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| Illustration: R Rajesh |
When he was twenty-one, he showed up at the house of a teacher, got drawn into conversation, and soon was expatiating on the ties he saw between God, zero, and infinity—keeping everyone spellbound till two in the morning. It was that way often for Ramanujan. Losing himself in philosophical and mystical monologues, he’d make bizarre, fanciful leaps of the imagination that his friends did not understand but found fascinating anyway. So absorbed would they become that later all they could recall was the penetrating set of his eyes.
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It had been Namagiri to whom Ramanujan’s mother and father, childless for some years after they married, had prayed for a child. Ramanujan’s maternal grandmother, Rangammal, was a devotee of Namagiri and was said to enter a trance to speak to her. One time, a vision of Namagiri warned her of a bizarre murder plot involving teachers at the local school. Another time, many years earlier, before Ramanujan’s birth, Namagiri revealed to her that the goddess would one day speak through her daughter’s son. Ramanujan grew up hearing this story. And he, too, would utter Namagiri’s name all his life, invoke her blessings, seek her counsel. It was goddess Namagiri, he would tell friends, to whom he owed his mathematical gifts. Namagiri would write the equations on his tongue. Namagiri would bestow mathematical insights in his dreams.
So he told his friends. Did he believe it?
His grandmother did, and so did his mother.
