The Man Who Knew Infinity CHAPTER ONE In the Temple's Coolness [1887 to 1903] 1. DAKSHIN GANGE He heard it all his life-the slow, measured thwap . . . thwap . . . thwap .
. . of wet clothes being pounded clean on rocks jutting up from the waters of the Cauvery River. Born almost within sight of the river, Ramanujan heard it even as an infant. Growing up, he heard it as he fetched water from the Cauvery, or bathed in it, or played on its sandy banks after school. Later, back in India after years abroad, fevered, sick, and close to death, he would hear that rhythmic slapping sound once more. The Cauvery was a familiar, recurring constant of Ramanujan's life. At some places along its length, palm trees, their trunks heavy with fruit, leaned over the river at rakish angles.
At others, leafy trees formed a canopy of green over it, their gnarled, knotted roots snaking along the riverbank. During the monsoon, its waters might rise ten, fifteen, twenty feet, sometimes drowning cattle allowed to graze too long beside it. Come the dry season, the torrent became a memory, the riverbanks wide sandy beaches, and the Cauvery itself but a feeble trickle tracing the deepest channels of the riverbed. But always it was there. Drawing its waters from the Coorg Mountains five hundred miles to the west, branching and rebranching across the peninsula, its flow channeled by dams and canals some of which went back fifteen hundred years, the Cauvery painted the surrounding countryside an intense, unforgettable green. And that single fact, more than any other, made Ramanujan's world what it was. Kumbakonam, his hometown, flanked by the Cauvery and one of its tributaries, lay in the heartland of staunchly traditional South India, 160 miles south of Madras, in the district then known as Tanjore. Half the district's thirty-seven hundred square miles, an area the size of the state of Delaware, was watered directly by the river, which fell gently, three feet per mile, to the sea, spreading its rich alluvial soil across the delta.
The Cauvery conferred almost unalloyed blessing. Even back in 1853, when it flooded, covering the delta with water and causing immense damage, few lives were lost. More typically, the great river made the surrounding land immune to year-to-year variation in the monsoon, upon whose caprices most of the rest of India hung. In 1877, in the wake of two straight years of failed monsoons, South India had been visited by drought, leaving thousands dead. But Tanjore District, nourished by the unfailing Cauvery, had been scarcely touched; indeed, the rise in grain prices accompanying the famine had brought the delta unprecedented prosperity. No wonder that the Cauvery, like the Ganges a thousand miles north, was one of India's sacred rivers. India's legendary puranas told of a mortal known as Kavera-muni who adopted one of Brahma's daughters. In filial devotion to him, she turned herself into a river whose water would purify from all sin.
Even the holy Ganges, it was said, periodically joined the Cauvery through some hidden underground link, so as to purge itself of pollution borne of sinners bathing in its waters. Dakshin Gange, the Cauvery was called-the Ganges of the South. And it made the delta the most densely populated and richest region in all of South India. The whole edifice of the region's life, its wealth as well as the rich spiritual and intellectual lives its wealth encouraged, all depended on its waters. The Cauvery was a place for spiritual cleansing; for agricultural surfeit; for drawing water and bathing each morning; for cattle, led into its shallow waters by men in white dhotis and turbans, to drink; and always, for women, standing knee-deep in its waters, to let their snaking ribbons of cotton or silk drift out behind them into the gentle current, then gather them up into sodden clumps of cloth and slap them slowly, relentlessly, against the water-worn rocks. 2. SARANGAPANI SANNIDHI STREET In September 1887, two months before her child was due to be born, a nineteen-year-old Kumbakonam girl named Komalatammal traveled to Erode, her parental home, 150 miles upriver, to prepare for the birth of the child she carried. That a woman returned to her native home for the birth of her first child was a tradition so widely observed that officials charged with monitoring vital statistics made a point of allowing for it.
Erode, a county seat home to about fifteen thousand people, was located at the confluence of the Cauvery and one of its tributaries, the Bhavani, about 250 miles southwest of Madras. At Erode-the word means "wet skull," recalling a Hindu legend in which an enraged Siva tears off one of Brahma's five heads-the Cauvery is broad, its stream bed littered with great slabs of protruding rock. Not far from the river, in "the fort," as the town's original trading area was known, was the little house, on Teppukulam Street, that belonged to Komalatammal's father. It was here that a son was born to her and her husband Srinivasa, just after sunset on the ninth day of the Indian month of Margasirsha-or Thursday, December 22, 1887. On his eleventh day of life, again in accordance with tradition, the child was formally named, and a year almost to the day after his birth, Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar and his mother returned to Kumbakonam, where he would spend most of the next twenty years of his life. "Srinivasa"-its initial syllable pronounced shri-was just his father's name, automatically bestowed and rarely used; indeed, on formal documents, and when he signed his name, it usually atrophied into an initial "S." "Iyengar," meanwhile, was a caste name, referring to the particular branch of South Indian Brahmins to which he and his family belonged. Thus, with one name that of his father and another that of his caste, only "Ramanujan" was his alone.
As he would later explain to a Westerner, "I have no proper surname." His mother often called him Chinnaswami, or "little lord." But otherwise he was, simply, Ramanujan. He got the name, by some accounts, because the Vaishnavite saint Ramanuja, who lived around A.D. 1100 and whose theological doctrines injected new spiritual vitality into a withered Hinduism, was also born on a Thursday and shared with him other astrological likenesses. "Ramanujan"-pronounced Rah-MAH-na-jun, with only light stress on the second syllable, and the last syllable sometimes closer to jum-means younger brother (anuja) of Rama, that model of Indian manhood whose story has been handed down from generation to generation through the Ramayana, India's national epic. Ramanujan's mother, Komalatammal, sang bhajans, or devotional songs, at a nearby temple.
Half the proceeds from her group's performances went to the temple, the other half to the singers. With her husband earning only about twenty rupees per month, the five or ten she earned this way mattered; never would she miss a rehearsal. Yet now, in December 1889, she was missing them, four or five in a row. So one day, the head of the singing group showed up at Komalatammal's house to investigate. There she found, piled near the front door, leaves of the margosa tree; someone, it was plain to her, had smallpox. Stepping inside, she saw a small, dark figure lying atop a bed of margosa leaves. His mother, chanting all the while, dipped the leaves in water laced with ground turmeric, and gently scoured two-year-old Ramanujan's pox-ridden body-both to relieve the infernal itching and, South Indian herbalists believed, subdue the fever. Ramanujan would bear the scars of his childhood smallpox all his life.
But he recovered, and in that was fortunate. For in Tanjore District, around the time he was growing up, a bad year for smallpox meant four thousand deaths. Fewer than one person in five was vaccinated. A cholera epidemic when Ramanujan was ten killed fifteen thousand people. Three or four children in every ten died before they'd lived a year. Ramanujan's family was a case study in the damning statistics. When he was a year and a half, his mother bore a son, Sadagopan. Three months later, Sadagopan was dead.
When Ramanujan was almost four, in November 1891, a girl was born. By the following February, she, too, was dead. When Ramanujan was six and a half, his mother gave birth to yet another child, Seshan-who also died before the year was out. Much later, two brothers did survive-Lakshmi Narasimhan, born in 1898, when Ramanujan was ten, and Tirunarayanan, born when he was seventeen. But the death of his infant brothers and sister during those early years meant that he grew up with the solicitous regard and central position of an only child. After the death of his paternal grandfather, who had suffered from leprosy, Ramanujan, seven at the time, broke out in a bad