It has been seen as the unlikeliest friendship. In 1913, when Srinivasa Ramanujan, then a 25-year-old working as a clerk in the Madras Port Trust Office, sent pages of mathematical proofs to the greatest living mathematician of the time, G.H. Hardy, at Cambridge University, he set up a story of genius, kinship and tragedy that has continued to fascinate not just mathematicians. This week the story of that collaboration will find retelling as a novel and as a theatre adaptation.

David Leavitt, an American novelist, publishes The Indian Clerk on September 4. In London, an adaptation of the Hardy-Ramanujan relationship goes on stage on September 5, presented by the theatre group Complicite. And, previewing the play, Indian-British writer Nikita Lalwani wrote about how the hold of the Ramanujan story on her imagination influenced her recent novel, Gifted, which has been longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize.

“It is a spectacularly great story,” says Meghnad Desai, professor emeritus at the London School of Economics and member of the British House of Lords. “It is the story of two very shy, socially crippled men who were able to communicate in the one universal language the world has known, mathematics. In mathematics, the criteria of proof cannot be avoided. It transcends all cultures.”

Desai himself has researched a script for a film adaptation of Ramanujan’s life. It was put on hold when filmmaker Dev Benegal announced his own project on Ramanujan in collaboration with Stephen Fry. Word is that Benegal’s project too may be on hold, but Desai says he plans to resume work on his script once he finishes with a film on the life of Noor Inayat Khan, the “spy princess”.

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