The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  “But how long was it before you learned?”

  “Oh, months. At least until November of that first year.”

  “But that's terrible. You must have been frozen!” And without thinking, Hardy laughs, too. They laugh together.

  “It was long ago.”

  “Of course. Well, I'll leave you then. Goodnight.” And he moves to shut the door. But Ramanujan says, “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Would you mind leaving the door open?”

  “Of course. Of course I'll leave the door open.”

  “And the door to your bedroom … Would you leave that open, too?”

  “Of course. Well, sleep tight.”

  “Sleep tight?”

  “An expression. Goodnight again.”

  “Goodnight again.”

  Hardy turns, and is halfway across the corridor, halfway to his own room, when a thought comes into his head, and he stops.

  “Ramanujan.”

  “Yes?”

  “You're not going to try it again, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Well, goodnight yet again.”

  “Goodnight yet again.”

  Outside the window, the city is dark. He pads into his own bedroom, being careful to leave the door ajar; takes off his clothes; lingers, for a moment, naked in the dark, before starting to put on his pyjamas. Then he flings them away. Now currents of air connect him to

  Ramanujan, over which any sound would carry, the groans of intimacy as much as of pain; the thrashings of loneliness; his own snoring. Sleep claims the sufferer, the same oblivion that will elude, tonight, his putative savior. Hardy hears rumblings in the distance, and revels in the unfamiliar sensation of the draft from the corridor brushing against his bare skin.

  3

  WELL, WELL, WELL.” He starts at the voice, the sensation of weight pulling the blankets taut. Gaye, in formal coat and tie, sits on the edge of his bed. He holds Hermione in his lap. To his surprise, Hardy is happy to see them.

  “It's been so long since you've visited me,” he says.

  “Busy, busy, busy,” Gaye says. “Every week is May week here. Balls and balls and balls. And what a long way you've come, Harold, since last I saw you!”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Yet another suicide to your credit.”

  “Suicide attempt. And it wasn't my—”

  “I stand corrected. Attempt.” Gaye strokes Hermione's neck, so that she purrs. “Mine worked, of course. But then again I never intended it not to. You know if you look carefully you can nearly always tell the difference between the ones who really mean it and the ones who just want some attention. It's rarely ambiguous.”

  “It wasn't ambiguous in your case.”

  “No, I meant to die. You see, I'm methodical. I thought it all out very carefully in advance, I made a list of all the possible methods, correlating the likelihood of success with the degree of pain. Unluckily for me, I'm afraid of pain. Some people aren't. Hermione, for instance. You were a brave girl, even through the death agonies, weren't you?” And he picks her up, so that her tiny pink nose touches his. “But where was I? Oh yes. So I wrote out the options. It was in early February that I started planning, just as it was becoming clear you wanted nothing more to do with me—”

  “I never—”

  “First tablets … Now tablets, Harold, are very good in that they won't cause much pain, but then again they're not necessarily guaranteed to take. If you choose the wrong ones, you'll just vomit, and even if you choose the right ones, there's every chance someone's going to barge in and find you sprawled out on the floor and drag you to hospital. So tablets—out. Next knives—but here the pain factor is very high, and besides, it's so easy to cut in the wrong place and just maim yourself, so I scratched that off the list. No pun intended.”

  “Please stop.”

  “Then I thought of jumping out a window—that's pretty much a safe bet, if you can get high enough. Unfortunately, at Trinity there's every chance you'll land on a bush, or fall just hard enough to break your neck and be paralyzed the rest of your life and then, once you're paralyzed, you'll have to ask someone else to help you do it, and humans being the skittish creatures they are, they're going to be afraid, no matter how sympathetic they feel, because it's murder, isn't it, and who wants to go to prison? You, for instance, would never have helped me. Hermione, yes—if she could have. Cats are not sentimentalists.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Which leaves guns. Now here are the advantages of a gun. First of all, assuming you put it in your mouth, it's instantaneous, so there's no pain. Second of all, the effect after the fact is really quite impressive. You know, the handsome young man lying atop his bed with his brains splattered all over his pillow. And on Easter Sunday to boot! The only pity was that it was the bedmaker who found me.”

  “You didn't want her to find you?”

  “Of course not! I had nothing against that bedmaker. Poor woman, I gave her the fright of her life.”

  “God, how you must have hated me.”

  “No, you're wrong there, dear. I loved you.” Gaye nods toward the open door. “Now that one … I'm not sure, but my guess is, he does too. So bravo to you, Harold. That's two you've driven to it.”

  “I haven't driven anyone to anything. I want to make this perfectly clear, you both have free will. You put a gun in your mouth, be jumped—”

  “Ah, but I never said you killed anyone, I said you drove us to it. Consider my situation for starters. I loved you and you stopped loving me. I said I couldn't live without you and I proved it. And in his case …”

  “He doesn't love me.”

  “He owes you everything. You brought him to England, you gave him a chance when no one else would. ‘The Hindoo Calculator.’ Only the trade-off is that he's sick. And now, to cap things off, Trinity doesn't want him.”

  “That's not my doing.”

  “Who said it was? And it wouldn't necessarily have made things better. Some are born for fame. I was. It was my calling. I had the hunger for it, not to mention the equipment to cope with it. But alas, I didn't have the goods. The talent. Such an irony … Those who can cope with it never get it, whereas those who get it can't cope with it.”

  “So is that why he did it? Because he couldn't cope with fame?”

  “There's never just one reason. Trinity dropped me, too, remember, thanks to Barnes—”

  “Barnes had nothing to do with it.”

  “Whether he did or not, I lost my fellowship. And then what was I supposed to do? Move back in with the family? Get a job as a master at some dreary second-rate public school? You can't know, it never happened to you. You work like a fiend, then someone decides he doesn't like you, and that's it, mate.”

  “I can assure you that Barnes had nothing to do with your losing your fellowship, Russell.”

  “Well, there are other routes to fame. So I finished the Aristotle translation, signed my name to it, and left instructions for a copy to be sent to you. I assume you received it.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn't come to the funeral.”

  “I couldn't face your family.”

  “Bravery was never your strong suit.”

  “Russell—”

  “The point is, there comes a moment when things add up, and one day, you're there in the station and you're looking at that line, you know, the one you're never supposed to cross, because if you cross it, you'll be too close to the tracks. And you just think, why in bloody hell shouldn't I? Because it's so easy to step across that line … Like one of your asymptotic formulae, Harold, half an inch closer, then a quarter of an inch, then an eighth, a sixteenth, a thirty-second … And the closer you get, the more obvious it becomes that no one's going to reach out and stop you, because no one's paying you the slightest attention. They're all thinking about themselves. And even though you don't know what you'll find on the other side of the line, at least you know it'l
l be something different to this. And this is hell, isn't it? So you just … move your feet … and cross it.”

  “I've never been tempted to cross it.”

  “No, not yet.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  Gaye laughs. “You should know. You're the one who's got Oliver Lodge by your bedside. When the dead come to visit from the other side, they usually bring warnings, right? Foreshadowings, precogni-tions. Well, I wouldn't want to disappoint you. So write this down on your tongue. Beware a man in black. Beware the hour of twilight. There may be an accident in your future. And don't imagine that you, too, won't one day try to cross the line …”

  “Try?”

  “Ah!” Gaye throws his hands into the air. “But the spirit has departed! A candle goes out, the medium drops her turbaned head to the table, exhausted from her labors.”

  “It's not fair. I only ever wanted to help.”

  “No, you wanted to save. There's a difference.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Exactly. Why do you think I chose Easter Sunday?”

  “Bertie told Norton I vampired you. That was the word he used: ‘Vampired.’”

  “Now Bertie—there's a man who knows how to handle fame. He got his chance, he planted the seed, he cultivated it. Now look where he is! Whereas you, Harold, you're one of those who'll never make anything of what you've been given.” Gaye smiles. “Poor Harold.” And he lays a hand on Hardy's cheek, a hand Hardy feels. It is cold and dry—how he welcomes it! But when he tries to put his own hand over Gaye's, Gaye withdraws. He stands from the bed and holds Hermione up in the air. “I'm flying! I'm flying!” he says, pretending to be her. “Remember, Harold? Remember how we used to make her fly?”

  “I remember.”

  “And now she flies all the time. You're an angel cat, aren't you, Hermione?”

  As if in answer, she wriggles out of his grasp, scuttles across the floor, and starts to sharpen her claws on the curtains. Gaye follows her. “Bad girl,” he says, bending down and detaching her claws, which rake the silk.

  “Don't leave,” Hardy says, but he already feels the severing, smells the smoke of the guttered candle.

  He climbs out of bed; switches on the lamp. The room is empty. And though he knows before he tries that he'll feel no striations or rips in the silk, still, he kneels before the curtain and fingers the hem. In the deep silence he hears no voices, only Ramanujan's breathing across the corridor. And this Hardy holds on to as tightly as he does the curtain's edge. Its steady rise and fall is like a railing to him, something to guide him through to morning. This one he loves also, and this one, he reminds himself, is still alive.

  4

  New Lecture Hall, Harvard University

  ONE AFTERNOON NEAR the end of 1917 (Hardy said in that lecture he never gave), Littlewood and I sat down together to solve what we had come to think of as “the Ramanujan Problem.” “Problem,” I now believe, is a word that should never be applied to matters of the human spirit. It belongs to mathematics, as in Waring's Problem: for any natural number k, does there exist an associated positive integer s such that every natural number is the sum of at most s kth powers of natural numbers? (Toward the solution of this problem, incidentally, Ramanujan made an interesting if little-known contribution.) Human situations, on the other hand, are complex and multiform. To understand them you must take into account not only misunderstandings, occasions, circumstances, but the mystery of human nature, which is as rife with contradictions as the foundational landscape of mathematics. And the thing is, no one ever does. We didn't. Instead, when Littlewood and I sat down together—in the same London café where he had told me of Mrs. Chase's pregnancy—we laid the situation out in front of us and looked for a reason, one reason, why Ramanujan might be depressed. And we decided that he was depressed because Trinity had failed to elect him to a fellowship. Ergo, in order to keep him going until next October, when we could once again put him up for a fellowship, we would have to replenish his self-esteem. Ergo we would have to arrange for honorifics to rain down on him. As we saw it, powerful institutions would be induced to affirm his worth, his spirits would revive, and he would go back to work. Then the “problem” would be solved.

  Now, of course, I see that our approach was hopelessly naïve—and

  I think, in our hearts, we knew it. Both of us disdained honorifics. We admitted as much, even as we acknowledged that ours was the luxurious disdain of those who, having won the prize, can afford to dismiss it. Nor can we have failed to recognize the likely futility of a “cure” that fixated on one cause of the malady while ignoring all the others.

  Nonetheless we set ourselves, with alacrity, to the task at hand. First we got Ramanujan elected to the London Mathematical Society. Then we proposed his name to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. The first election went through quickly, in December. I wired him—he was in another sanatorium by then—and his response, while enthusiastic, was muted. For though these elections, we knew, would bolster our case when we brought his name up at the fellowship meeting next October, we also knew that neither was sufficient to haul our friend out of his torpor. If we were to solve the Ramanujan problem, a more substantial change would have to be brought about, and this would be to have him elected an F.R.S.

  Let me try to give you some idea of what it means, in England, to be named an F.R.S. For any kind of scientist, it is the highest honor in the land. Each year over a hundred candidates are put up, in all disciplines, of which at most fifteen are elected. Rarely is a man elected who is under thirty. When I was elected, I was thirty-three. So was Littlewood.

  We considered Ramanujan's chances. What he had going for him was his obvious, indisputable genius. What he had going against him was his youth—he was just twenty-nine—and the fact that he was Indian. In its history the Royal Society had only ever had one Indian member. In all probability, we reasoned, he would not be elected. Still, we decided to float his name. After all, if we failed, he need never know we had made the effort. And if we succeeded, it might be just the thing to save him.

  Just then, the president of the Royal Society was the physicist Thomson. He was the discoverer of the electron (hence his nickname, “Atom”), and in a few months he would succeed Butler as the Master of Trinity. I knew him well enough that I could write to him on Ramanujan's behalf. In my letter, I tried to impress upon him the tenuousness of Ramanujan's situation. While I believed that he would probably be alive in a year's time, I could not guarantee it. And though

  I felt hesitant about rushing a fellowship for which, under ordinary circumstances, he would have been considered too young, the fragility of his health and of his spirit, in my view, argued for an exception to be made. Of his merit there was no doubt; he was vastly more qualified than any other mathematical candidate.

  Much to my relief, the tactic worked. In February 1918, Ramanujan was simultaneously elected a fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and an F.R.S. The coincidence of the two elections led to some confusion, for when I sent him a telegram informing him of the latter, which he did not expect, he confused it with the former, which he did. Indeed, he told me later, he had to read the telegram three times before he understood what it actually said. And even then, until I verified the news for him, he did not believe it.

  By this point, Ramanujan was no longer in Cambridge. Instead he was living in a tuberculosis sanatorium called Matlock House in Derbyshire. Why he had settled, in the end, on this particular institution I am not sure. It might have been because Dr. Ram, who worked there, was Indian, or because the cook was supposedly willing to prepare dishes to the tastes of the individual inmates. In any case, his decision came as a relief to me, as it meant that I could go along with the conditions imposed by Scotland Yard without revealing to anyone that Ramanujan had tried to kill himself. All I had to do was to inform the doctors, on whom I supposed I could count for discretion. In November of 1917, then, Ramanujan went by rail to Matlock and stayed there f
or most of the following year.

  Matlock was distinguished, among other things, by its remoteness and difficulty of access; during the war it could be reached only by one train that arrived at eight in the morning. I will not pretend that I liked the place. The structure itself was unforgiving, and had the look of one of those punishing schools to which children in Victorian novels are sent to languish. Back in the last century, it had begun its life as a hydropathic institution, which explained the plethora of disused equipment—various forms of tubing and emptied pools—that littered the grounds. The bathtubs were enormous. A staggered brick wall divided the house from the sloping road that ran alongside it, giving it the look of a prison, which was apposite. It was a prison. Let me say this once, clearly and for the record. Ramanujan was not there to be treated for tuberculosis. He was there for the convenience of his friends and to satisfy an informal sentence handed down by a chief inspector at Scotland Yard. And he knew it. He must have known it.

  From the beginning of his tenancy, he was unhappy. Dr. Ram, as it turned out, was a bullying sort, who wielded the power I had unwittingly put in his hands with relish. Using as his weapon that authority with which medical men naturally endow themselves, he made it immediately clear that under no circumstance should Rama-nujan imagine that he would be allowed to escape Matlock. So long as his doctors declared that he was unwell, he had no freedom, no rights. Nor would he be allowed under any circumstances, even an improvement in health, to leave sooner than twelve months from the date of his arrival. Whether Dr. Ram elucidated, or Ramanujan guessed, the true source of this sentence I cannot say. I know only that Ramanujan, much to my perplexity, appears to have accepted Dr. Ram's word as law. At Hill Grove he had rebelled; at Matlock he submitted.