter from her, he told Chatterjee, the cricketer, “My house has not written to me.” “Houses don't wrote,” Chatterjee replied cheerfully— perhaps an ungentle witticism, for in fact the failure of the expected letters to arrive was a source of great pain to Ramanujan, though whether this was because he missed the girl, or feared that his mother had killed her, I cannot say. According to Mr. Anantharaman, Ramanujan knew “no conjugal happiness” with Janaki, as she was, in his words, “most unfortunate.” Yet Mr. Anantharaman also reminds me that shortly before his marriage, Ramanujan was operated on for a hydrocele—a swelling of the scrotum due to the build-up of serous fluids—after which he was unable to engage in sexual activity for more than a year. Other sources imply that Komalatammal refused to let the couple sleep together, using the hydrocele as an excuse. Probably she wanted Ramanujan all to herself. I cannot tell you whether Ramanujan regarded this enforced abstinence, whatever its cause, as a curse or a blessing.

  In any case, he must have been pretty well able to guess what was going on at home. Even under the best of circumstances, the Indian mother-in-law is a tyrant, given leave by convention to berate and even beat her poor daughter-in-law, to force her to do any number of unpleasant chores, and to dispense punishment freely. In turn, the daughter-in-law is expected to treat her mother-in-law with reverence, to simper before her and accept whatever abuse she inflicts without protest. Vengeance, she knows, will come later, when she has her own son and he marries and she has the chance to perpetrate upon her daughter-in-law the same cruelties to which she was subjected. Thus the cycle continues, generation to generation, in pretty much every Indian household. And when you consider the extenuating circumstances—Komalatammal's volatility; the absence of the mediating son and husband; the daughter-in-law's youth and defiant nature—well, you can imagine what a powder keg that house in Kumbakonam must have been.

  I am sure Ramanujan divined it all: the vituperative asides, the coarse saris, the slop pails. Poor Kuppuswamy, now nearly blind, spent most of his time trying to keep out of the way of the flying pots. And, the whole time,—this is the great irony—the poor girl was writing letters to her husband—long, lamenting letters, begging him to arrange for her to come to England, if for no other reason than so she could escape her mother-in-law's despotism; only Komalatammal would intercept the letters and destroy them before they were sent. Just as she intercepted Ramanujan's letters to his wife before Janaki could get hold of them. Once Janaki tried to sneak a note into a package of foodstuffs being sent to Ramanujan, but Komalatammal fished it out before the package went. You can imagine the heat Janaki must have got then.

  It was an intolerable situation—and Ramanujan, even from a great distance, felt its repercus
sions. Later, his mother let it drop that her resentment toward Janaki owed to certain peculiarities in the girl's horoscope that her family had deliberately camouflaged before the wedding. Apparently the horoscope, when properly read, revealed that marriage to Janaki would hasten Ramanujan's death. Her parents, knowing this would imperil the chances of their none-too-desirable daughter finding a husband, resorted to fraud in order to be rid of her. Though, as it happened, they weren't rid of her for long.

  I wish that, at the time, I had understood as clearly what he was suffering as I do now. By means of the same powerful intuition that, in earlier days, he had passed off as a gift for prophesy, he must have “seen” the horrifying scenes in Kumbakonam. Yet he could do nothing. Due to the U-boat attacks, he could not go home. And in the meantime, in the absence of letters, he tried to read the silence. This is a dangerous undertaking in the best of circumstances. I know, having often tried it myself. When those you long to hear from do not or cannot speak, you speak “for” them, just as, in the days of our youth, Gaye used to speak “for” the cat, saying things like, “I'm not feeling very well,” or, “Hardy, you're cruel, you won't rub my tummy.” In the same manner, Ramanujan must have spoken “for” Janaki, and in turn replied to this Janaki who, for all we know, bore not the slightest resemblance to the girl he had left behind in India.

  And this was only one of his many troubles. The war frightened him, as it did all of us. The foods he craved, in particular the fresh vegetables that were a staple of his diet, were becoming increasingly hard to obtain. And then English customs, he told me, seemed very strange to him. There's no nice way to say this: he thought us dirty. Once, for instance, we overheard a woman at a tea shop complaining that if the members of the working classes smelled, it was because they bathed just once a week. “If only they would bathe, as we do, once a day!” this woman said. Ramanujan looked at me in alarm. “Do you mean to say you only bathe once a day?” he asked.