The Indian Clerk (26 page)

So where does that leave him?

Everywhere he goes, he sees Indians. They never take off their gowns and mortarboards, perhaps to insure that no one question
their presence here. Under the best of circumstances they would be nervous. Now the war seems only to have amplified their
self-consciousness. One afternoon, for instance, as he's walking through the Corn Exchange, he watches a gust of wind yank
the mortarboard off the head of an Indian youth in King's College robes. With amusement and pity, he observes the comic turn
of the youth chasing the mortarboard and bending to retrieve it, only to see it dashed off once again—playfully, cruelly—by
the wind. Finally the mortarboard lands at Hardy's feet. He rescues it, dusts it off, and hands it to the Indian, who is out
of breath from running. The Indian thanks him, then hurries in the opposite direction.

A few minutes later, Hardy sees him again, gathered at the corner of Trinity Street and Bridge Street with three of his countrymen.
One is Chatterjee, the handsome cricketer with whom (it seems an eon ago) he conflated Ramanujan. The second is tall and stooped
and wears spectacles and a turban. The third is Ramanujan himself. He waggles his head at Hardy. And what is Hardy supposed
to do in response? Wave? Walk over and say hello? He chooses, on this occasion, just to wave.

The next morning, he asks Ramanujan who he was with. "Chatterjee," Ramanujan says. "He is from Calcutta. And Mahalanobis—he
is also from Calcutta, studying natural sciences at King's—and Ananda Rao."

"Oh yes," Hardy says. "Isn't he the one who was coming to England on an Austrian ship? As I recall, you were worried he might
not make it."

"He had quite an adventure. By the time he and Sankara Rao reached Port Said, the war had begun. Near Crete an English ship
started firing on them and ordered them to stop. Luckily their ship carried no guns. If the ship had carried guns, and the
sailors had shot back, they would have been sunk."

"What happened after that?"

"Everyone was taken prisoner and brought to Alexandria, where the ship was seized. The Indians and the Englishmen were put
on another ship and sent to England. So he and Sankara Rao arrived safely."

"And the tamarind?"

"It was undamaged."

"What do you make with it again?"

"I should like to try it."

"Perhaps I shall have a dinner. I shall invite some friends. Chatterjee and Mahalanobis, perhaps."

"I would enjoy that," Hardy says. But Ramanujan either changes his mind or forgets that he made the offer in the first place,
for the invitation—to Hardy's mild regret—doesn't come.

Today, of course, we know the truth. We have the memoirs and the letters, testimony to what a horror France was, the rats
and the lice and the severed limbs flying. Things that those of us who were not there have no right, no license, to describe.
And we also know what an outrageous waste it was ("wastage" was the bureaucratic term for death in the battlefield), and how
stupid the war was in conception and practice, and how stupidly we played it.

At the time, though, even as the rationalist in me tried to keep in mind the delusive purpose of the propaganda, the sentimentalist
took pleasure and sometimes comfort in the notion that the war was a sort of jolly game. "All great fun," as Rupert Brooke
once put it. Nor did it help when Brooke waxed poetic, in his letters, about bathing with the "naked, superb" men in his regiment.
Of course, Brooke could feel himself naked and superb in his own right, which I never could. Still, the very idea of bathing
naked with a corps of handsome youths—I cannot pretend that it did not excite me. As a boy I had devoured tales of battle
and glory and victory. I was a little in love with young Prince Harold. When he took the arrow in the eye at Hastings, I longed
to have been there with him, to have ministered to his wounds and cradled him in my arms. I used to have a very strong erotic
fantasy—I think it was the fantasy in which I indulged the first time I touched myself with carnal intent—that I was lying
injured on a battlefield, my clothes somehow half torn away, and two officers, one a doctor, lifting me onto a stretcher and
carrying me into a tent, where they proceeded to strip away the clothes that remained, until I was naked . . . The fantasy
never progressed beyond this moment. What would happen next I could not imagine. And now, in the first years of the war, this
fantasy returned, more powerful than ever, perhaps because I had had, in the intervening years, experiences that allowed me
to extend the vision beyond the moment when my clothes were stripped off, to the one where the doctor leaned over to kiss
me, and beyond that as well . . .

You see, the action, not to mention the grisliness, was in France. Back at Trinity, the nights were quiet enough for dreams.
I tried to convince myself that I appreciated the silence, when in truth I missed the drunken singing that used to wake me,
and the philosophical arguments under my windows, the morose declarations uttered—as only the young can utter them—with rhapsodic
joy. For this had always been the flavor of the first weeks once the term started. One could revel with the young in their
newfound freedom, the freedom to stay up late, and argue, and say, "When youth ends, life ends. I shall kill myself when I
turn thirty." (The voicer of this particular sentiment, I happen to know, didn't make it past nineteen.) I even missed those
rituals I'd once claimed to despise: the bloods invading the rooms of the aesthetes, breaking their crockery and throwing
the pieces down into New Court. For now there were no bloods—the hale and hearty were off fighting—and few aesthetes, for
many of these were fighting, too, and of those who remained, none seemed to have the heart to sing or argue.

Early that winter I was sitting, one morning, reading in my rooms, with Hermione on my lap, awaiting Ramanujan. I looked up
and saw that the first snow was falling. And somehow its innocence, its seeming obliviousness to the condition of the world,
moved me and saddened me. For possibly the snow was falling also on the riven farmland of France and Belgium, falling into
the trenches in which the soldiers waited for what might be their last sunset. And it was falling on Nevile's Court, to be
gazed upon by the injured lying on their camp beds. And it was falling in Cranleigh, where my mother, half out of her mind,
watched it through her bedroom window, and my sister through the window of a classroom in which uniformed girls were painting
a vase of flowers. Lifting Hermione off my lap, I got up and walked to the window. It was still warm enough outside that the
snow didn't stick; it melted instantly when it touched the ground. And there, standing in the court below me, was Ramanujan.
The flakes melted on his face and ran down his cheeks. He stood there like that for a full five minutes. And then I realized
that this must have been the first time in his life that he had seen snow.

He came upstairs and we went to work. I cannot say exactly what we were working on. It's so hard to remember with Ramanujan,
for he was always busy with two or three things at once, or he had had another dream, and had another oddity to share. Were
we, for instance, already on to the theory of round numbers? This was the sort of thing in which he could lose himself for
days at a time, counting through all the numbers from 1 to 1,000,000 and then ordering them by roundness. "1,000,000, Hardy,
is very round," he said to me one day. "It has 12 prime factors, whereas if you take all the numbers between 999,991 and 1,000,010,
the average is only 4." I liked to imagine him sitting in his rooms, making lists like this. Yet he was doing much more than
that. He was laying the groundwork for the asymptotic formula for roundness that we would later perfect.

By the middle of October, the last of the wounded had been moved out of Nevile's Court. New hospital facilities were being
built on the cricket grounds of Clare and King's colleges—one of the best pitches in town, I noted ruefully at the time.

Still, I visited the hospital. The first time, I took Ramanujan with me. The wards stretched for three-quarters of a mile,
ten blocks of them, with sixty beds each. What was strangest about them was that they only had three walls each. In each one,
where the fourth wall should have been, there was open sky, clouds, lawn.

I asked one of the sisters why the walls were missing. "It's for the fresh air," she said, rubbing her arms for warmth. "Fresh
air blows away germs. Also headache and lassitude."

"And what happens when it rains?"

"There are blinds. Though if I'm to tell the truth, they don't work very well. Not that it matters. These men are used to
sleeping outdoors, and under far worse conditions."

Not far off, a soldier started wailing. His words were unrecognizable. Perhaps he was Belgian. The sister went off to tend
to him, and I looked at the men, most of whom were wrapped in cocoons of blanket and bandage. How would they stay warm in
the winter? I wondered. Or perhaps that was the point. Perhaps the thinking was that, should they be made too comfortable,
they might be less willing to return to the front. I could imagine such an idea gaining credence in military circles.

Afterward Ramanujan expressed his bewilderment at the missing wall. "Tuberculosis patients are treated the same way," I told
him—having no idea, of course, what was to come. "Fresh air! Fresh air! The English are great believers in the healing powers
of fresh air."

"But what happens when it rains?"

"Then they will get wet."

That afternoon, on target, it rained. Great sheets of rain came down. Somehow I could not sit in my room, watching the deluge,
so I took my umbrella, the one I had stolen from Gertrude, and went back to the ward. The sister was now fighting the blinds,
which rattled and flapped in the wind. At her feet, rainwater pooled. She had put on galoshes. When the wind gusted, shards
of rain splattered the men lying nearest the blinds, some of whom cursed or laughed, while others lay still, seemingly oblivious
to the lashings.

The quietest of them—I noticed him only then—was a lad with dark blond hair and green eyes. Hair only slightly darker than
that on his head tufted out from his nightshirt. I stepped gingerly to his bedside. "May I?" I asked, opening the umbrella
over his head.

"I don't think I should thank you," he said.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because opening an umbrella indoors is bad luck," he said.

"Not this umbrella," I said. "This is a lucky umbrella. And besides, we aren't exactly indoors. We're sort of . . . on the
threshold, aren't we? Between outdoors and indoors."

"Are you a don?"

"Yes. How did you know?"

"You talk like a don."

"Do I?"

"All sorts of daft things."

I was pleased that he considered me young enough to tease. I asked if I could sit with him a bit.

"There's no law against it," he said. And I sat down in the chair next to his bed, being careful, all the while, not to let
the umbrella sway.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Thayer," he said. "Infantry. Birmingham. Took a hunk of shrapnel in the leg near Wipers."

"Wipers?"

"You know, in Belgium."

"Ah, Ypres."

"Are you in pain?"

"Not the leg. I don't feel anything in the leg. They say it's fifty-fifty if I lose it." Suddenly he looked up at me. "Is
not feeling pain a bad sign? Does it mean I should consider the leg gone? Because Lord knows you can't get a straight answer
out of anyone around here."

"I wish I could tell you," I said. "But I'm only a mathematician."

"I was never any good at long division."

"Neither was I." I said this without even thinking what effect the words might have on him. He laughed.

"So are you in pain anywhere else? Besides your leg, I mean."

"It's just that my head aches. A sort of pounding. Ever since the explosion." He pointed to a bowl next to the bed, in which
a wet cloth lay. "The sister drenches this with hot water and puts it on my forehead and that seems to help. Could you ask
her if she'll do it now? It's got cold."

"Of course I will," I said. And I got up to look for the sister. But she was still doing battle, valiantly and hopelessly,
with the blinds, a struggle from which she would be called away intermittently by a patient's yelp.

I glanced around the ward. There were one or two other sisters about, tending to patients. Then I noticed a stove in the corner.
On one of the hobs was a pot of water from which steam rose.

"Just a minute," I said. And I leaned the umbrella, as best I could, on the chair, so that it might continue to keep him even
a little dry. "I'll be right back," I said. And then I took the cloth from the bowl and carried it over to the stove, where
I dipped it in the hot water and wrung it out.

"Here we are," I said, returning. "May I?"

He lifted his chin with a kind of knightly forbearance. Very cautiously I brushed back his hair. Then I took the cloth and
draped it over his brow. He shuddered and gave out an audible sigh of relief.

All that afternoon I sat with him. He talked to me, not, I sensed, because he took any great interest in me, but because he
had things to say and I was someone to listen. I must be honest about this. He talked about the front line, and the rats that
were as big as dogs, and the curious fact that one almost never saw the enemy—"never saw Jerry" was how he put it—but always
felt his sinister proximity. Somehow you knew he was there, in his own trench, not two hundred yards away, and when, on occasion,
some sign of life would emerge from the other side of No Man's Land—when one heard a bit of singing, or smelled food frying—it
came as a shock.

"What kind of singing?"

"Jerry songs. Only once—it was the oddest thing—I heard a radio playing, and it was a British program. A comedy. And they
were laughing at it."

All the while the rain came down. Men moaned and wailed and asked—begged—for cigarettes. Every twenty minutes or so I would
take his cloth and warm it in the hot water. The bother was, during those intervals when I was away at the stove, the umbrella,
propped up against my chair, kept falling over. Rain would mat his hair and soak his blankets. I'd do my best to dry him.
Then I'd sit again and try to keep the umbrella steady, even though doing so made my arm ache. You see, I was determined that
no drop of water should land on him, other than the water from the cloth on his head.