The Indian Clerk (10 page)
Authors: David Leavitt
Scratching his head, Mercer went off, not having drunk his coffee and carrying with him a book written in a language he barely
understood. From the window I watched him stumble over a paving stone, reading even as he walked. It was a good sign.
Then I felt a warm hand on my shoulder; shut my eyes.
"How lovely it must be to be the rescuer," Gaye said.
"So you've been listening in?"
"What choice did I have? Can I help it that Hermione nudged open the door? And then that bawling. It
dragged
me from Aristotle. I had to make sure everything was all right."
"It was nothing I couldn't manage."
"Certainly an expressive young man."
"He's suffering. He needs my help."
"Fine, and what about what you need, Harold? Your own work?" Gaye picked up Mercer's cup from the table, and drank down the
cold coffee in a single gulp. "Coaching an undergraduate for the tripos. The tripos, of all things! And after all the
screeds
I've heard you deliver against the damned—"
"He won't make it otherwise."
"Is it your job to save him?"
"Someone saved me."
"But Love didn't
coach
you. He just sent you back to Webb." Gaye put the cup down. "Now if he was ugly—"
"That has nothing to do with it."
"Of course not. Yours is a more specialized erotic thrill, that of rescuing the fair damsel from the jaws of the dragon. Or
do you imagine him doing what you couldn't?"
"What?"
"Taking his place as senior wrangler and then, while standing atop the carcass of the beast, denouncing the hunt."
"You sound jealous."
"I am—of the original work that will be lost by virtue of your coaching this—"
"How selfless of you."
Gaye picked up Hermione and stroked her neck. "It's your decision, of course. Don't think I'd dream of interfering."
Wriggling out of his grip, Hermione slipped back through the door that she (or Gaye) had earlier opened, the door that led
to his part of the suite. A few seconds later, Gaye followed her.
Half an hour later, he popped his head out. "Shall we have supper in tonight?" he asked, then took it back immediately. "But
of course not. It's Saturday. Your Saturdays are spoken for."
"You know that, Russell."
"Gosh, I wonder what they do all those Thaturday nightth, thothe very thmart young men?"
"I can't talk about this."
"No, of course not. Of course you can't."
Now I ask myself: why didn't I ever propose him for membership? At the time, I told myself that it was to spare him being
made a laughing stock, another Madam Taylor. Or perhaps the truth was that I wanted to spare myself being looked upon as another
Sheppard. In thrall.
The one possibility I never allowed myself to consider was that, unlike Taylor, Gaye might be considered worthy of membership
in his own right. And if he had been inducted into the Society—would it have made a difference later on? I don't know. I don't
know.
And where was Ramanujan then? In 1904, he had just graduated from the high school, and won a scholarship to Government College.
Still in Kumbakonam; I doubt he'd even been to Madras at this stage. Later, in one of his laughing moods—this must have been
during the first year of the war, for I recall that there were soldiers lying on stretchers in Nevile's Court—he told me that
back then, Government College was called "the Cambridge of South India."
Things started off well enough. He took courses in physiology, in English, in Greek and Roman history. But then he got hold
of a copy of Carr's
Synopsis of Pure Mathematics,
the book that he would later say meant as much to him as Jordan's
Cours d'analyse
had meant to me. As he explained, his parents, to supplement their small income, sometimes took in students as boarders, and
one of the students had left the book behind. Astonishing to think that from this book he got his start. A few weeks ago,
before boarding the ship that has carried me to your good country, I borrowed it from the Trinity Library, the one copy there,
dusty from disuse. The
Synopsis
is more than nine hundred pages long. It was published in 1886, and no one had charged it since 1902.
What
was
it about this book? Food for a starving man. I can see Ramanujan sitting on the
pial,
that porch in front of his mother's house about which he so often waxed nostalgic; sitting in the shade while the parade of
street life passed before him, and reading through pages and pages of equations, each one numbered. He told me later that
he had that book memorized. Had there been a Carr tripos, he would have been prepared to recite each equation chapter and
verse, merely upon being given its number. 954: "The
Nine-point
circle is the circle described through
D, E, F,
the feet of the perpendiculars on the sides of the triangle
ABC."
5,849: "The product
pd
has the same value for all geodesies which touch the same line of curvature." In total 6,165 equations. And he memorized them
all.
He became neglectful of his other subjects. Ignoring history, he entertained his friends by making what he called "magic squares":
Or:
Child's play. Each column adds up to the same number—vertically, horizontally, diagonally. The astonishing thing was that
Ramanujan could construct his magic squares in a matter of seconds. During his Greek history class he would sit at his desk,
apparently taking notes, when actually he was making magic squares. (He had, needless to say, got hold of a more general theorem
without even realizing it.) Or he would list the prime numbers in sequence. Trying even then to find order in them.
And of course, the more he lost himself in mathematics, the less attention he paid to his other subjects. Physiology, he said,
was his worst subject because he had a horror of dissections. I think the truth was that, like most mathematicians, he had
a horror of the physical. (After watching his teacher chloroform some sea-frogs for dissection, he asked the teacher, "Sir,
have you chosen these sea-frogs because we are all pond-frogs?" That was typical of his wit. He knew even then that Kumbakonam
was a small pond.) And then he also did poorly at English, which surprises me, because when I knew him his spoken English
was flawless, while his written English, if not the stuff of Shakespeare, was certainly passable. Nevertheless, at the end
of the first year, he failed his English composition examination. Notwithstanding his obvious talent for mathematics, his
scholarship was taken away. Policy was policy. Now he would have to pay for his schooling—or rather, his parents would have
to pay for it. And his parents were poor. His father was some sort of accounts clerk, his mother took in sewing and sang at
the local temple to make ends meet. Sometimes there was no food and he had to eat at the houses of his school friends.
This was the first of several times he ran away. What he did while he was gone he would not tell me—only that he went to another
town, north of Madras. Visakhapatnam. Within a month he was home again.
I think I can imagine how he felt: as angry at himself as at the system—pitiless, unyielding—on which his success depended.
Government College had booted him out because he would not play by the rules, and while it enraged him that he was expected
to play by the rules—as Littlewood would observe, even then he knew himself to be great—he also despised himself for his own
inability (or was it unwillingness?) to be the good boy he was expected to be. For who was there to assure him that his faith
in his own greatness was not vanity or illusion?
And meanwhile, back in Cambridge, Mercer was coming to see me every day. I'd hold the stopwatch. I'd call out the numbers
of the Newtonian lemmas, and he'd recite them. Then we'd work through the
Cours d'analyse.
At first, those afternoons, Gaye lingered in his part of the suite. Sometimes he'd leave the door open. Then—after I got up
once in the middle of a coaching session and shut it—he stopped leaving it open.
I was there for the reading of the honors list that year, standing inside the Senate House at nine in the morning, part of
a vast crowd in the murk of which I could make out O. B. with Sheppard, who must have had money riding on the favorite. The
gallery was reserved for ladies. Newnham and Girton girls were piled three or four deep against the rails. No doubt they were
hoping, as they hoped every year, for a repeat of 1890, when Philippa Fawcett had beaten the senior wrangler and her sisters
had gone into a frenzy. Since then, no woman had even come close.
Everyone was talking at once. I should mention that the likely candidates for senior wrangler weren't there. By long tradition,
they stayed in their rooms during the reading of the honors list, waiting for their friends to bring them the good or bad
news. Still, you could hear their names on the lips of the crowd, and in this way they were more present than they would have
been had they actually been there in the flesh.
The clock of Great St. Mary's Church began to strike nine, and Dodds, the moderator, took his position at the front of the
gallery. Instantly the crowd quieted. Dodds was dressed in the full regalia of his college, and clutched in his right hand
the bundled honors list, the untying of which he timed to coincide exactly with the sounding of the ninth chord. With religious
dignity he intoned: "Results of the mathematical tripos, Part I, 1905." A beat of silence. "Senior wrangler, J. E. Littlewood,
Trinity—"
Before Dodds could finish, applause erupted from the crowd. So Littlewood had beaten Mercer! A stab of disappointment passed
through me, which I tried to dull by reminding myself how much I loathed the tripos. I looked at Sheppard, who was frowning.
No doubt he'd put his money on Mercer out of loyalty to me. Then Dodds said, "Please, please, silence! If I may be allowed
to continue—Senior wrangler: J. E. Littlewood, Trinity,
bracketed
with J. Mercer, Trinity."
Sheppard's face, dark with dread moments before, brightened. "Bracketed" meant that Littlewood and Mercer had scored exactly
the same number of points. They were tied.
In spite of myself I let out a cheer. O. B. cast at me a bemused and contemptuous glance. I shut up and listened as the rest
of the wranglers and optimes were named, right down to the wooden spoon. By then most of the crowd had gone outside to watch
the senior wranglers paraded about in all their glory. I followed. Not far off I saw Littlewood borne aloft by his friends.
Was he ecstatic? I doubted it. Although, at this point, I hardly knew him, I could guess that he would be phlegmatic about
such a victory. Mercer I didn't see at all.
The odd thing was, from the beginning, everyone behaved as if Littlewood alone was victorious. Mercer might as well not have
existed. A week or so later, for instance, I went out—rather surreptitiously, I will admit—to buy Littlewood's photograph,
and discovered, much to my annoyance, that it was sold out. "But I've got plenty of Mr. Mercer, sir," the newsagent said.
"In fact, I'm having rather a fire sale on Mr. Mercer."
It made perfect sense. Mercer was frail, twenty-two, from Bootle, while Littlewood was nineteen, roaring with health, and
had Cambridge connections going back more than a century. Philippa Fawcett was his cousin. His father had been, in his time,
ninth wrangler, his grandfather thirty-fifth.
O. B. had both photographs. "Look at the way he keeps his legs open," he said of Littlewood's. "As if he doesn't have the
slightest idea that he's being provocative. And of course, that's the delicious part—he doesn't."
"Quite a bulge, too," mused Keynes, who happened to be visiting. I tried not to look at the bulge. Instead I concentrated
on the cleanshaven, oblong face. The part that ran through Littlewood's hair might have been ruled with a straightedge. He
kept his thin lips tightly closed, his heavy eyebrows raised in inquiry. All told, he radiated a kind of coiled strength,
as if at any moment he might jump out of his chair and do a handstand.