For Ramanujan’s first three years, he scarcely spoke. Perhaps, it is tempting to think, because he simply didn’t choose to; he was an enormously self-willed child. It was common in those days for a young wife to shuttle back and forth between her husband’s house and that of her parents, and Komalatammal, worried by her son’s muteness, took Ramanujan to see her father, then living in Kanchipuram, near Madras.
