The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  Hardy raises his eyebrows. “But in the vision it was his relative who died,” he says. “Not a stranger in the relative's house.”

  “Yes. An inconsistency. Perhaps a sort of … mistranslation, or miscommunication. Sir Oliver makes the point that the messages received during seances cannot always be taken literally.”

  “Hedging his bets.”

  “Perhaps. Still, why not investigate these matters? Scientifically, of course. Controlled experiments.”

  “But how can we investigate them? What tools would we employ?”

  “Dowsing rods, the board … There are tools for those willing to use them.”

  They have arrived at the gates of Trinity. With great formality, Mahalanobis bows. “Well, I shall leave you now. I must return to my own college. Good day, Mr. Hardy.”

  “Good day, Mr. Mahalanobis.” And they shake hands. All very odd, Hardy thinks as he steps into the porter's lodge. If only Gaye would appear right now, spit out some of his acid wisdom, and in so doing help Hardy to burn through the morass of Mahalanobis's words! And yet if Gaye appeared, that would count as a psychical phenomenon. In which case Lodge would be proven right.

  Hardy approaches the porter's desk. The porter is writing figures on a ledger. “Good afternoon, sir,” he says. “Been to visit Mr. Rama-nujan?”

  “Indeed.”

  “He looked quite poorly last night. I hope he's feeling better.”

  “Better, yes. He asked me to bring him a book. Might I borrow the key to his room?”

  “Of course, sir.” And the porter extracts an enormous ring, hung with dozens of keys, from a hook under his counter. With astonishing speed he rifles through them before detaching one and handing it to Hardy.

  “You know all those keys by heart?” he asks—noticing, for the first time, something he's always seen but ignored.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But that's extraordinary.”

  The porter points a finger to his own skull. “Just part of the job.”

  “I see. Well, thank you. I'll bring this back later.” And he heads out into Great Court, full of wonder and vexation. Nothing makes sense today. Climbing the stairs in Bishop's Hostel, he feels that he must move stealthily, like a thief. And why? He's no thief. Still, when he opens Ramanujan's door, and the hinges creak loudly, he winces. Stepping inside, he pulls the door to more slowly than he opened it, but this only prolongs the creak. Just as slowly he shuts it until it catches.

  There. He's in. No one, so far as he knows, has seen him.

  He looks around himself. It's the first time he's been in Ramanujan's rooms since the infamous dinner party. That evening everything was tidy. Today the room is in disarray. A loose purple garment is thrown over the back of the chair. The bowls from which, presumably, Ramanujan and his friends were eating when he had his attack are piled by the gas ring. Papers are scattered on the desk. Justifying his earlier sense of himself as an intruder, Hardy rifles through them: mathematics mostly, relating to the work they're doing right now on compositeness and the primes. And yet there is one sheet that surprises and tempts him as much as Alice's diary did. The heading is “Theory of Reality.” He reads it through twice.

  Theory of Reality

  o = the Absolute, the Nirguna-Brabman, the reality to which no qualities can be attributed, which can never be defined or described in words. (Negation of all attributes.)

  ∞ = the totality of all possible attributes, Saguna-Brabman, and is therefore inexhaustible.

  o × ∞ = the set of finite numbers.

  Each act of creation is a particular product of o and ∞, from which a particular individual emerges. Thus each individual may be symbolized by the particular finite number that is the product in his case.

  Hardy blinks. The hand-writing is Ramanujan's. The neat, fine strokes are unmistakable. He recalls receiving Ramanujan's first letter, the bewilderment he felt when he encountered the equation 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + … = -1/12. So is what he's reading now just another example of Ramanujan's peculiar shorthand? Or perhaps the ideas that Ramanujan is trying to express are philosophical rather than mathematical. When, in his heyday, McTaggart lectured the Apostles, Hardy would yawn and look at his watch, while Moore sat riveted, taking in every word. Even today he doesn't know what Moore heard that he didn't. So perhaps Moore could make sense of Ramanujan's “theory of reality.”

  Hardy puts the sheet of paper down. Two books are sitting propped open on the arm of the armchair. One is written in what he supposes to be Hindi. The other is Oliver Lodge's Raymond, and this one he picks up. Though he hasn't read it, he's certainly read about the book, which was all over the papers when it was published: how Lodge, two days before his son Raymond's death at Ypres, had a precognition of the event. A message came to him at a séance. Supposedly his account of subsequent communications with Raymond's spirit has brought comfort to thousands of bereaved parents—ludicrous, Hardy thought at the time. But what does Lodge actually say?

  He glances through the opening pages; reads:

  Raymond was killed near Ypres on 14 September 1915, and we got the news by telegram from the War Office on 17 September. A fallen or falling tree is a frequently used symbol for death; perhaps through misinterpretation of Eccl. Xi, 3. To several other classical scholars, I have since put the question I addressed to Mrs. Verrall, and they all referred me to Horace, Carm. II. xvii. as the unmistakable reference.

  Mrs. Verrall, of course, Hardy knows, or knew. She was the widow of Verrall, one of the elderly Apostles who held sway during his youth, and a classicist herself. She died only the summer before. And now, reading back a few pages, he begins to grasp the sequence of events. At a séance, “Richard Hodgson” (a ghost?) left an obscure message for Lodge that Lodge then passed on to Mrs. Verrall, who interpreted it as a reference to a passage from Horace. The passage from Horace is one Hardy himself remembers from his days at Winchester: it describes how lightning struck a tree that then fell, and would have landed on Horace, had Faunus, guardian of poets, not stopped it. This message Lodge interpreted as meaning that “some blow was going to fall, or was likely to fall, though I didn't know what kind …”

  A few days later his son died. The eponymous Raymond. Hardy turns to the frontispiece. Is it only because he knows his fate that Hardy sees, in the youth's face, a certain expression of doomed indifference? Raymond is far from handsome, with a pear-shaped head and flat brown hair. The first section of the book is described as its “normal portion,” and consists of Raymond's letters from the front and letters from the officers he fought with. Then there is a “supernormal portion” and a section called “Life and Death.” Opening to a page at random, Hardy reads:

  The hypothesis of continued existence in another set of conditions, and of possible communication across a boundary, is not a gratuitous one made for the sake of comfort and consolation, or because of a dislike to the idea of extinction; it is an hypothesis which has been gradually forced upon the author—as upon many other persons—by the stringent coercion of definite experience. The foundation of the atomic theory in Chemistry is to him no stronger. The evidence is cumulative, and has broken the back of all legitimate and reasonable scepticism.

  There is a knock on the door. Hardy jumps, nearly dropping the book.

  “Mr. Hardy,” he hears a voice call from the corridor.

  It is Mahalanobis. Hardy opens the door and lets him in. “You startled me,” he says.

  “I'm sorry,” Mahalanobis says. “The porter told me I would find you here.”

  “Yes, I thought I'd get Ramanujan that book he wanted.”

  “I came for the same reason.”

  “I assume it's this one?” He holds out the copy of Raymond. But Mahalanobis shakes his head.

  “Oh, I see. Then the one in Hindi?”

  “That is the Pancbangam. An almanac. It is written in Tamil.”

  “So that's not the one he wants either?”

  “No, sir. He asked for Carr.”

&nbs
p; “Carr?”

  “May I?”

  “Of course.”

  Gingerly Mahalanobis steps past him, into the bedroom. He returns a moment later carrying a heavy, worn tome. “A Synopsis of Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics” he announces. “This was the first mathematics book Ramanujan was ever given. As a boy he used to read it on his mother's porch.”

  “I know. But why should he want Carr now? It's obsolete. He's miles beyond it.”

  “I believe it is a source of comfort to him. I have observed that he often reads through the numbered equations, at night, when he cannot sleep.”

  “Comfort from Carr?”

  “Yes, sir.” Mahalanobis adjusts his turban. “Well, I shall be going now. Good day.”

  “Good day.”

  Then Mahalanobis leaves, as quietly as he came, so that Hardy is once again alone amid Ramanujan's few possessions; these few signposts to a life about which, he realizes, he knows far less than he thought. The portrait of Leibniz hangs on the wall. From the hearth an elephant-headed figure gazes at him. He has four arms. A rat sits at his feet. From the kitchen the familiar pot of rasam gives off a sour smell. Hardy peers into it and sees that the silvering on the inside is wearing away.

  He takes Raymond with him when he goes. Despite himself he finds that he's become intrigued by the mystery: the séance, the passage from Horace, ghosts and visions. So much he doesn't know! On the stairs he encounters a bedmaker, carrying a mop and a pail. Who supplies her with her mop? And how has the porter managed to memorize all the keys? Yet the world goes on, the tumblers ceaselessly click, the mops ceaselessly slap the floors. And all the while Hardy, blind to nearly everything, cuts his steady, narrow path through the wilderness.

  It is only as he enters the porter's lodge that it hits him. Zero and infinity. The things we can never know because they are unknowable and the things we can never know because there are too many of them. An infinitude of them. From this coupling a life is born.

  “Did the Indian find you, sir?” the porter asks.

  “Yes, he did. Thank you. Here's the key.”

  “Very good, sir,” the porter says, and slips the key back onto his immense ring. How many keys are there? One of them, Hardy knows, opens his own door, while others open the doors of the absent and the dead.

  3

  EARLY IN THE SUMMER, Sophia Hardy dies. In Cranleigh, the vicar of Hardy's childhood, now middle-aged and corpulent, pays a call on him and Gertrude. He tells them that he will pray for their mother, which strikes Hardy as provocative, considering his own outspoken atheism and Gertrude's indifference to religion. “You must miss her very much,” the vicar says, sounding like Norton, to which Hardy wants to reply: No. Her dying was tedious. Perhaps not for her; she had pain to keep her occupied, and plenty of company, the living and the dead parading in and out of her room in rapid succession. Men and women they had never heard of, a sibling drowned in infancy, their father (but rarely). Toward the end, her hands were always busy. She seemed more engaged by life than she had in years. She talked constantly, though in the last days they could make no sense of what she was saying. Until then, every time she had gone to the brink of death she had come back again, but each time she was less connected to the world of the living, as if she had left another piece of herself behind. And then, on a Thursday morning in June, she actually died. Perhaps it was because Hardy, for once, hadn't got back in time to give her a reason to revive. He was stuck in Cambridge due to mysterious railway delays. By the time he arrived in Cranleigh she had been dead two hours, the divergent series that was her dying—a half, plus a third, then a fourth—having at last made its crossing into infinity. When Gertrude told him, he embraced her—not in grief but in joy. At last it was over for both of them.

  Of course they tell the vicar none of this. Their mother was an observant woman, and out of respect for her, they go through the formalities required of and by vicars: making arrangements for the funeral, giving this man, who really knows nothing about their mother, the information he needs in order to deliver the eulogy. After half an hour, he announces that he must go, and Hardy sees him to the door. Dusk is just beginning to fall. “I haven't forgotten that conversation we had,” he says in the doorway. “Do you remember? We were walking in the fog.”

  “Yes, I remember,” Hardy says, and doesn't say that he's surprised that the vicar remembers. After all, it was years ago. The vicar was at most twenty-five, whereas today he's … fifty-four? Is it possible?

  “I thought you impudent at the time, though now I see that I should have taken you more seriously. I should have prayed for your salvation. You have grown into a nonbeliever.”

  “That's true.”

  “But a peculiar kind of nonbeliever. Always trying to outwit God. Let me give you fair warning, you shall lose in the end.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “A ship bound from Sweden, a gale at sea …” The vicar touches Hardy on the shoulder, and he draws back. “Consider the possibility, at least, of grace. Perhaps God wanted you to survive. And perhaps you do believe. Otherwise, why fight so hard?”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “On another subject, I gather your Indian student is not well. I'm sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Please tell him he is in my prayers.”

  “Why? He's not your religion.”

  “Prayer may transcend the particularities of faith. It may help him to know that others are thinking of him.”

  “I'm not sure I'd agree with that. In my experience, when people pray for the dying, they die faster, either because they assume that prayer will do the job and stop taking care of themselves, or because the knowledge that all these people are constantly praying for them makes them feel obliged to get better, and the pressure does them in.”

  “An interesting theory. In that case you should say nothing to your student, though of course I shall pray for him nonetheless. Well, goodbye, Mr. Hardy.” And the vicar holds out his hand. Hardy takes it: limp fingers slide alongside his palm. Then the vicar walks away, leaving Hardy to wonder, once again, who told him about what happened in Esbjerg. Was it Gertrude? It seems unlikely. Their mother, then? But did he send their mother a postcard? He can't remember.

  He reenters the house. Gertrude is opening the curtains, letting pale light into a room that has been dark for weeks. He goes to her, and at last they give into a giddiness that has been building for hours. They summon Maisie and together, with euphoric abandon, the three of them move the bed in which Mrs. Hardy died out of the drawing room, return the furniture to its original configuration. Light, light! Gertrude sweeps, brushing away the dust that was once their mother's skin, while Maisie scours the floors. After that they're not sure what to do, so they play a game of chess. Hardy, to his own surprise, loses. This seems to delight his sister, who bursts, once again, into laughter. Then they seem to run out of laughter, and they go to bed, even though it's still early, even though the light hasn't yet drained from the sky.

  In the morning they take a walk through the village. Men and women they hardly recognize—shopkeepers, former students of their father's, grown into middle-aged men—salute them and offer condolences. When they get home, Gertrude is agitated. “It's only a matter of time,” she says, taking off her gloves. “Mark my words, the undertaker's going to ring up and tell us that Mother's woken up and proposed a game of Vint.” She laughs again, and this time her laugh is shrill, slightly mad.

  “It seems unlikely,” Hardy says. “Though with Mother, you never know.”

  “What do you call it—the place an undertaker does his … whatever he does?”

  “I have no idea. Parlor? Studio?”

  “Salon?”

  “Like a French hairdresser.” Suddenly Hardy too is laughing; both of them are laughing like children, the laughter infectious, until they are literally on the floor, with tears in their eyes.

  Two days later the vicar presides at the funeral. T
hey manage to get through it without cracking a smile, though Hardy nearly breaks down when, during his eulogy, the vicar refers to their mother as “a crack card player.” After that there is a reception, ghostly figures, few of which they recognize, standing about the drawing room holding cups of tea, while Maisie serves sandwiches that no one dares eat. And why is it, Hardy wonders, that eating after a funeral is construed as disrespectful to the dead? As he drinks his tea, he watches the vicar eyeing the sandwiches, observes with pleasure the spiritual battle that is clearly raging in the vicar's soul, between longing and calling, the lure inherent in the demonic sandwiches and the will to resist. And in the end, resistance wins. “He must be so proud of himself,” Hardy says to Gertrude after the last of the guests has left and they are gorging themselves on the sandwiches. “No doubt back at the rectory he's making sandwiches for himself right now. Huge sandwiches, the sort that Americans eat.” Gertrude laughs so hard she nearly chokes.

  Such hilarity! Going to bed that night, Hardy is amazed: he never imagined death could be such a lark. And what comic turns will the next day bring? The next day they have an appointment with their mother's solicitor, the elderly Mr. Fanning, who seems to have stepped out of another century, brought forward by Wells's time machine complete with his fountain pens and his nibs and his hand-written ledgers. Of course this is a much more serious business. The truth is, neither of them knows how much money their mother had. And given that, in all likelihood, Hardy's never going to write his book about Vint, or his murder mystery, he could use some money. So could Gertrude. Thus they listen closely as Mr. Fanning, with great formality, reads out the terms of the will. As expected, both the house and the estate are to be divided equally between the children of the deceased, Godfrey Harold and Gertrude Edith. As for its value … Here Mr. Fanning pauses; puts down the will. “Unfortunately,” he says, “it appears that in her last years your mother allowed … certain debts to accrue.”