The Man Who Knew Infinity Page 3

  The one-story structure, thatched with palm leaves, stood back about ten feet from the street, insulated, as it were, by its two-tiered, covered pial: it was a step or two up from the dusty (or muddy) street, another few up to the little porch. The stucco house faced the street with a twelve-foot-wide wall broken by a window to the left and a door to the right. A bystander in the street, peering through the open door and into the gloom of the interior, could sight all the way through to the back, where his gaze would be arrested by a splash of sunlight from the open rear court. The rest of the house, meanwhile, was offset to the left, behind the front window. Here was the main living area and, behind it, a small kitchen, redolent with years of cooking smells.

  South India was not always hot; but it was never cold. At a latitude of about eleven degrees north. Kumbakonam lay comfortably within the tropics; even on a January winter’s night, the thermometer dropped, on average, only to seventy degrees. And that climatological fact established an architectural fact, for it gave South Indian homes a kind of permeability; their interiors always savored a little of the outside (a feeling familiar to Americans with screened-in porches). Windows there were, but these were merely cutouts in the wall, perhaps with bars or shutters, never space-sealing panes of glass that left you conscious of being on one side or another. In the middle of most houses was a small courtyard, the muttam, open to the sky—like a skylight but again without the glass—that brought rain into the center of the house, where it was funneled to a drain that led back outside. In Ramanujan’s house, smells from outside wafted inside. Lizards crawled, mosquitos flew unimpeded. The soft South Indian air, fragrant with roses, with incense, with cow dung burned as a fuel, wafted over everything.

  Just outside the door lay Kumbakonam, an ancient capital of the Chola Empire. The Cholas had reached their zenith around A.D. 1000, when Europe wallowed in the Dark Ages, and had ruled, along with northern Ceylon, most of what, during Ramanujan’s day, was known as the Madras Presidency (which, with those of Bombay and Calcutta, constituted the chief administrative and political units of British-ruled India). The dozen or so major temples dating from this period made Kumbakonam a magnet to pilgrims from throughout South India.

  Every twelve years, around February or March, they came for the Mahammakham festival, commemorating a legendary post-Deluge event in which the seeds of creation, drifting upon the waters in a sacred pot—or kumba, source of the town’s name—was pierced by the god Siva’s arrow. The nectar thus freed, it was said, had collected in the Mahammakham “tank,” the outdoor pool for ritual bathing that was part of every temple. At such times—as in 1897, when Ramanujan was nine—three-quarters of a million pilgrims might descend on the town. And the great tank, surrounded by picturesque mandapams, or halls, and covering an expanse of twenty acres, would be so filled with pilgrims that its water level was said to rise several inches.

  When not in use, temple tanks could seem anything but spiritually uplifting. Open, stone-lined reservoirs, sometimes stocked with fish, frequently green with algae, they often served as breeding grounds for malarial mosquitos. Situated on low ground between two rivers, Kumbakonam was notorious for its bad water, its mosquitos, and its filarial elephantiasis, a mosquito-borne disease that left its victims with grotesquely deformed limbs, sometimes with scrota the size of basketballs. When Ramanujan was six, the town completed a drainage system. But this was designed to carry off only surface water, not sewage, and most of the town’s health problems continued unabated.

  Kumbakonam, a day’s train ride from Madras, which was almost 200 miles north and the nearest real metropolis, had a seventy-two-bed hospital. It had four police stations, two lower secondary English schools, three conducting classes in Tamil, a high school of excellent reputation, and a college. Indeed, with a population during Ramanujan’s day of more than fifty thousand, it was no mere village, but a major town, sixth largest in the Madras Presidency.

  Just outside town and all through the surrounding districts ranged some of the richest cropland in all of India. Two-thirds of the population—including whole castes given over to agricultural labor alone, like the Paraiyans and the Pallans—worked the land for a few annas a day. Silt carried down to the delta by the Cauvery made the use of expensive manure as fertilizer unnecessary. Narrow strips of land beside the river, annually submerged in the silt-laden water of monsoon-borne floods, were especially valued and used to raise bamboo, tobacco, or banana. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the delta’s arable cropland, more than three-quarters of it, was given over to rice.

  In many parts of South India, the land was, for much of the year, a bleak brown. But here, midst the rice fields of the Cauvery, the landscape suddenly thickened with lush greenery in a rich palette of shades and textures. Farmers nursed delicate infant rice seedlings in small, specially watered plots whose rich velvety green stood out against neighboring fields. When, after thirty or forty days, the plants were healthy and strong, laborers individually scooped them out with their root pods and transplanted them to large, flooded fields; these made for a softer green. There the plants grew until a yellower hue signaled they were ready for harvest.

  Almost every square foot of the delta was under the plow, and had been since time immemorial. Cattle and sheep found little room in which to graze; the land was just too valuable. Forests were few, just isolated coconut, banyan, or fig trees and, toward the coast, palmyra palms and Alexandrian laurel. The 342 square miles of the taluk, or county, of which Kumbakonam was chief town, comprised just about that same number of villages. Most were little more than tiny inhabited islands midst a sea of waving crops—a couple of dozen thatched-roof huts and a few hundred inhabitants, half-hidden by coconut palms, sitting on cramped little sites a few feet above the neighboring rice fields.

  And yet, whatever their debt to the land, Ramanujan’s family was not of the land. They were townspeople. They were poor, but they were urban poor; they inhabited not just the ground on which they lived but a wider world of the mind and spirit. The Cauvery freed the town from undue preoccupation with the day’s weather and the season’s crops, bestowing upon it a measure of wealth. And Ramanujan’s family was among the many who, indirectly, lived off its bounty.

  Like the American city of Des Moines, with its similar relationship to the corn-rich countryside of Iowa, Kumbakonam was more cosmopolitan than its surroundings, was a center for the work of eye, hand, and brain, which needs a degree of leisure to pursue. A census taken around the time Ramanujan was growing up found it had a higher proportion of professionals than anywhere in the presidency but Madras itself. The crafts were especially strong. One specialty was fine metalwork; Kumbakonam craftsmen, six hundred of them, it was estimated, kept European markets stocked with deities of the Hindu pantheon executed in copper, silver, and brass.

  Another specialty was silk saris, the product of two thousand small looms manned by three thousand people. No place in South India was better known for its fine silk saris, dazzling in bright colors, embroidered in silver stripes, fringed with gold, than Kumbakonam and neighboring Tanjore. Saris woven in Kumbakonam could cost as much as a hundred rupees—a year’s income to many poor families.

  Bountiful harvests made the delta home to many wealthy farmers, and the marriage of one of their daughters might mean the purchase of a dozen or more saris. Before the wedding, the whole family would troop into town, make their selections, only later to be billed for what they took away; the merchants were happy to extend credit to such well-heeled customers. Otherwise, though, it was normally the husbands who did the buying, worried lest their wives, as one Kumbakonam sari weaver and shop owner told an English visitor around this time, spent too much.

  Srinivasa Iyengar, twenty-four at his son Ramanujan’s birth and about five years older than his wife, was a clerk in one such shop, just as his own father, Kupuswamy, had been. Normally, such a clerk remained one all his life—waiting on customers, taking orders, performing routine paperwork, perhaps traveling to ne
arby villages to collect bills. Occasionally a clerk might be taken into the business or would go off to start his own. But that required some special drive or entrepreneurial temperament. Apparently Srinivasa was good at appraising fabrics, a skill upon which his employer relied; but beyond that, whatever it took to step to a better job he could never muster.

  Clerks like Srinivasa reported to work at eight or so in the morning and didn’t get home till long after dark (which, so close to the equator, varied little across the year from about 6:00 P.M.). Sometimes they would return home at midday for lunch, though more likely their wives packed food in small metal cannisters for them to eat at the shop. Because certain months were deemed unpropitious, weddings would often stack up in months reckoned as lucky, making business quite seasonal and leaving clerks to sit idle for long periods. At such times, Srinivasa might well have been found asleep in the shop in the middle of the day.

  Day after day, year after year, he was at the shop, largely absent from Ramanujan’s early life. Indian society generally left the father little role to play at home, casting him as an aloof, physically undemonstrative, even unwelcoming figure whose relationship with his children was largely formal. Srinivasa was almost invisible, his name largely absent from family accounts. “Very quiet,” a boyhood friend of Ramanujan called him. Someone else would resort to the word “weightless.” But even had he been otherwise, he could scarcely have competed with Komalatammal as an influence on their son.

  Years later, while away in England, and with at least one letter to his father confined to reminders to keep up the house and not let the gutter run over, Ramanujan wrote his mother about the titanic struggle unleashed in Europe with the onset of the Great War, down to details of the number of men fighting, the width of the battle fronts, the use of airplanes in combat, and the contribution of Indian rajas to the British war effort.

  He must have known such an account would interest her. He and his mother understood each other. They talked the same language, enjoyed one another’s intelligent company, shared the same intensity of feeling. When he was young, the two of them dueled at Goats and Tigers, played with pebbles, on a grid resembling a perspective view of railroad tracks receding to the horizon, crossed by other tracks perpendicular to them. Three “tigers” sought to kill fifteen “goats” by jumping them, as in checkers, while the goats tried to encircle the tigers, immobilizing them. The game demanded logic, strategy, and fierce, chesslike concentration. The two of them reveled in it.

  Komalatammal, whom Ramanujan resembled physically, was, in the words of one account, “a shrewd and cultured lady.” Her family could claim Sanskrit scholars in its line, scholars upon whom local kings had bestowed gifts. She was the daughter of Narayana Iyengar, well known in Erode as amin, an official in the district court charged with calling witnesses, taking court notes, and conferring with lawyers. When Ramanujan was about four, her father offended some higher-up and lost his job. It was then that he and his wife, Rangammal, moved to Kanchipuram, the temple city near Madras. There he managed a choultry, a temple annex where marriages are held and pilgrims put up.

  A picture of Komalatammal survives, probably taken in her forties or fifties. It shows a woman whose corpulence even nine yards of sari cannot hide. Only her hands, resting lightly over the arms of her chair, suggest ease. The whole rest of her body conveys raw intensity: head cocked to one side, eyes alive, almost glaring, mouth set, leaning a little forward in the chair, only the balls of her bare feet touching the floor, poised as if ready to spring. The overall impression is one of great personal force only barely contained within her body.

  She was an intense, even obsessive woman, never shy about thrusting her powerful personality onto objects of her interest. And her primary object all the years he was growing up was her son, Chinnaswami. In India, strong ties between son and mother are legendary; close indeed must have been the relationship between Ramanujan and his mother that even his Indian biographers invariably saw fit to comment upon it.

  Komalatammal fed him his yogurt and rice, his spicy, pickled fruits and vegetables, his lentil soup. She combed his hair and coiled it into the traditional tuft, sometimes placing in it a flower. She tied his dhoti (or, as it was known in Tamil, veshti), the long piece of cloth wrapped around the waist and pulled up between the legs that all but the most Westernized men wore. She applied the namam, the powdery caste mark, to his forehead. She walked him to school; before going, Ramanujan would touch her feet in the traditional Indian sign of respect and secure her blessing. She monitored his friends and his time, made his decisions. Later, when Ramanujan didn’t get the treatment at school she thought he deserved, she stormed into the principal’s office and protested. And when she decided he ought to marry, she found him a wife and arranged for the wedding—all without bothering to consult her husband.

  She poured prodigious energy into her spiritual life. In Hindu families, the women were apt to be more pious, and more scrupulous about observing tradition, than the men. So it had been in her own family; her mother was said to have gone into hypnotic trances that placed her in communion with the gods. And so it was in Ramanujan’s family. Komalatammal was fiercely devout, held prayer meetings at her home, sang at the temple, pursued astrology and palmistry. Always, the name of their family deity, the Goddess Namagiri of Namakkal, was on her lips. “An exceptionally gifted lady with psychic powers and a remarkable imagination” was how one friend of the family described her. She had “’a remarkable repertoire of mythological stories and used to tell me stories from [the] ancient Mahabharata and Ramayana to [the] later Vikramaditya legends.” Any pause in the telling was cause for yet another murmured appeal to Namagiri.

  From his mother, Ramanujan absorbed tradition, mastered the doctrines of caste, learned the puranas. He learned to sing religious songs, to attend pujas, or devotions, at the temple, to eat the right foods and forswear the wrong ones—learned, in short, what he must do, and what he must never do, in order to be a good Brahmin boy.

  3. A BRAHMIN BOYHOOD

  For thousands of years Brahmins had been the learned men, teachers, and interpreters of Hindu life. Brahmins with heads so shaved in front that they looked prematurely bald, prominent caste marks of dried, colored paste upon their foreheads, locks of hair in the back like little ponytails, and thin, white, knotted threads worn diagonally across their bare chests, were an everyday sight on the streets of Kumbakonam and within its temples. Kumbakonam was a bedrock of Brahminism, the traditional Hinduism associated with its highest, priestly caste.

  Four percent of the South Indian population, Brahmins were to most Hindus objects of veneration and respect; in pre-British India, at least, wealthy patrons acquired religious merit and washed away sins by giving them land, houses, gold. Brahmins were the temple priests, the astrologers, the gurus, the pandits specializing in sacred law and Vedic exegesis, indispensable at every wedding and funeral, occupying the most exalted niche in the Indian caste system.

  Books about India by British writers around this time seemed to delight in regaling their readers with the horrors of the caste system—of men and women punished for sins committed in past lives by being consigned in this one to low and pitiable stations. There were four castes, these accounts recorded: Brahmins, at the top of the heap; Kshatriyas, or warriors; Vaisyas, or merchants and traders; and Sudras, or menials. A fifth group, the untouchables, lay properly outside the caste system. The first three castes were entitled to wear the sacred thread that affirmed them “twice-born.” The Sudras could not, but could enter the temples. The untouchables could not even do that. Nor could they draw water from the village well. Nor, traditionally, could even their shadows cross the path of a Brahmin without his having to undergo a purification ritual.

  Even this rudimentary breakdown, based on caste law first set down in the Institutes of Manu, a Sanskrit work dating to the third century, didn’t quite apply in South India; for the Kshatriyas went largely unrepresented in the South. But more, it omi
tted the reality of India’s several thousand self-governing subcastes, each with rules as to who could eat with whom, and whom one could marry. Most were originally, and often still, rooted in occupational categories. Thus, there were castes of agricultural workers, barbers, weavers, carpenters. It was these subcastes, or jatis, to which one really belonged. One simply was a Vanniar, or a Chettiar. Or, as in Ramanujan’s case, a Vaishnavite Brahmin; his very name, Iyengar, labeled him one.

  From the Hindu pantheon of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, Vaishnavites—about one Brahmin in four—singled out Vishnu as object of special devotion. Further theological nuances—for example, over just how much human effort was needed to secure divine grace—lay in the split between its Tengalai and Vedagalai, or northern and southern, branches. Such distinctions were not unlike those marking off, first, Christians from Jews, then Protestants from Roman Catholics, and finally, Lutherans from Methodists. And like their Western counterparts, the differences were often as much matters of style, tone, ritual emphasis, and historical accident as theological doctrine.

  All Hindus believed in reincarnation and karma, heard the same tellings of the great Indian epics, shared certain sensibilities, values, and beliefs. But Vaishnavite Brahmins, as a rule, simply did not marry Shaivite Brahmins, those devoted to Siva. Each group had its own temples, shrines, and centers of religious teaching. Ramanujan wore a caste mark on his forehead—the namam, a broad white “U” intersected by a red vertical slash—wholly distinct from the three white horizontal stripes worn by Shaivites.

  Caste barriers rose highest at mealtime. A Brahmin ate only with other Brahmins, could be served only by other Brahmins. In the cities, restaurants and hotels employing Brahmin chefs prominently advertised that fact. A Brahmin away from home went to elaborate pains to verify the source of food he ate. Brahmin families on pilgrimages to distant shrines would pull over to the side of the road to eat what they’d brought with them rather than chance food prepared by who-knew-whom.