The vanishing Ramanujan

I first met Javed on a rainy evening in March 1991. I was waiting for my friend Salim near Ashfaq Mia’s tea stall, hoping he wouldn’t ask for the 200 bucks I borrowed a month back. Sipping my ginger tea under the shed, I saw a lanky boy walk towards me. His shirt had visible dirt spots and one of its buttons was torn. The boy was probably in his early 30s but looked somewhere near 40 with bald patches and grey hair already visible.
“Are you Javed bhai?” asked the boy. “Salim bhai is on his way. He told me to come and accompany you while he arrives.”
He looked exhausted but also looked like someone who was used to being exhausted. It wasn’t an exhaustion born out of some recent stress, but rather one that had grown over months, years; the boy looked like he was moulded by it. ‘The most depleted man in the world’—he’d call himself jokingly later on.
When I offered him a cup of tea, he said that he didn’t have any cash on him. “It’s on me, relax,” I said as I told him to sit beside me.
He hesitated for a while, even after sitting beside me, and finally mustered up all his courage and told me, “Bhai, I don’t want the tea. Can you just give me the two bucks instead?”
I tried to keep my intrigue to myself and laughed, “Have the tea. I can give you the two bucks as well.”
The boy blushed and nodded while looking at the dirt under his sandals. I could sense the discomfort in him and I wasn’t kind enough to let it go.
“What now?” I smirked, “Would you rather have four bucks and not have the tea then? And the chain would go on and on?”
The boy nodded quietly, biting his lips. Much to his dismay, I spent the next 15 minutes poking him even further before Salim arrived. Realising that I wouldn’t get many answers from the boy, I asked Javed about him after he left. 
His name was Jamal. In his mid-30s now, he came to Dhaka some eight years ago, looking for a job after graduating from a local college. A second division in his intermediate exam and a third division in his Bachelor’s, he wasn’t the brightest of students, but he was immensely desperate. He’d applied for everything—junior officers, clerical jobs, typists, peons.
Some people are born this way. They don’t have any strings to pull, bribes to offer, or merit to compensate for the lack of the others. Jamal was God’s handcrafted failure, designed meticulously to suffer. He was gifted only one weapon to fight with, and a rather rusty one at that—his patience and the gift of staying quiet. 
He stayed quiet when his unemployment cost him the love of his life, Ruqaiyah. He stayed quiet when his landlord at Aga Sadek threw his belongings on the road in front of the entire neighbourhood and kicked him out. In and out of a few tuitions here and there, he was too broke to be staying somewhere decent and decided to move into a slum. When his father died and he was too broke to be able to afford the bus fare, he made the journey to Cumilla on foot. When he reached his village two days later, his father was already six feet under.
But when Salim told me about the real reason behind why he wanted me to meet Jamal, it blew me away.
Jamal had a secret talent, one that only very few people knew about. Despite being a below-average student, Jamal had developed a habit of making calculations really fast in his head. I had read about human calculators in the papers once but I couldn’t believe that I’d be able to find one in Bangladesh.
But Jamal’s powers didn’t originate from his genetics or some childhood love for numbers. His powers originated from his impoverished conditions. With less than a 100 taka each month, rent to pay, mouths to feed, and an unmarried sister back home, Jamal had to think a thousand times before spending a single paisa on himself. Any coin left on the road, any penny saved from a cup of tea or an unpaid bus fare—Jamal would save it. For months after months, and years after years, Jamal had to calculate every penny he saved, every penny he sent back home, and every penny he spent on himself. And soon, he could make calculations in his head faster than a calculator.
“I just turn the numbers into taka and the calculations become easy,” Jamal had told me. “When I walk by the street and look at vendors selling things on the footpath, I can see the prices floating on the products. I see numbers all around me now. Prices hovering in the air and how much I would have left by the end of the month if I bought them. I don’t do the math willingly. This machine just keeps churning out numbers that float around in my head.”
I was a mere insurance agent back then, making ends meet myself, and I had been looking for an idea to make it big. That’s when Jamal came into my life with his superpower. I realised that people would be as amazed as myself with Jamal’s power and they’d be willing to buy tickets to watch the magician at work. I decided to launch him as Ramanujan Jr.
Owing to his shyness, he was heavily reluctant at first but he needed the money way more than I did and an advance payment did the trick. He had only one condition: “Javed bhai, under no condition should anyone be able to know how I got these powers. No one can know about my financial condition.”
Jamal made it into the papers right after the first show. Soon, he was doing shows at the Shilpakala Academy, with big circuses, and alongside magicians like Jewel Aich. I was also able to book shows for him in Kolkata, Assam, and Shillong. A year later, he was finally able to pay back all the debts back home and get his sister married.
But soon, people were done with Ramanujan Jr. Sure, we had made a fair share of money together but he never popped off as a big celebrity. He wasn’t getting shows anymore and a few years later, I could see his name slowly drift out of relevance.
I wasn’t ready to give up on making money already. I had tried launching a few more talents here and there and even tried starting my own circus, but I had overestimated my managerial skills. That’s when I decided to play the final card up my sleeve.
I called a journalist friend of mine and paid him to write a story on the origins of Ramanujan Jr. If people got to know about Jamal’s story and the heartbreaking origins of his power, they’d be bound to feel sympathy for him. Jamal wouldn’t just be Ramanujan Jr. anymore. He’d be the slum-dog who made it to the stage out of poverty. Rich men would pay to see him again, to feel pity on him, to hear him talk about his struggling days.
The night after the story got published, Jamal stormed to my home at around 11 PM, drenched in the rain. That was the first and only time Jamal raised his voice against me, breaking into tears as he did. “Javed bhai, this was the only thing I ever asked from you. You took two-thirds of the money from the shows, I didn’t utter a single word. I have been as grateful as a dog, a filthy stray dog, this entire time and this is how you repay me!”
I tried to calm him down, telling him that it was a misunderstanding and that I would fix everything the next morning, with no intention of doing so whatsoever. The story started doing its trick and I had already booked two shows that very afternoon.
But Jamal was beyond consolation. He kept wailing like a baby, lying on the floor, and banging the carpet. It was the only time Jamal wasn’t quiet. I told him to go home, get a good night’s sleep, and meet me in the morning.
That was the last I saw of Jamal. He packed up that very night and left home for good. He didn’t really move out of his mess in Dhaka, shift anywhere else, or return to Cumilla. His mother and sister didn’t hear from him ever again, and neither did I. We filed a missing report and circulated posters all over. The news of Ramanujan Jr. missing made it to the papers and television, but it was of no use.
Betrayed and anguished, Jamal simply disappeared from the face of the earth.
Hasib Ur Rashid Ifti is a writer and a final year undergraduate student.