I hope the filmmakers will include among their scenes my favorite stories of Ramanujan's genius. Attending his first Cambridge lecture and asked by a professor whether he wanted to add anything, Ramanujan went to the blackboard and wrote results the professor had not yet proved — and which he could not have known before. In one episode, Hardy visited his ailing protégé in a nursing home and commented that the license number of the cab he had come in, 1729, was “rather a dull number.” Ramanujan reacted instantly: “No, Hardy. It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”
Ramanujan was convinced, from reading the lines on his palm, that he would die before he was thirty-five. Auto-suggestion in such a religious man could well have had a powerful effect; Ramanujan always saw mathematics as a divine gift, bestowed upon him by his family deity, the goddess Namagiri, in his dreams. Loneliness, neglect, and poor eating habits in an unfamiliar climate also took their toll. Tuberculosis was a common affliction among Indian students in England, and Ramanujan, obsessed by his work, unable to find vegetarian food in an England of wartime shortages, simply wasted away. The enormity of this preventable loss is unbearably moving.
Ramanujan had, in Hardy's words, “a profound and invincible originality,” but he was still heir to an ancient Indian mathematical tradition that has given the world its misnamed “Arabic” numerals, that invented the zero in the second century B.C., and that flowered in the theorems of Aryabhatta in the fifth century A.D., Brahmagupta in the seventh, and Bhaskara in the twelfth. Yet he would never have approached the eminence he did were it not for his discovery by (or perhaps one should say of) Hardy. Poverty and colonialism can well be blamed, but today's India must do better at identifying and nurturing new Ramanujans.
It took an Englishman, J. B. S. Haldane, to observe: “If Ramanujan's work had been recognized in India as early as it was in England, he might never have emigrated”—and might have lived to achieve even more. It is a shame that the handful of Indian-born Nobel Prize — winning scientists all triumphed abroad rather than in the land of their birth. Perhaps the film will help change that.
33. The Other Saint Teresa
SHE DIED SEVENTY YEARS BEFORE MOTHER TERESA, in the unre-markable Kerala village of Puthenchira, far from the flashbulbs of a celebrity-seeking press. Another Servant of God, another woman who found her calling in ministering to the sick and dying, another unforgettable heroine to the forgotten. But there was no state funeral for her, no Nobel Peace Prize, not even a profile in the big-city papers. Mother Mariam Thresia Chiramel Mankidiyan died, aged fifty, of a banal wound that would not heal because of her untreated diabetes.
Seventy-four years later, she was beatified in St. Peter's Square by Pope John Paul II, the penultimate step toward sainthood. I sat shivering under a gray Roman sky in the Vatican, among tens of thousands thronging the square for the outdoor ceremony. The atmosphere was a cross between a baptism and an Oscar Awards presentation. Five venerable servants of the Church were to be beatified, and as their names were called out raucous cheers rose from their supporters in the crowd, many of whom were draped in scarves bearing the colors of their would-be saint. There was a particularly noisy Latin American contingent, and a surprisingly voluble Swedish group bearing the blue and yellow of their national flag (fortified rather unfairly, I thought, by a large number of Indian nuns wearing Swedish colors). When Mariam Thresia's name was announced, a ragged little round of applause emerged from the handful of desis sporting the orange-and-yellow scarves of her “party.” Then the pope shuffled in, and the pomp and magnificence of the Vatican took over, as the organ music swelled and sonorous Latin chants melded with the raised voices of the congregation singing the praises of their Lord. And then the curtains parted to unveil five immense tapestries hanging from the Vatican balconies, the last of a stern Mariam Thresia in her nun's robes, clutching a crucifix and regarding the worshipers with an ascetic eye.
How did this woman transcend the obscurity of her geography and genealogy to receive beatification at the hands of the pope in the Jubilee Year 2000, only the fourth Indian ever to have been beatified? The story of Mariam Thresia is a remarkable one. Born in 1876 into a family in straitened circumstances — the result of a grandfather having had to sell off all his property to get seven daughters married — Mariam Thresia was one of three daughters. Her father and a brother reacted to adversity by turning to drink; Mariam Thresia turned instead to faith. Moved at an early age by intense visions of the Virgin Mary, she took to prayer and night vigils, scourging herself in penitence, donning a barbed wire belt to mortify her own flesh, forsaking meat and “mixing bitter stuff in my curry” (as she later confessed in a brief spiritual autobiography). She took to standing in a crucified position, and blood appeared spontaneously on her hands and feet — the stigmata of Christian lore. Like Saint Teresa of Avila centuries earlier, she suffered seizures during which she levitated: neighbors would come to her family home on Fridays to see her suspended high against the wall in a crucified pose. The Catholic Church was initially suspicious; the local bishop wondered if she was a “plaything of the devil,” and in her late twenties she was repeatedly exorcized to rid her of demons. But nothing shook her faith, and soon enough her exorcist, the parish priest of Puthenchira, became her spiritual mentor and ally. Before she turned forty she was allowed to found her own order — the Congregation of the Holy Family — with three companions. By the time she died in 1926 the three had grown to fifty-five; today there are 1,584 sisters in the order, serving not only in Kerala but in north India, Germany, Italy, and Ghana.
Mariam Thresia was driven not only by her intense visions of the other world but by an equally strong sense of responsibility for the present one. She made it a point to seek out the sick, the deformed, the dying, and tend to them. She bravely nursed victims of smallpox and leprosy at a time when they were shunned even by their own families, caring for people whose illnesses were hideously disfiguring and dangerously contagious. In a caste-ridden society she insisted on going to the homes of the lowest of the low, the poorest of the poor, and sharing her food with them. When these outcasts died, she buried them and took charge of the care of their orphaned children. Her devotion to good works won her a devoted following: it was said she emanated an aura of light and a sweet odor, and that her touch could heal. But she could not heal herself of a wound caused by a falling object. She died just as her tireless work was achieving visible results in the growth of her congregation.
The path to sainthood in the Catholic Church has to be paved with miracles, and many have been attributed to Mariam Thresia. One in particular was thoroughly investigated by the Church and resulted in her beatification. Mathew Pallissery, born with two clubfeet into a family too poor to afford surgery, crawled and hobbled on the sides of his deformed feet till his teens, when his family embarked on forty-one days of prayer and fasting dedicated to Mariam Thresia. On the thirty-third day, he dreamt that Mariam Thresia came to him and rubbed his right foot. He woke and found it had straightened — he could walk on it. A year later, the family prayed and fasted again; this time, on the thirty-ninth day, it was his mother who dreamt of Mariam Thresia, and when she went to her sleeping son she found his left foot had straightened, too. There are “before and after” photographs, x-rays, and the expertise of orthopedic specialists to confirm that the cure could not be explained medically and was, in fact, more complete than surgery could have achieved. Today Mathew is forty-four, employed, married, and the father of two. He was in Rome to witness firsthand the beatification of Mariam Thresia.