Dance of Numbers in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy

Numbers play a vital role in human life. This world revolves around numbers and their operations. For Leopold Kronecker, a great mathematician of the 19th century, "God created numbers, and all the rest is the work of man."

Proper use of numbers and their interesting and intriguing properties would make any work perfect. Paintings and sculptures are more attractive if they follow certain measurements and proportions. Literature is not an exception. There are many writers who use Mathematical concepts directly or indirectly in their works.  A classical work that has plenty of un-ignorable Mathematics is Vikram Seth’s epic novel, A Suitable Boy. It is one of the longest single volume novels in English. Seth is a trained economist from Stanford. As a young man, Seth's mind was most taken with the perfect abstractions of mathematics and he still loves to lose himself in numbers in different ways.  He said in an interview in 2005, “I love speculating about solutions to problems in mathematics. I have no interest whatever in sudoku. But I do look at chess and bridge problems in newspapers. I find that relaxing.” He says, “to get one true mathematical insight a fortnight is enough by way of work; and rest of the month spend leisurely.”

A Suitable Boy was published in 1993. 1993 is a prime year. There are some other significant aspects for 1993. It was in 1993, that Chis K Caldwell announced what was then both the largest known factorial prime (3610! - 1) and the largest known primorial prime (24029# + 1). In June 1993, Andrew Wiles first announced that he had proven the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture for enough special classes of curves that to complete the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

Seth makes crafty use of number theory in his A Suitable Boy both in terms of its structure and content.

Numbers in the Structure of the Novel

The novel is structured beautifully with the stylish use of numbers. Every part of it begins with an odd number, mostly a prime or a biprime (semiprime).

Chapter	Page	Property
1	3	Prime
2	71	Prime
3	129	Biprime: 3x43
4	189	Odd Number: 33 x 7
5	227	Prime
6	289	Biprime: 17 x 17
7	367	Prime
8	497	Biprime: 7 x 71
9	545	Biprime: 5 x 109
10	613	Prime
11	683	Prime
12	759	Product of first Odd primes of unit digit, 10’s and 20’s:  3x11x23
13	837	Odd Number: 33 x 31
14	951	Biprime: 3x317
15	1027	Biprime: 13x79
16	1087	Prime
17	1155	Product of first four odd primes: 3x5x7x11
18	1247	Biprime: 29x43
19	1321	Prime

• The novel has 1349 pages. 1349 is a biprime. It is 19 x 71
• It has 19 parts. 19 is a prime number.
• First Chapter has 19 sections
• Second Chapter begins at page number 71.

Number Theory in the Content of the Novel

The story revolves around Lata, a 19 year old girl and three proposals she gets for marriage. Both these numbers are odd numbers.

Some of the characters are directly connected to Mathematics.

• Dr Durrani, an accomplished mathematician with an FRS of the Brahmpur University, is the father of the hero, Kabir.
• Bhaskar, a nine year old boy, a Mathematics whizkid is the nephew of the brother-in-law of the heroine, Lata. Bhaskara is one of the most famous ancient Mathematicians (194) of India.
• Dr Sunil Patwardhan is a mathematician at Brahmpur University

Opening Plot

In Part One, we see the plot of Kabir meeting Lata, the two leading characters in the novel. They meet each other for the first time at the Imperial Book Depot in the campus of Brahmpur University (43-46). Around this plot, Vikram Seth gives some very important observations. For him, every Mathematics book is a collection of incomprehensible words and symbols. It gives a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond one. It is the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world. It suits the serious mood of a person.

Lata, a literature student the University, who is mostly interested in love poetry, casually picks up a the book What is Mathematics? by Courant and Robbins and reads a paragraph dealing with the geometrical meaning of De Moivere’s formula,  zⁿ, r, z’. She does not understand anything. But she could grasp the weight, comfort and inevitability of the mathematical concept.

For Seth, the usual expressions like “We also recall” and “with these preliminaries” in any Proof are words of assurance and reassurance, that things were what they were even in this uncertain world.

Lata replaces the book back and turns to the poetry section. When she starts glancing through the poetry collections, Kabir, who was noticing her, says, “It’s unusual for someone to be interested in both poetry and Mathematics.”

There is rich Number Theory in the novel beyond the level of common reader.

Bhaskar’s Interest in Numbers

Bhaskar,  a whiz kid of 9, used to assist his father in the shoe shop with fast calculations. He was fascinated working out discount rates, postal rates for distant orders, and the intriguing geometrical and arithmetical relationships of the sacked shoeboxes. He speaks to his uncle Maan about a particular geometrical construction—draw a triangle and draw squares on the sides of it in a particular way and then add up these two squares, you get a (particular) square everytime.

Once when his uncle Maan visits him, he asks him to calculate 256 times 512. For Bhaskar, it was easy and replied 131072. Seth here uses the numbers carefully. He chooses 2⁸ times 2⁹  which is 2¹⁷.

To tease him he asks 400 times 400. The kid becomes very unhappy.

But then he asks a difficult sum: 789 times 987.

He answers quickly. “It’s 778743.”

But 789=3x263 and 987=3x7x47 a biprime and triprime. (Page 101)

Bhaskar was curious to know about names of the powers of 10. His doubts are about the nameless powers of ten.

10¹=ten

10²=hundred

10³=thousand

10⁴=ten thousand (there is no special word for it)

10⁵=lakh

10⁶=million

10⁷=crore

10⁸=there is no single word

10⁹=billion

10¹⁰=no word –It’s very important since it’s 10¹⁰.

He asks his father’s business friend, Haresh Khanna and he refers to some Chinese words for ten thousand and ten million (191-192).

When Haresh meets Dr Durrani ask the kid’s doubt, he speaks about the accounts of Al-Biruni, the most original polymath the Islamic world had ever known, regarding the names of powers of 10 (213).

Haresh, after a long search, writes to Bhaskar different names of the powers of 10 (601).

10⁴=wan (Chinese)

10⁸=ee (Chinese)

He suggests Bhaskar to find a name for 10¹⁰.

Seth writes about negative numbers beautifully. Maan once asks Bhaskar to find 17 minus 6. He gets 11.

He then asks him to subtract 6 from it. He gets 5. He asks him to subtract 6 once again. The kid gets annoyed. But when he learns about negative numbers, he is much fascinated by that. He insists on taking bigger things away from smaller things the whole day long (193).

Bhaskar and his mother Veena were separated in a stampede. The description is as follows: “But she felt the small hand slip, palm first, and then digit by digit, out of her own.” (733)

As a volunteer rescue worker Kabir finds Bhaskar. For Kabir, Bhaskar was a mini-Gauss. When he asks his father, Dr Durrani, to find the whereabouts of the boy, he says he was discussing Fermat’s Last Theorem and a variant of Pergolesi Lemma and knows nothing other than that (745).

Dr Durrani

Dr. Durrani was a professor of Brahmpur University. Seth describes him with a square face and was with a white moustache which has balance and symmetry. Haresh Khanna takes Bhaskar to Dr Durrani. He asks Bhaskar what 2 plus 2 is. Bhaskar’s answer is Four. He asks him whether it was right. Dr Durrani answers it with another question. He asks the sum of the angles of a triangle. The boy answers 180.Then, Dr Durrani takes a musammi and tells him that though on plane it is true, on it the sum is not 180. He speaks about spherical triangle and the same is the case with 2+2=4 (222).

He discusses with Sunil Patwardhan, his colleague on super-operations and several quite surprising series coming out of it. A super-operation is any operation to get a number in the series with the following algorithm:  n+1 has to act in relation to n as n acts on n-1 (211-212).

Hence we get the following series:

1, 3, 6, 10, 15, … a trivial series based on the primary combinative operation(addition).

1, 2, 6, 24, 120, … secondary combinative operation (multiplication)

1, 2, 9, 262144, 5²⁶²¹⁴⁴, …  tertiary combinative operation (exponentiation)

1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, … (subtraction)

He then comes with a series 1, 4, 216, 72576,  …

According to Dr Durrani, cricket is curiously fertile for Mathematics. He is delighted by the hexadic, octal, decimal and duodecimal systems and attempts to work out their various advantages.  He speaks about six—the perfect number has almost fugitive existence in Mathematics but in cricket it is the presiding deity because of six balls, six runs to a lofted boundary and six stumps. Six is embodied in one of the most beautiful shapes in all nature such as benzene ring with its single and double carbon bonds. It is symmetrical, asymmetrical, and asymmetrically symmetrical, like the sub-super operations of the Pergolesi Lemma (1075-1076).

Kabir lofts a six of the last ball of a match. Seth describes it as follows: “the ball sailed in a serene parabola towards victory (1079).

According to Kabir, Dr Durrani is beyond the bounds of religion and culture, space and time. He hardly thinks of anything except his parameters and perimeters. Seth finds an analogy for such persons by stating that an equation is the same it is written in red or green ink( 171)

My Conjecture

There are two different accounts of the total number of words in the novel. According to Wikipedia the novel has 591552 words.Some reviewers record that it has 591554 words.Anyway both cannot be right. But, both can be wrong.My conjecture is that it has 591553 words. Because 591553 is a prime number! Let us count.