The Indian Clerk (46 page)

"Mrs. Neville," he answers. And smiles. "What a pleasant surprise."

She takes his hand. She doesn't want to give away that over the course of a few seconds, all the convictions on which she
has depended to survive, these last months, have collapsed. No longer is the past a novel finished and put back on the shelf;
no longer is she a different woman than she was, a Londoner, impervious to the pleas of beggars and the banshee-echo of underground
trains. For he has returned, and now she is the same Alice who lived on Chesterton Road. She never stopped being in love with
him.

What's happened, she realizes as they walk together down Queensway, is that this chance meeting has carried her past the
moment she dreaded, the moment at which she would have to acknowledge that awful visit to his rooms. It's as if a wind has
picked her up and carried her across that border she would not let herself cross by choice, and now she's here, on the other
side. They're walking together toward her flat. She's asked him up for coffee.

Up the stairs to the door. Although the flat is only on the second floor, the climb leaves him winded. "Miss Hardy told me
you haven't been well," she says, letting him in. "I'm so sorry."

"I was in the nursing hostel for several months," he says. "But I'm better now. I'm back at Bishop's Hostel." He follows her
into the small, square sitting room, into which most of the Cambridge furniture—the piano, the Voysey settee, the two spinsterish
chairs—has been stuffed.

"Forgive the crowdedness. The flat is so much smaller than our house."

"It's fine," he says, sitting down on one of the chairs. "Rather like seeing old friends." And he rubs the upholstered arm
with what seems to her genuine fondness.

"I'll just get the coffee. I'm afraid we don't have any milk, and only a little sugar, so it can't be a proper Madrasi coffee.
The shortages."

"I understand. And how is Mr. Neville?"

"As to be expected," she says from the kitchen. "He's away today, in Reading."

"Oh yes?"

"The university there may offer him a position."

"I hope so."

"Yes, I suppose I do, too. Though it will mean leaving London, and I've only just got used to London." Having put the coffee
on, she returns to the sitting room; sits in the second chair. There is so much more she could say—to him, to anybody—about
what she has learned in these last months! In a marriage, it is the repetition that kills: the repetition of meals; of conversations;
of bickering ("How did you sleep?" "I told you never to ask me that again"); of sex or no sex; of habits (his dribbling urine
on the toilet seat, her flatulence); of grief (the long afternoon naps of sorrow); of laundry; of repetition itself (totting
up the accounts twice, because Eric's arithmetic, amazingly, is worse than hers); of his obliviousness and her hardness; of
his calling her "darling"; of the knowledge that there will always be things in him that she will never understand and things
in her that he will never understand; of the knowledge, always, that no matter how far he goes or for how long, he will come
back.

Yes, she thinks, in a marriage, it is the repetition that kills. And it is the repetition that saves.

She turns to Ramanujan. Only now does she see how much weight he has lost. His face, bereft of its pudginess, is lean and
serious, and she takes in, as if for the first time, its beauty: the black, haunted eyes, the heavy brows, the flared, flat
nose. Ramanujan has brilliantined his thick hair, combed it to the left. His collar is open. What firm fat once concealed—the
ropy ligaments of his neck—illness has now exposed. Illness, and the open collar. She has never before seen him with an open
collar, except that once, in his room.

"I didn't think I'd see you again." She says this without sentiment; a mere statement of fact. "Yet here you are."

"Yes."

"It's odd. So much has changed, yet everything is the same. The same furniture in a different flat."

"It is a pleasure to sit in this chair again. Your house was my first real taste of England."

"If only we could fit everything! But you see, this is only temporary, this flat. Until Eric gets a position. It's ridiculous,
the dining table barely fits in the dining room. You can't even pull the chairs out without hitting the wall."

"And how is Ethel?"

"I'm afraid she's not with us anymore. You know her son was killed."

"No, I didn't."

"He ran away from the front. He couldn't bear it. They shot him as a deserter."

"You mean the English?"

Alice nods. "We tried to get her to come with us to London, but she didn't want to be so far from her daughter. I understand,
of course. So now we just have a char who comes in twice a week."

"Please give her my regards if you write to her."

"I shall. The war is such a horror, Mr. Ramanujan. But at least I have found a place for myself." And she tells him about
her work, about Mrs. Buxton, about the house in Golders Green. She talks and talks—until she realizes that she is leaving
him far behind, forgetting him. "I'm so sorry," she says, "I've not even asked what's brought you to London."

"Just a doctor's visit."

"Of course, your illness. And what did the doctor say?"

"So many doctors have said so many things. And now it seems I am to go to a sanatorium. Mendip Hills. Near Wells. The doctor
who runs it is Indian. Most of the patients, too."

"But isn't that a sanatorium for tuberculosis?"

"Yes. My symptoms fit no other diagnosis, so by process of elimination, it has been concluded that it must be tuberculosis."

"But you don't cough."

"No lung trouble. Just the pain and the fever. Nothing changes. Every day the same. Illness is really very boring, Mrs. Neville."

"Repetition," Alice says faintly. And suddenly she remembers the coffee; hurries to the kitchen; pours it into cups and brings
them back. "I have a little sugar here."

"No need, I shall drink it as it is."

Then they sit, in a small, square room in Bayswater, drinking their dark, bitter coffee. She is thinking that the room is
like one of those stalls at the Paris flea market that are set up to look like rooms, but rooms in which no human being could
live, because there is no space to move. So it is now: their lives up for sale. What will happen next? Only a few steps separate
her from the settee, the table on which Ramanujan did the jigsaw puzzle, the piano. She looks at it, then looks at him.

"Do you ever sing anymore?"

He waggles his head.

" I am the very model of a Modern Major General . . .' Remember?"

" 'I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral . . . '"

"You do remember!"

"Of course."

Then, together:

" I know the Kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical.'"

They finish the song, laughing. "I wouldn't have thought you'd remember the lyrics," she says.

"I remember them all."

Once again, she turns toward the piano. "It needs to be tuned. I don't know how it will sound. It's been months since I've
played."

"It doesn't matter."

They get up, and sit together on the bench. She feels the heat of his nearness—in her marrow she feels it. Still, she doesn't
touch his arm. She doesn't touch his hand. She arranges the music on the desk.

Fingers on the keys: the simple accompaniment is rendered strange by the out-of-tune piano. As they sing, the past embraces
them, and the furniture bears witness.

What has this vision to do with Ramanujan? It is true that, as I crossed Harvard Square this morning, I was thinking about
my departed friend; rehearsing in my mind the speech I was to give in his memory. So perhaps the Goddess Namagiri supplied
me with this vision, as a way of indicating the line (pardon the pun) that Ramanujan, who is no doubt reincarnated today in
some superior form, wishes me to take. Or perhaps the hallucination was merely the product of an increasingly elderly and
diseased imagination. I don't know. All I can offer is an interpretation: we spend our lives, all of us, trying to hook each
other. We hook, and are hooked. Sometimes we fight it, and sometimes we take the hooks gratefully, sink them into our own
flesh, and sometimes we try to outwit those who have hooked us by hooking them, as I tried constantly, in my younger years,
to hook God.

Ramanujan, in the late months of 1917 and the early months of 1918, was a man from whose body many hooks dangled. Of these,
at the time at least, I could only see some. There was the hook that connected him to me, to my ambition for him, which he
felt obliged to meet, and to my fear of him, which he felt obliged to allay; and there was the hook of his illness, obliging
him to rely on the care of doctors; and the hooks of duty and love connecting him to his three friends, Chatterjee, Rao, and
Mahalanobis; and the predatory hook (this one particularly sharp and menacing) plunged into him at an early age by his mother;
and the hook of responsibility and desire that linked him to his wife across the ocean; and the hook of the war, embedded
in everyone's flesh in those years; and finally the hook of his own ambition, which of course he had driven into himself.

Do you see, now, what it was like for him? Do you see in what a complication of duties, hopes, and terrors he was enmeshed?
I hope you do, because I didn't, at least at the time. After all, there was so much of which I wasn't aware, and about which
I didn't think to ask. By now he was out of the nursing hostel and living, once again, at Trinity. His health had improved
only to the extent that he was no longer bedridden. He could once again dress and wash himself, and come to see me in the
mornings, and on occasion he even felt well enough to travel up to London, where he stayed with his beloved Mrs. Peterson,
whose heart he would soon break. And yet he was not in any sense recovered. The pain in his stomach persisted, as did the
fever. Illness must have made him vulnerable, and perhaps this is why, in those months, he found himself thinking more than
ever before of his wife, Janaki, the girl with whom, back in India, he had been able to spend so little time, as his mother
(I learned this later) had kept them from sleeping in the same bed, using his surgery as an excuse. Yes, I can imagine that
in his solitude and confusion—separated from his homeland by the war, deprived (again, by the war) of all but the most rudimentary
foods, facing another gloomy, cold Cambridge winter—he might well have started dreaming of that young girl to whom he referred,
in the Indian fashion, as his "house." (It was during these weeks that he told Chatterjee, "My house has not written to me,"
and that Chatterjee replied, "Houses don't write.") And yet it would be a mistake to imagine that he dreamed of her with undiluted
longing. There was great bitterness in Ramanujan, as I soon learned from an unlikely source.

What happened was this. Early in the fall I received a letter from a childhood friend of his, an engineering student named
Subramanian, who told me that he had gone to visit Ramanujan's mother and that she and his blind father and his brothers were
in a state of agitation because for months Ramanujan had not written to them. Naturally when Ramanujan came to see me that
morning, I told him about the letter. "Is it true," I asked, "that you are not writing to your people?"

"They hardly write to me," he replied.

"But why is that?"

"But she's your wife. It's natural that you should listen to her."

"My mother was offended when Janaki ran away. But what she does not understand is that Janaki offends me too, for she writes
me only these formal letters."

The mother's jealousy seemed obscene to me. I suggested that perhaps it was her unreasonable attitude that had driven Janaki
away, and Ramanujan shook his head no. It was a firm no—not his usual ambivalent waggle. Clearly both fish hooks were smarting.

In the end, I persuaded him, at least, to write to them and assure them that he was all right. At least I think I did. For
just as, at the mention of Subramanian's letter, Ramanujan had suddenly opened himself to me, now that we were back to the
question of letter writing, he withdrew. It was fascinating to watch, this withdrawal, like the infolding of one of those
flowers that close their petals at night. "You may tell Subramanian that you have got me to promise to write to my people,"
he said. A very careful instruction which, you will note, contains no promise. I put it into my reply word for word. Whether
he did write to them I have no idea.

It was now October. For a while he disappeared. He went to a sanatorium called Hill Grove, near Wells, in the Mendip Hills.
This institution was run by a Dr. Chowry-Muthu, whom Ramanujan had met when he had come to England from India; it catered
mostly to Indian patients suffering from tuberculosis. But Ramanujan did not like it there, and when Chatterjee and Ananda
Rao went to visit him, he had only complaints to voice. It seemed that Dr. Chowry-Muthu employed curious treatment methods,
one of which was to make his patients wear masklike inhalers containing germicides. He compelled them to take part in singing
exercises and to saw wood in a workshop. The "chalets" in which they lived were rustic shacks. Nor had Ramanujan anything
good to say about the food or the beds. To make matters worse, he was in a state of great agitation, Ananda Rao told me, because
he knew that very soon, at Trinity, it would be decided whether he would be elected to a fellowship. As I mentioned earlier,
since the spring of 1916 he had been trying to get me to reassure him that his election would be, as Barnes had foolishly
asserted, a fait accompli. But now Barnes was gone, and I was left with the responsibility of trying to put the election through.
The trouble was, I suspected—rightly, as it turned out—that, despite what Barnes had said, Ramanujan would not be voted in.

Now I wonder: did he feel it happening at Hill Grove—a tug on a line that crossed the countryside, crossed valleys and rivers,
to connect a sick Indian in a sanatorium to that Trinity chamber in which dons had gathered to decide his fate? In that same
chamber, only a few months before, Neville's banishment had been assured. And surely Ramanujan must have been thinking about
Neville that afternoon, as he sat on one of Hill Grove's porches, wrapped in blankets, the hated mask over his mouth. He was
waiting—hoping—for a telegram. But none came. I could not tell him, as I wanted to, that he was now a fellow, and so I told
him nothing.

The next day he left the sanatorium. He took a bus from Wells to Bristol, where he caught the train to Paddington. Probably
there were delays: the train service was constantly being disrupted just then, as more and more cars were requisitioned for
use in the war. But finally he arrived, and from Paddington he went immediately—two stops on the Bakerloo—to Mrs. Peterson's
boardinghouse in Maida Vale. This was one of about a dozen more or less identical establishments ranged around a narrow rectangle
of garden behind Maida Vale Station. Any of you who have done time in London will be familiar with the layout of such places:
the hall with its coat rack and telephone stand, the formal front parlor, the carpeted stairs leading up to the tenants' rooms,
the doors marked "Dining Room" and "Private" and "Kitchen." All that made Mrs. Peterson's boardinghouse unique was that its
clientele consisted entirely of Indians. This was nothing she had planned, she explained when I went to see her in 1921; her
husband having been killed in a tram accident, she'd had to find a way to make a living, so she'd opened the boardinghouse
and, as it happened, the first lodger to knock on her door was an Indian. "Mr. Mukherjee," she said. "He was studying economics.
He still writes to me. From Poona. And he liked the place, so he told his friends, and word got round."

It was a rainy April afternoon when Mrs. Peterson told me this. We were sitting in her tragic front parlor, with its stiff
little chairs and Meissen figurines and floral wallpaper; a room grown stale from its own protection, from its having been
reserved, for so long, for some ceremonial occasion that would never take place: a visit from royalty or the viewing of a
coffin. Every now and then, I suppose, someone must have come to see her whom she felt obliged to entertain somewhere other
than in the kitchen, at which point the curtains would be flung open, the floors mopped, and fresh flowers put on the table,
with the result that the room's spirits lifted a little. A fat young woman whom I assumed to be Mrs. Peterson's daughter brought
the inevitable tea. Mrs. Peterson herself was not fat; she was a small, elegantly proportioned woman in her mid-sixties who
had known much loss: two sons dead in the war, in addition to the husband. "After Mr. Mukherjee there was Mr. Bannerjee, and
Mr. Singh, and two Mr. Raos." I nodded, as an Indian in a checked suit and turban quietly took off his coat in the front hall,
hung it on the rack, and padded up the stairs.

We spoke about Ramanujan. Tears came to Mrs. Peterson's eyes as she told me of his first visits, his shyness with her, the
quiet gratitude he expressed when she served him his supper and he saw that the dishes were familiar ones. "For you see, I
had to learn to cook Indian, for the sake of my gentlemen," she said. "Mr. Mukherjee, he taught me how to make the things
he liked. He showed me the shops where I could get the ingredients. And since I wanted him to be comfortable, I went along,
though the food seemed strange to me at first. I'm a fairly quick learner in the kitchen." She put down her teacup. "I only
ever wanted to make my gentlemen happy. That's the sad part. I was so very fond of Mr. Ramanujan. He seemed so alone in England.
Those last times he came to me, when he was visiting the doctors, he looked so unwell. There was a room he preferred, a small
room on the top floor, and I tried to always put him in it."

I asked if I could see the room. "Of course," Mrs. Peterson said, and led me up the stairs—past the first floor, where the
permanent lodgers lived in larger suites, to the attic with its low ceilings and constricting walls. Once, these had been
servants' quarters. The room that she showed me was under the eaves, cozy and neat, with a small desk by the window and the
bed pushed into a corner beneath the angled wall. The view was of other roofs. The wallpaper, of climbing roses, clashed with
the carpet, which was dark brown and patterned with interlocking hexagons. Still, it was an appealing room, a warm room: I
would have liked sleeping there myself.