Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Swapan Adhikari had never felt such a sustained sense of disbelief. Question after question rose and fell in him like the peals of giant bells — Was this all intuitive? How could it be ? Was someone, a relative, a maths professor, guiding him? If so, why the idiosyncratic language? The symbols were all wrong, the competence in mathematical notation and the sequentiality of steps amateurish, as if a child were trying to build the engine of his car with the pieces of his Meccano set. Where did he live? Where was he before he came to St Lawrence? Could it have been a preternaturally gifted teacher at that school? What else had he been feeling his way towards? How could someone like this, with such an innate understanding and feel for the music of abstraction, be untrained? Yet untrained he seemed to be. Where had he got hold of books on algebra? This boy was thirteen years old. . the fact was like repeated socks to his jaw. This was not possible. There was something under his nose that he was failing to notice, that would clear up the mystery, and he would be left feeling a bit foolish at his incomprehension.

But with every nugget of meaning that Swapan Adhikari scooped out from the mess, one thing only stood out with the incontrovertibility of a basic axiom — he almost did not dare think it — this boy was a. . genius. The slightest touch of hysteria brushed against him. Then it seemed to intensify — he flipped again through the pages and found his eyes welling up. Something from the magic world of childhood reading reappeared: the story of Byangoma and Byangomi, the bird-couple who knew the fates of the princes and men who fell asleep under the tree in which they lived, the birds who talked about the future of those mortals, alerting them to what was to come. It seemed to him that those magical creatures had guided the boy through these matters that should have been beyond him.

He could not tell why he found it so deeply affecting that Swarnendu had tried to go back to first principles, at almost every step of the way, in order to prove the theorem. It was so pure, so innocent. It was like watching a child, except this child was touched by a kind of divine fire, a child in whose presence you felt like bowing your head.

The room was densely blue with smoke: he had made his way through two packets of Charminar.

That was when he decided to drop in on his old, now nearly demented, professor, Ashish Roy, the man who had come close to solving some of the open problems in number theory, including the n 2+ 1 conjecture, only to have a series of nervous breakdowns take it all away from him. The rumour within mathematician circles in Calcutta was that he had had a glimpse into the mind of god, into god’s book of numbers, and had been driven insane as a result.

Then came the second attack of incredulity. Ashish Roy not only knew Swarnendu — Sona, he called him — but they were near-neighbours. At the time Swapan Adhikari had briefly wondered about the statistical probability of the joining of three random dots — Ashish Roy, Swarnendu Ghosh and himself — distributed amidst a dense scatter, seven million to be exact, but non-mathematicians never believed you if you said there were more coincidences in life than in books, concurrences at which they did not bring illogical charges of ‘Oh, that’s unbelievable!’ that they reserved for the fictional variety. Why would there be saws such as ‘The world is such a small place’ and ‘What goes around must come around’ if coincidence did not form a regularly occurring part of life?

Ashish-da had leafed through Swarnendu’s workbook. The silence in the room had been punctuated by the wonderfully aleatory music of a brief giggle; an ‘eeeesh-tsk-tsk-tsk’ of regret, the kind that resulted from watching your favourite candidate in a race falling slightly behind; a long rumble of laughter; a deep ‘ooooh’; several ‘a-ha-ha’s of admiration — all widely spaced from each other. Behind the random soundtrack had been his ever-present anxiety that Ashish-da’s wife, who blamed mathematics for the dark pit into which their lives had fallen, could have entered the room at any minute and broken up their mostly silent meeting. She kept her husband under continual surveillance, forbidding any of his mathematician friends, ex-colleagues or students from visiting.

‘Have you seen, have you seen, a list of arithmetic progressions, he’s on the brink of Dirichlet’s theorem.’

Long silence.

‘I saw the proof first in ’37, Harding-saheb drew my attention to it. Oh, Harding-saheb, what a nice man he was. A giant moustache. You could hardly make out the words behind it. He missed out key steps in a proof, assuming that you’d know it, or that it was too obvious to be spelled out.’

Another pause, this time dotted with odd snuffling and guttural noises.

‘Jaaaah, it slipped my hands, it slipped.’

A huge sigh followed by another protracted lull.

‘I thought you and that other young man, the one who left, what was his name, I thought you would go too, but. . yes, you two could see if the first and second Hardy-Littlewood conjectures could. . could. . nah, the bell rang.’

Then the closest Ashish Roy came to the nub, a one-point touch like that of a tangent to a curve, then off and away again: ‘Maybe we could all pass the baton on to this boy. Invest him with all our hopes. But we need to help him. Ufff, if he arrives at Dirichlet by pure intuition’ — here he rubbed his hands the way a miser would, contemplating his hoard of gold — ‘you could talk to the student who’s abroad, what’s his name? I can’t remember anything nowadays, my brain is a sieve, sieve ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, a sieve for primes like that Greek had, a sieve ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, that was a good one, no? What do you say, eh? But some books may tide him over the short term. . Hardy & Wright, maybe. .’

Swapan Adhikari had got what he had wanted. Something had been clarified for him.

Finally, after weeks of mental preparation, Swapan Adhikari sits down to write to his friend Ayan Basu, now an associate professor of mathematics — ‘the one who left’, the one he was supposed to join, until fate dealt him a crippling card. .

Dear Ayan , he begins:

I hope this finds you in good health and spirits. I have no excuse for the large gap that has fallen between this and your last letter to me except to cite the usual mess that is life. But I’m writing to you with a request you may well find a bit unusual. A little bit of the back-story, first. You may find it unbelievable too, as I did, but please be patient. There is a boy in my school, a Swarnendu Ghosh, thirteen going on fourteen, in Class Seven.

He stops there. How can he take it forward, short of sending Ayan the boy’s exercise book for him to experience it first hand? What else can he add about Swarnendu? The gentle questioning of the boy in the staffroom and outside the school yielded up very little. He had the strange capacity of returning pure silence to direct questions in a way that made the interrogator feel intrusive and, ultimately, embarrassed. It was Swapan Adhikari who had felt flustered and discomfited, as if the ordinary power dynamics between teacher and pupil had been reversed. About the mathematics, the boy had not been able to say anything at all except to confirm that it was his own work, done unaided in his private leisure time.

‘I. . I think. . and then. . then the numbers take me from. . from one step to another,’ he had said haltingly, struggling to put words to experience.

Other information too was minimal; he had refused to talk about his parents or any other members of his family, but had told Swapan Adhikari which school he had attended before he came to St Lawrence. Now, writing about him to Ayan, he realises that the boy is an absence, a geometric gap bounded by the facets of the different elements of analytic number theory that he had tried to think about.