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Genius In A Strange Land

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By KAREN HAYMON LONG, The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 11, 2007

"The Indian Clerk," by David Leavitt (Bloomsbury, $24.95)

Not since "The Kite Runner" has a book so entranced me.

I read "The Indian Clerk" in long stretches, becoming so engrossed in the story that when I broke away for a bike ride, it was as if I had catapulted forward 93 years into another world.

My head was in Cambridge, England, during World War I with world-renowned mathematicians.

David Leavitt, a University of Florida English professor (pictured), has spun a tale so real, other readers will surely feel as I did.

His is a novel partially based on the truth about a Cambridge math don who takes under his wing a mathematical genius from India named Srinivasa Ramanujan.

When he wrote to G.H. Hardy at Trinity College, Cambridge, Ramanujan was a low-paid clerk who spent most of his time working out mathematical formulas that even Hardy, a pre-eminent mathematician, hadn't imagined.

Convinced he is a genius, Hardy and his colleague and friend Jack Littlewood arrange for Ramanujan to come to Cambridge to study with them.

It's an ill fit from the start.

Hardy and Ramanujan could not be more different, except for their passion for math. Hardy is an atheist, against war and left leaning. He's a focused worker. Ramanujan, a strict Hindu, claims that a Hindu goddess puts complicated math formulas on the tip of his tongue while he is sleeping. He is restless, easily distracted and frustrates Hardy with his lack of focus.

The book is as much or more about Hardy as it is about Ramanujan. It may have been titled "The Math Don and the Indian Clerk."

Hardy, unbeknown to his friends and colleagues, from time to time sees the spirit of his dead lover, who killed himself when Hardy broke up with him. The lover floats in now and then to offer advice, to admonish him and to show jealousy toward Hardy's new love interests.

Everything changes when the war starts. Students and dons head to the front. Food is rationed. Air raids shatter the peace of London.

Through it all, Hardy tries to focus Ramanujan, tapping into his genius. But the Indian eludes him. He does work on his own, though, in the middle of the night, mostly.

Leavitt weaves complicated math formulas and mathematical patterns into the novel, which may sound like difficult reading. But the way he presents it, even non-mathematicians will find Hardy's and Ramanujan's work fascinating.

Almost from the beginning, Ramanujan is depressed. His teenage wife back in India does not write to him. He hates British food and has trouble getting curry, tamarind and other ingredients he needs to cook his own meals.

He is a part of Cambridge, but very much an outsider.

Then he gets deathly ill, perhaps from lead poisoning from his cooking pots, yet we never really know. Doctors guess he has tuberculosis, although he never gets a cough.

Eventually, he begins working again on composite numbers. He's honored with a Trinity fellowship, though several racist dons fight his appointment.

In the end, Hardy wonders whether he should have brought Ramanujan to such a foreign land. He begins to think of his Indian friend as a casualty of Cambridge - and of his own prodding - just as so many young Cambridge students are casualties of the war.

After the war, Ramanujan returns to India, for a visit, he says. But shortly afterward, at age 33, he dies.

"I am told that upon his return, India greeted him as a hero, and that India wept at the news of his demise," Hardy says. "Quite an ending to a story that began so modestly, and would in all likelihood still be going on, modestly, had I not intervened."

In Leavitt's hands, Ramanujan's story does go on - anything but modestly.

Karen Haymon Long is the Tribune's book editor.

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