Living and Dying in suburban Bombay

Manil Suri, a professor of Mathematics in the U.S., has written a remarkable novel encapsulating a vision of India that is compelling and contemporary. The Death of Vishnu is about living and dying in suburban Bombay. It is an urbane demolition of the hypocrisies and affectations of middle class India and it is also a book that examines the sacred and the secular in a world of dissolving certainties. In a conversation with NIRMALA LAKSHMAN, the writer talks about the book, the ideas that inspire him and a mathematician's quest beyond rationality.

WRITING in The New York Times recently, literary critic Margo Jefferson ponders on how before we are allowed to be alone with a book, we have seen it "blanketed in press releases, reviews and dust-jacket testimonials that tell us what we must think" . This is also an era of carefully orchestrated critical manipulation, depending of course on who the writer is, where he or she lives and works and of course the monetary advances that are purported to have been made. The lay reader often has an uneasy sense of being put upon by a literary establishment that consists of not only writers and their agents but publishers and book-sellers as well aided of course by the pervasive and frequently tyrannical presence of the media. In the end, it takes away from the pleasure of discovering and enjoying a book for its own sake; the simple act of reading and affirming that fiction is still perhaps our best bet for understanding human nature, for redeeming our daily lives with a little bit of vision and magic that makes it all worthwhile.

Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu is one such book. It should be read for the unalloyed pleasure of delving into a world that is so very familiar to many of us - a world of everyday problems, of characters who are much like us and our neighbours and perhaps to see that amalgamated somewhere in the muddle and blunder of middle class living, life's larger tragedies and ironies are played out. While Vishnu, the odd jobs man, lies dying on the landing, neighbours quarrel, young lovers dream of elopement, and a crisis of faith shatters the secular harmony of an apartment building This novel encapsulates a vision of India that is compelling, contemporary and yet is rooted in the realities of tradition and a way of life that is intensely timeless. It works at many levels. While it is engaged with the particular and even the mundane, it is a story that reflects human frailties, human longings and also in the end of not finding any satisfactory answers.

Manil Suri teaches Mathematics at the University of Maryland. The training in Mathematics, he feels, has stood him in good stead when he wrote this novel. It is basically about various threads that are networked into a connection, about finding the best paths and having it all fall into place. He is grateful that the formula worked and in that sense of satisfaction, there is no trace of hubris. This is a first time author who is passionate about telling a story that reflects a world that is obviously very close to him. Although separated by geographical distance, Suri moves with ease into this world lovingly delineating characters and their journeys with wit and irony. There is some unevenness in parts of the novel but this is always rescued by a felicity of language and a swiftly moving story-line. In a wide ranging conversation in Washington D.C., that is excerpted here, Suri begins by explaining the inspiration behind this remarkable debut novel.

I started writing this in 1995. It was a year after the actual Vishnu died. I had gone to visit my parents in 1994 and he was, as usual, on the steps. He was very sick this time and died a few days later. Originally I thought that this would be a short story. I remembered that someone had left a cup of tea for him on the step and then I was making things up and it was basically about the people on the first floor, the Asranis and the Pathaks and the fighting about the ambulance and so on. I was going to end that in the last pages where he meets Krishna and that was going to be the end of the short story. But then it just didn't fit together. The first chapter just seemed to want a lot more; the characters demanded a novel, really.

Other authors have written about this, how the characters kind of seize you and write themselves, is this what happened to you?

Yes.They are more like unruly children. They are like brats who demand that their voices be heard and when you start paying attention to some of them, the others start demanding that you pay attention to them too ... so that's what keeps things in balance, keeps things interesting. People ask me if I wrote each strand separately, the Pathaks separately, Kavita separately, and so on. But I didn't. Whoever was asking for attention, their voice got heard and it worked itself out.

There was a real Vishnu though ...

When I was writing the first chapter I didn't really make the God connection with him, there are so many people in India with such names, and the book was just about this man dying and then I was at a writing course in Bethesda, and the teacher there who is a very good writer herself, Jane Bradley, said there's the God Vishnu and people will start making the connection perhaps. That's when I started thinking that it's so ironic that this man who was named after this very powerful God is basically at the bottom of the heap. And then I got the idea of him climbing the steps trying to aspire to the God Vishnu, that's how this came about.

It is moving that his mother sees this in him; it is a kind of liberating element in the mire of poverty around him ...

Well, basically, this man had died and I wanted to give some meaning to his death. At least make some patches of his life beautiful, that is why it was nice to have his mother as a figure who he really loved and who loved him. She is the only one in the whole book who really loves him ... The other thing is that I didn't want to make this a story about Vishnu, just about his life, and how he came to Bombay and so on and so forth, how he went into drink, etc. That has been done; I didn't feel like competing with someone like Rohinton Mistry, who writes these amazing backgrounds for his characters.

Who is the real hero of the story then? Vishnu or Mr. Jalal or is it the collective heroism of life in suburban Bombay that you are celebrating?

Well, really, that is thing I was saying, these characters start demanding attention. Mr. Jalal came much later, after the first two chapters and I had to think of someone to put in and he said I am going to be the one who is going to propel the whole thing. With his revelation and everything, he kind of demanded this ...

Who is your favourite character?

Mr. Jalal, I think. He is the one who is closest to me. He has this background that is very rational just like me being a mathematician, and then he is on this quest into things that are beyond his rationality. He is after something spiritual and he doesn't quite know what. What I found was that as I was researching the book I was reading a lot. I was reading mythology, the Bhagavad Gita and a lot of texts. I was beginning to think about spiritual things putting myself in Mr. Jalal's place and then there is this gap between where reason and proof end and where faith starts, so that is the chasm that Mr. Jalal has to jump over and he basically falls in the middle. While I was thinking about these things a lot of questions occurred to me and I was able to use him as a conduit and just put all these questions in his mind and have him dangle between all these.

Although this is not an obviously political novel, by engaging with the life of the metropolis and even by writing about the passions and ideas that abound among the middle-class in India, the story is in many ways inescapably political. Would you agree?

I like to think of the building as a metaphor for India. It has all these class differences, religious differences and the end is basically open because I feel I am more an observer, so I am really putting all these incidents in the building together which reflect what has happened in India. I don't feel that I am someone who is making political predictions, I stay away from that and that is why I end it where it does ...

In talking about Hinduism or Islam, you do not seem to be overly worried about sounding politically correct or incorrect ...

I would be afraid if I was criticising these religions which I am not. I think their positions are put forth ph pretty directly and pretty correctly and positively too. I was very careful about the mythological references and so on...

Mr. Jalal's quest for faith and Vishnu's journey to death are two strong threads that weave the novel together. Would it be right to assume that the novel is anchored in an exploration of faith and philosophy in contemporary India, and is it also a personal quest?

Well, if I could come back to the analogy with mathematics, all of mathematics is built on certain axioms, in the same way, religion also starts with something you believe in. Now I can take these beliefs without committing to whether I believe in them or not, and then talk about what comes afterwards. When I look at the Gita for instance, that was a very moving thing in my life, very profound. I came to writing this book more or less an agnostic, then I found in that, in this Gita, there are many secular things that are good things for living your life by. Simple things like doing things without worrying about their outcome, not letting your ego overtake you, not worrying about material things, just simple things like that. The whole book is actually permeated by that kind of spirit. There are little things like Radiowalla, for instance. He is a very nice person and then when he gets the radio he changes, becomes very possessive. Mr. Jalal is also really based on Akbar and his fall comes because he is very ego driven. Akbar was trying to bring all the religions of the land together and Vincent Smith, the historian, points to an incident when Akbar has a revelation and then started cutting his hair off and dancing around. And then he made this religion called Din Illahi, but it was a flop because he was egotistical and set himself up as someone in between the people and God, and said that you must worship me, and I will take your message to God. Mr. Jalal reflects the same kind of ego-driven search for religion that Akbar had. In Vishnu's case, it is the philosophy of reincarnation, as he climbs the stairs and he is looking at the lives that stretch in front of him as becoming more and more spiritual in successive life times.

So you are really setting out different kinds of belief patterns, different kinds of quests ...

Yes, I am not really propounding anything. If you look at Mrs. Jalal, for instance, she may well be the most "noble" figure in the book. She has a very steadfast faith in her religion and just sticks to that. There is a passage in the book about the ants climbing the building. Like every one else, they are all aspiring to something higher up but they all have their own paths.

The novel also seems to be about loss. The loss of Padmini, the loss of innocence for Mr. Jalal and even his wife perhaps. Then you have the death of Vinod Taneja's wife and, perhaps too, the loss of harmony in the apartment building. Would you agree?

I think there is a wistfulness that permeates through a lot of the people's lives. I think that happens in life in general. For some of the people on the lower floor like Mrs. Asrani who thinks of her husband who was just like a little kid, it seems to have all gone now and not led to anything new. When you go to Mr. Taneja, then the loss of his wife has pushed him in a direction that is taking him into a spiritual trip, one that he would not have gone on otherwise. So he is looking inwards ... After this incident occurs it is hard to imagine that this building would be as harmonious as before, and it can never really go back to that. There is a sense of loss in that...

One of the great strengths of this novel is the very effective characterisation of people who are, in some ways, intensely ordinary and yet in many ways unique and memorable. For instance, Short Ganga is so true to type but comes alive because of the way she is portrayed. Similarly, Mrs. Asrani, Mrs. Pathak and even the ladies who come to the kitty party - their affectations, their ideas and their attitudes vividly and convincingly reflect the lives and preoccupations of middle-class India. And as each one led you to defining themselves as you said earlier, did you find that their actions too could be dovetailed to their characters?

Exactly. One theory says that you let your characters take you by the hand and let them do what they want but, on the other hand, you have to constrain them. As a mathematician, I looked at this building as an abstract entity, and it has these floors that are going to represent differences in class and religion and that is where the metaphor of India comes in and then it has these stairs and this sense of ascent and that will be the spiritual ascension. So I had this outline and I had to fit in these characters in there but then I would let them wander a little and then push them back together and they did criss-cross and it became more apparent how this whole thing should work out ... Short Ganga, I wish I could have given her more of a role, she is such a fiery character. It fitted quite nicely because there is this idea that a scientific theory is one that can be disproved. So Short Ganga comes up with a scientific theory and she obviously disproves it but is unwilling to accept that. I was trying to contrast this with the whole idea of faith again where Mr. Jalal has this revelation and you can neither prove it nor disprove it.

Like many other Indian writers writing in English, you move with ease between different worlds and cultural contexts. You might have just as easily written about expatriate Indian life, the preoccupations of the upper middle classes of India and I am sure a diverse number of other subjects and settings, and yet you chose this particular context. Was it a conscious decision to locate it this way or is it just that you had a story to tell?

I started with Vishnu and I had observed this man die and I was starting with a short story. From there it just kind of radiated outwards and there was this whole building with its own ecology and with all these characters that came to life.

There has been a comparison with R.K. Narayan. How do you respond to that?

There were two reviews. One was in the New York Times and the person basically said that R.K. Narayan does not write about anything political at all and neither does this book. That was a little strange, because he does not seem to have caught on to the whole allegorical aspect of India. There was another review in The Los Angeles Times by Sashi Tharoor and he caught everything in the book. He pointed out that it starts like R.K. Narayan in a very idyllic setting and so on and it is only idyllic so that I can then smash it ... If you read something like The Painter of Signs, there is deep stuff going on there, there is this very political woman and so on ... Well, people write whatever they want to in reviews ... very different from Mathematics where if you submit a paper for publication and the referee doesn't like it you get the paper back and you can comment on that.

You don't seem to display too much of the anxiety of Indianness in your novel, to use a phrase that is currently in vogue. How do you manage that? There is no belaboured explanation of things Indian and it seems to be working really well here in the West too. Did you have to work at it?

I had the good fortune to only be writing for myself. I had never been published before and didn't have to worry about an audience. I was just writing for myself and maybe my mother. That was extremely liberating. I really think there is something to be said between good writing and bad writing and not so much between Indian writing and non-Indian writing. I have been a mathematician for 20 years. No one has asked me if I am an Indian mathematician.

This also leads to the issue of how one writes in English. We have a continuous debate raging in India between writers writing in English, translators of vernacular writing, critics and, d, of course, the media adding its bit to the debate. Is this something that worries you, or are you writing without this kind of self- consciousness?

The only thing was that in the beginning I was in a writers group and I was the only Indian among Americans and there were people who objected and said that you must tell us at once that we are in Bombay, and why is this man on the step, we don't know what is happening and you must explain it better ... I didn't change things, if they didn't get it it was too bad. These were not the real questions somehow I felt that and the thing is that people in the west do get it too, it is doing well ... Some people have said that they would like a glossary, but then that is a kind of political question, if you see Italian or French words you don't see a glossary. I have had a very positive reaction in India. I was a little afraid that people would say you know you have have been living abroad for 20 years and who are you to write about India. But that hasn't been the reaction, the book has been really welcomed.

What is your view of the media's role in the production and publication of literature in the contemporary context, particularly when writers' lives and loves, let alone their advances, has become a matter of great public interest?

What happens often is that there are some reviewers who really review the book and then there are many articles that are more about personalities and these may not really go into the book in any depth. There is a lot more talk about the author than the book and that is fine. Someone asked me is it fair to talk about your personality rather than the book and I think it is okay because the book is an extension of my personality. I guess we cannot live in an innocent environment any more, and this has become a necessity of sorts. I am glad you brought up the question of advances though. When I read a review that starts by saying well this book got so much of an advance and let's see if it measures up to that, that is completely ridiculous. Because the advance does not measure how good or bad a book is, some of the best books might have got a very paltry advance. The advances measure how many copies the publisher thinks he can sell, it has nothing to do with the literary merits of the book. Some very trashy novels get the biggest advances, so it is just a measure of saleability. The literary value has to be measured independent of the advance. Any review that mentions the advance is automatically suspect.

How do you see The Death of Vishnu?

I like to think of it as three different things. One of them is that it is just a comic novel about people in a building, their fighting and so on. On another level, it is a metaphor for India, with all its class and religious differences, it doesn't have to be India, it could be the whole world, people fighting with each other over various differences. On the third level, it is a novel about spiritual ascension of mankind, just getting more and more detached and inward looking and it is a parable for man's quest for that.

Will you be writing more on these themes in your next novel?

The next novel will not be a sequel. I am working on the life of Shiva. That talks about Shiva being an ascetic and withdrawing from the world, and the world ends and so it is about two big ideas of asceticism and destruction and trying to create some human drama to reflect that. What I think is that since I have embarked on this trilogy to think of the whole universe as being reflected in the phases of Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu, sort of extracting the essence of these deities and what they represent; destruction, creation and preservation. These again are very secular things, you can see it in Greek mythology, for instance. So it is really all about extracting these ideas and creating human characters and events around them. A sort of mapping of the universe, a mapping of existence perhaps.

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