THE STERADIAN TRAIL: BOOK #0 OF THE INFINITY CYCLE (19 page)

44

T
he Ramanujan museum in Royapuram topping the agenda, Joshua arrived at Lakshman’s office early Monday morning. Sunday had been a lacklustre day for both of them. The whirlwind trip to Kumbakonam had taken its toll on their bodies and they spent much of the day recovering from it. Particularly Joshua who had developed joint and body pains from the back-to-back bus rides. He treated himself to the Ayurvedic massage at the Oceanic spa, where he was doused and kneaded with unguents so spicy and aromatic that he almost began to fear if they were going to shove him next in the oven and serve at some cannibal wedding feast. The fact that the masseur stripped him down to a fig-leaf of a langoti and asked him to sit facing east and said a silent prayer cupping a dollop of oil in his palm before beginning the proceedings didn’t do much to assure him. But the massage did help ease the pain and restore some of his strength; he even felt sufficiently energized to go through Robert Kanigel’s biography of Ramanujan, which he’d bought on Friday, and jot down notes to discuss with Lakshman.

Lakshman’s Monday began on a mixed note, with good news arriving over the phone and a crisis by email.

The good news was that the wildlife officers had wrapped up their investigation and concluded that the death of the blackbuck was due to natural and unavoidable causes and did not warrant the registration of a criminal case. So Madhavan, and more importantly, the Institute were officially off the hook and Lakshman received a call from the Fifth Floor patting him in the back for helping resolve the matter satisfactorily for all parties concerned. But he could not even bask in the success for a moment. A crisis in the form of an email popped up on the computer before he even put the phone back in the cradle.

Lakshman was thrashing the matter out with Chamundeeswari when Joshua knocked on the door and peered in. He asked Joshua to wait a little and turned back to Chamundeeswari, who seemed to have her own opinion on things and wasn’t shy about voicing it.

The bone of contention was the date of Pomonia’s ceremony. Just when Lakshman had arrived at one after a painstaking selection process taking everyone’s stated convenience into account, Srisu suddenly moved the goalpost, sending him a new set of dates, crossing out some of the earlier entries because Pomonia’s court astrologer had deemed them unfavourable. Lakshman spent much of the morning reworking the schedule and homing in on a new date. When he shared it with Chamundeeswari and asked her to rework the logistics plan, she pointed out a major snag: The new date Lakshman was proposing was a new moon day.

New moon was one of those days on which there was no clear consensus in the country. It was auspicious for some and taboo for others, depending on which region one came from and which panchang system one followed. While Pomonia’s astrologer had given the new moon a clean bill of health, Chamundeeswari pointed out that the Fifth Floor was going to throw a fit because he, like her, was from Karnataka where new moon days were given a wide berth.

Personally, Lakshman was somewhat of an agnostic in these matters. Sure, he indulged Urmila from time to time, but his concessions stopped at home, they didn’t creep into his office. But thanks to Srisu and Chamundeeswari, he now found himself trapped in a web of superstition even at work. Not wanting to risk offending the Supreme Being, he grudgingly took Chamundeeswari’s advice and reworked the date one more time. After asking her to rejig the logistics based on that, he went out in search of Joshua.

‘Is everything okay?’ Joshua asked Lakshman as they trooped down the corridor. ‘You were looking pretty intense.’

There was no way Lakshman could tell Joshua that he was jumping through hoops like a circus dog for someone like Pomonia. ‘Everything’s fine. Just another day in the life of Lakshman,’ he said. ‘Were you able to go through the Kanigel book?’

‘Well, not thoroughly, but managed to refresh my memory about certain things.’

‘Find anything important?’

‘No, no great revelations, but figured out one thing. Remember what the old gentleman was telling us in Kumbakonam? About Jeffrey and his grad student searching the roof thatches?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Guess why he did that?’

‘To look for stuff written by Ramanujan, I guess. Although what made him think Ramanujan would keep something there, and that it would still be there, I don’t know!’

‘Well, there’s an interesting story behind it,’ Joshua said. ‘Ramanujan would do his derivations and proofs on slate first. If he arrived at any interesting result, he would write it down in a notebook. It turned out that one of the important results he’d derived on his own had already been discovered a hundred and fifty years before him. He got very upset and hid the notebook in the roof.’

‘But isn’t it silly of Jeffrey to think that they would have the same roof thatches for eighty years? They’re made of coconut leaves for heavens’ sake. They won’t last so long.’

‘I thought as much. But human greed, as they say, knows no season or reason.’

‘But I still can’t understand what made Jeffrey believe he might stumble onto something. What motivated him to the extent that he’d go travelling to a remote town like Kumbakonam? That too, so many years after Ramanujan’s death?’

‘Hey, you’re forgetting a lot of Ramanujan’s writings were discovered long after his death, some even in the Seventies,’ Joshua said.

‘Yeah, the Lost Notebook, right,’ Lakshman said.

The Lost Notebook was not really a notebook in the strict sense. It was just a loose bunch of scrap papers with about six hundred formulas Ramanujan had scribbled down on his deathbed in India. After he died, Janaki Ammal turned them over to the University of Madras. They passed from hand to hand and made it to the Wren library at Trinity College and remained there, forgotten, until George Andrews stumbled on them over half a century later in 1976. Dubbed the Lost Notebook given Ramanujan’s penchant for recording his results in exercise books since childhood, the bunch of papers caused a huge stir in the mathematical community. People pounced on it immediately, but they could not succeed in making sense of all the formulas, proving or disproving them. They were still chipping away. In the new millennium now, twenty-five years since the discovery by George Andrews, over eighty years since his own death, Ramanujan was still keeping mathematicians busy. Neither Joshua nor Lakshman was surprised that Jeffrey too was on his trail.

They walked out of the building and the driver saw them and revved up the engine.

‘Looks like a different car?’ Lakshman said. ‘It’s an Ambassador, not the usual Expanzo.’

‘Different car and more importantly, different driver,’ Joshua said. His paranoid side asserting itself, he’d randomly called a new company unconnected with the hotel, not only to avoid Durai but also to get a driver who was completely outside his circle of friends.

Though he wasn’t wearing a spic and span company uniform, the new driver Nallathambi seemed more courteous than Durai Raj, bending like a question mark as he opened the door for Joshua. But he devolved into a totally different specimen – from man to a monkey – as soon as they emerged from the campus and blended into the tide of traffic on Sardar Patel Road. He was grouchy behind the wheel and needed only the slightest excuse to open his foul mouth. A jaywalker on the road, an auto-rickshaw overtaking him from the wrong side, a motorcyclist weaving in and out, a car in front taking a few seconds to respond to the green light, a bicyclist coming dangerously close . . . Any of this was more than sufficient provocation for him to unleash a torrent of the choicest expletives in the purest Tamil in which no immediate relative of the offender was exempted.

Lakshman squirmed in his seat, unsure what to say when Joshua kept asking for a translation. The only stretch of road where Nallathambi showed some semblance of civility was the Kotturpuram Bridge as there was hardly any traffic on it. Once they crossed over and merged into the gridlock on Mount Road, he not only regained his old form but also took his talent to Himalayan heights, forcing Lakshman to step in and ask him to tone it down a bit.

But it was to no avail.

He gave Lakshman a wilting look with his bloodshot eyes and said, ‘Am I talking to you, sir? If I drive badly, put your life at risk, scold me, slap me with your shoes if you want. Otherwise don’t tell me what to do.’

Lakshman didn’t dare wag his tongue at him after that.

They crawled along Mount Road in fits and starts, getting stuck in a series of traffic snarls. They managed to reach Royapuram in about an hour, but it took another thirty minutes before they could locate the museum. They had to stop at many places to get directions because none of the people they approached had heard of the museum in their town. But Nallathambi didn’t rest until he delivered them to the desired destination, located on a narrow, densely packed by-lane of Somu Chetty Street.

Joshua and Lakshman got down from the car expectantly but they were instantly deflated by the very looks of the building; somehow it seemed worse than the house in Kumbakonam. It was no surprise that it didn’t find a place in any tourist map of the city. It didn’t even have an independent, dedicated building to start with. The museum, if one could call it that, was a single room carved out of Avvai Kalai Kalagam, an academy founded by a local philanthropist to promote art and culture in that forgotten part of town. The rest of the space was taken up by a small library and a maths education centre.

Lakshman and Joshua walked into the building and made for the one-room museum, disappointment writ large on their faces.

But they were in for a pleasant surprise.

The building was indeed less than modest but what it had inside blew them away. The poky little enclosure housed a veritable treasure trove of Ramanujan memorabilia. A splendid array of photographs, certificates, letters, books, notebooks and sundry items including his famous slate and passport were kept in exhibition, hung on the walls or displayed on shelves and tables.

There were only a handful of schoolchildren pottering about the place, shepherded by a middle-aged man who was commenting on the items on display and answering their queries. When he saw Lakshman and Joshua walking in, he cocked a curious eye at Joshua and said to Lakshman, ‘I’ll be with you in five minutes.’

‘Take your time,’ Lakshman said. ‘We’ll just look around till then.’

They got busy looking through the display. They had no clear idea what exactly they were searching for, but they knew it was here somewhere, a black cat in a dark room.

Lakshman took one end of the wall and Joshua the other.

Before long, two books on the stand, right under a portrait of Hardy, caught Lakshman’s eyes.

Lakshman picked them up and called out: ‘Josh, come and have a look at this.’

45

T
hey were reprints of Ramanujan’s three notorious notebooks, a facsimile edition condensed in two volumes, published by TIFR, Bombay.

Joshua made it in two strides and took one from Lakshman and they began leafing through the well-thumbed pages with rapt attention, marvelling at the singular genius of Ramanujan all over again.

Each page was brimming over with mathematical exotica in all hues and colours in Ramanujan’s cursive hand: statements, formulas, equations, theorems, corollaries . . . No detailed proofs or derivations were given. Just a broad outline, if at all, telescoped down to a few steps, a mountain condensed into a molehill. Ramanujan had compiled them in India before getting the scholarship to Cambridge. He couldn’t afford to buy paper so he did all his derivations on a slate and wrote down only the key results in the notebooks. There were about 3,500 results in all in the three notebooks.

‘Have people been able to make sense of these notebooks yet?’ Lakshman asked. ‘The last I heard they were still working on it.’

Unlike the Lost Notebook, these three notebooks were
widely disseminated after Ramanujan’s death. But decoding the results they contained remained an elusive task for five decades. People started making progress only from the Seventies.

‘Yes, finally,’ Joshua said. ‘It’s been the lifetime mission for Professor Bruce Berndt at the University of Illinois. He’s published his results in five volumes. The last volume got done just a few years ago.’

‘Which is what, ninety years after Ramanujan cooked them up originally?’

‘That’s right,’ Joshua nodded.

Lakshman flipped to a random page and glanced through it. As was the case with the others, he couldn’t make head or tail of anything.

‘Do you understand any of his stuff, Josh?’ he asked. ‘I don’t have the foggiest idea what they mean.’

Joshua laughed. ‘I don’t have the slightest clue either. But I’m not ashamed to admit it. It’s not just us. Many mathematicians, I mean pros steeped till their neck in theorems, proofs and corollaries to bring home their daily bread and butter, also face the same problem. That’s why it took them so long to make sense of these notebooks. You need to have a PhD in pure math to even understand what some of the theorems mean. And proofs? Forget it. There are only a handful of guys on the entire planet who can manage that.’

Joshua put the book back on the stand and moved on to the next section of the display. It had some pictures and the original letter Hardy had written to Ramanujan in the fateful year of 1913. ‘They’ve got some very cool pictures here,’ he said.

‘You don’t want to look into the notebooks?’ Lakshman asked.

‘No, I don’t think they hold anything relevant for us. Nothing new to discover, I mean. Not that we are capable of doing any such thing,’ Joshua said. ‘If there was really something in them others would have reported it already. It’s sort of like the story about the economist seeing a ten-dollar bill on the road. If there was really a dollar bill like that somebody else would have taken it already. The notebooks have been in the public domain for years now. Every university library worth its salt has a copy. I don’t think Jeffrey found anything of value in them.’

‘Then why was he here?’ Lakshman said.

‘That’s what we’re here to find out,’ Joshua said.

The caretaker of the museum entertaining the kids finally freed himself from them and headed towards Lakshman and Joshua with a big smile.

‘Hello sirs, welcome!’ he said, stretching an arm out. ‘Sakthivel.’

Lakshman and Joshua introduced themselves.

‘I think you’re coming here for the first time, sir. Welcome!’ Sakthivel said.

‘I didn’t even know a museum like this exists in the city,’ Lakshman said. ‘How long has it been here?’

‘Since 1993, sir.’

‘1993? That old?’ Lakshman said. ‘Who gathered all these things and set this up? Not our government, I’m sure.’

‘Of course not, sir,’ Sakthivel said. ‘This museum is the idea of P.K. Srinivasan, sir.’

‘Who is that?’

‘Retired maths teacher, sir. Old-fashioned gentleman who teaches all kinds of maths shortcuts to children. He’s a big fan of Ramanujan, sir. He created this museum for him, collecting his things from various people for thirty years. He has even come on TV, sir
.
’

‘I think I’ve heard of him,’ Lakshman said. ‘But I didn’t know he’s established a nice museum like this.’

‘Not many people know, sir. Only school children come usually. Recently there was an article in the
Hindu
about this place and so some more people have started coming. Just recently there was another foreigner here, sir. He came many times, also.’

Lakshman’s ears pricked up instantly. ‘A foreigner?’ he said.

‘Yes sir, a young professor. He came here three or four times, sir, sometimes with his student. Said he liked this place very much.’

‘You remember his name?’

‘I think William something, sir.’

‘Jeffrey Williams?’

‘Yes sir, same person. Do you know him, sir?’

Lakshman wasn’t sure how to respond and let Joshua handle it.

‘He was an old student of mine,’ said Joshua. ‘What was he doing here?’

‘Just looking at the things on display, sir. Also made Xerox copies of some of the books.’

‘Really?’ Joshua said.

‘Yes sir,’ he said. ‘He made copies of all books here. He didn’t even spare Janaki Ammal’s
Sri Ramajayam
notebook, sir. It has no mathematics but he still made a copy, sir.’

Joshua gave Sakthivel a befuddled look.

But Lakshman’s antennae seemed to detect a signal. ‘Do you mind showing us that notebook?’ he said.

‘One minute, sir. Let me get it.’ Sakthivel spun around and made for the section with all the sundry items.

‘What notebook did he say?’ Joshua asked Lakshman.

‘
Sri Ramajayam
notebook,’ said Lakshman. ‘
Sri Ramajayam
is a chant or mantra hailing Rama. There’re many such chants depending on the God. People write them in notebooks like writing imposition lines in school, usually for 108 times, the magic number here, but it could go up to 1,008 or 10,008 or even 100,008 times.’

‘What for?’

‘To bring divine blessings and good luck,’ Lakshman said. ‘My grandmother used to do it all the time. It doesn’t surprise me that Mrs Ammal did it as well – they were a religious family. But what I do find strange is Jeffrey making a copy of that book.’

‘I agree,’ said Joshua.

Sakthivel fetched the notebook from the stand and handed it to Joshua – Americans always got priority over Indians.

It was an ordinary exercise book with nothing special about it: a standard issue, hardbound, unruled, maroon-red calico on the spine, pages turned sepia with time, a silverfish fossilized on the cardboard cover which carried the label of M.R.M. Books & Stationers, Trichinopoly.

Joshua flicked it open and thumbed through a couple of pages. All they had was column after column of mantras. In Tamil. ‘Why don’t you take a look?’ he said and passed it over to Lakshman.

Lakshman put on his reading glasses and leafed through the first few pages. He couldn’t spot any
Sri Ramajayam
s though. What he saw instead were columns of other chants like
Hari Narayana
,
Hari Gopala
and
Hari Vasudeva
– Mrs Ammal’s favourite names for Vishnu. Puzzled why this notebook had managed to grab Jeffrey’s attention, Lakshman riffled through a few more pages.

Before long he saw a trend began to emerge . . .

~

All was quiet in the alley outside the museum. Nallathambi was sprawled out in the car seat and dozing off with the
Daily Dove
newspaper tenting over his tummy, quivering in sync with his breathing. But the phone booth at the end of the street was witnessing a flurry of frantic calls. So far the instructions to the two men had been to only tail Joshua from a distance. But that was beginning to change now.