Srinivasa Ramanujan died at the age of 32 in the year 1920. Ever since, his short life has caught the imagination of writers, mostly Western, who— carried away by the sheer romance of his story— have barely succeeded in bringing him to life. 

The latest by David Leavitt, ‘The Indian Clerk’ is no exception save the hitherto unknown account of the attraction Alice Neville (the wife of the man sent out to bring Ramanujan to Cambridge) felt for him. But the ‘real’ Ramanujan is there in the little known ‘biography’— actually a clinical documentation — by the internationally known ‘Father of Library Science’.

Dr S R Ranganathan was one of the many young people around at the time when the name of the clerk of the Madras Port Trust became internationally known. In a short span of four years, Ramanujan had become one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society accepted on first presentation, Fellow of the Trinity College, Cambridge, and had garnered countless honours and then with the heady promise of a brilliant yet uncharted future at the call, just passed away with the promise.

Ranganathan set out to chronicle his life for which he was ideally suited. He was the quintessence of the great South Indian Brahmin tradition that combined deep spiritual awareness with an almost severe objectivity in matters of mind. 

If it were not for Ranganathan the life of Ramanujan, particularly the pre-Cambridge life, would be lost in the darkness of anonymity. With a zeal that only he was capable of, he picked on every trail and talked to everyone who had anything to do with Ramanujan, like a retired Professor of Mathematics who was a school-mate of his, a neighbour who had retired as a Chief Engineer, a class-mate in ‘Pachaiyappa’s College’ who was an advocate and another, an IPS retired, who recollected that Ramanujan had penetrating intuition combined with a childlike simplicity. 

Man behind the genius
When he worked his mathematics, which he did relentlessly, he would be lost to the world.  Sometimes he would hide under a cot to avoid disturbance. But he was not always serious. He would swap jokes and burst out laughing cupping his mouth with both hands.

A teacher of Mathematics at the College whose intricate solution to a problem in algebra had covered two sliding blackboards which Ramanujan solved in a much shorter way. 

Dr C D Deshmukh, a contemporary at the University of Cambridge, who had seen Ramanujan cook his simple vegetarian food himself. Ramanujan was so puritanical in his vegetarianism that having had ovaltine at a friend’s place (and discovering later that the contents included powdered egg), he left immediately with his bag and later wrote to the landlady that when he approached the Railway station there was heavy bombing; he was convinced that the raid was a punishment for his act.

Prof Mahalanobis, who was also at Cambridge, remembered a conversation with a tutor in mathematics, Arthur Berry, who was working out some formulae on the black-board. The latter, looking back at Ramanujan to see whether he was following, found him beaming. 

In answer to a query he got up, went to the black-board and wrote down the results and some other results, which had not yet been proved. When Mahalanobis visited Ramanujan at night he found him sitting very near the fire, very cold. He slept with his overcoat on. On checking the bed he had to show Ramanujan the tucked blankets and how to get inside them.

Ramanujan was more interested in establishing philosophical theories rather than mathematical conjectures. He was eager to work out a theory of relativity, which would be based on the fundamental concepts of Zero, Infinity and the set of finite numbers. He spoke of ‘Zero’ as the symbol of the absolute— the absolute negation of all attributes.  ‘Infinite’ was the totality of all possibilities. The product of Infinite and Zero supplied the whole set of finite numbers.

There was a man who lived with a brother who was a lecturer in college, who was now retired from the Revenue Board office.  He recalled events and incidents, which indicated Ramanujan’s extraordinary interest in the occult. 
Ramanujan was living as a tenant in a house in George Town.  He dreamt there that a child of the family living in another room was in danger.  In the morning he found the child quite normal. When he returned from the college however, he learnt that the child was very sick. He told the parents to remove the child to another place for the death of a person can occur only in a certain place, time and point. When the parent removed the child, the child recovered consciousness.  Later, since the child insisted, the parents took it back to their house and after a little while it had died. Whereupon Ramanujan had a dream of the child pursuing him and he had to hide in a temple. Developing a fever he prayed to Goddess Nemagiri and was cured.

The Notebook
While going through the archives in the University, Ranganathan came across the mention of a frayed notebook, which was lost, while Ramanujan was in England. About this time Ranganathan was appointed as the first Librarian of the Madras University. A mathematics student of Edward Ross, this shift to a profession, which seemed dull, made him confide with the Principal. “I can’t bear the solitary confinement day after day. How different from life in the college!” The Principal asked him to make up his mind after going for a year’s study in England.

In 1925, however, arriving in England he went in search of the frayed or missing notebook as it came to be called. The search took him to the doors of King’s College, Oxford, where Hardy had moved to from Cambridge. The conversation went like this. Hardy: “Come in, Ranganathan. Edward B Ross has written to me about you. The latest I hear from him was that you had given up teaching mathematics and become the University Librarian”. 
Ranganathan: “Yes, I found a peculiar link between my period as a teacher of mathematics and my present period as a Librarian. When going through the Ramanujan archives, I found reference to a notebook. (I came)... to England in search of that notebook.”

Whereupon Hardy went in and came out with the frayed notebook in his hands.

Ranganathan: “Excuse me.  If I had known that it is with you I would not have asked you about this. It is best kept by yourself”.

Hardy: “No. It is not right. Ramanujan belongs to your country. The proper place for this is your own University Library.”

Hardy had declined to edit the notebook for publication since he had considered it “too difficult a task”.  “It will take the whole of my life time”, he had said.  Ranganathan restored this notebook to the University Library where it is now preserved.

Meeting of minds
Hardy was the product of the best education in England could offer. Ramanujan had struggled all his life to educate himself.  In his brilliant book ‘An Apology of A Mathematician’, Hardy says that if he had been better educated, he would have been less of a Ramanujan. “I still say to myself when I am depressed, and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people, ‘Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms’.  It is to them that I owe an unusually late maturity.”

One can quite understand that Hardy had to guide Ramanujan who was innocent of the ways of English dons. But Hardy had always known that he was in the presence of genius even while trying to teach Shakespeare the laws of English grammar. There was a lot in common between them. Both were retiring, shy and chary of ceremony and crowds. In fact their simplicity is such that it is difficult to disbelieve the narration of a meeting between them...

Ramanujan was very ill in 1919. He lay wasting away with an attack of tuberculosis, which was to later prove fatal, at a hospital at Putney. Hardy had travelled to visit him by a taxi. Hardy entered the room and said,  “I came in the taxicab 1729. It is rather a dull number.  I hope it is not an unfavourable omen!”

Ramanujan: “No Hardy!...It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.” Every integer was a personal friend of Ramanujan.

This is how Hardy recorded the exchange.  It epitomises their relationship, as kindred souls, never needing greetings or farewells.