Writing used to be just a hobby for Manil Suri, a way to unwind after his day job as a mathematician, and he would produce just one short story each year. “Then, all of a sudden, I started writing a short story about India,” he told me last week—a story that became the foundation of his debut novel, The Death of Vishnu.
He showed that story to Jane Bradley in 1995 for a course she taught at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and she convinced Suri that he should expand it to novella length and dig deeper into the mythological aspects. Later, he showed two chapters and an outline to Vikram Chandra, who called it “a very trenchant idea,” Suri recalls: “Then I got writer’s block for a year and a half, trying to live up to that.” Finally, during a workshop at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, Michael Cunningham actually wrote “You are a writer” on a piece of paper for Suri and told him, “You must finish this at any cost!” The Death of Vishnu was published in 2001; now, seven years later, he’s on the road again for his second novel, The Age of Shiva.
When he started writing his second novel in 2000, Suri explains over tea at the Asia Society‘s café, it was supposed to be The Life of Shiva, a story “about all those people around Shiva who love him but cannot attain him,” in keeping with the original myth. “The first person I started with was his mother,” he remembers, “planning to do just a few chapters. Then I started writing, and reading about India’s history… 200 pages later, the Shiva character still hadn’t been born, and it became apparent this book should be about the mother, not the son.” (Which proved liberating, in that Suri could avoid falling into too formulaic a pattern of transposing Hindu mythology to twentieth-century settings.)
The novel is set in the years immediately following India’s independence and its partition from Pakistan, years that were full of chaos and cultural upheaval for the nation’s people. Suri’s parents were married in July of 1947, the month of partition, “and they fled for their lives after the ceremony,” he says. “They didn’t even open their wedding presents.” And yet so many other writers had tackled that period before that Suri didn’t want to take it on directly; as he points out, the first challenges to Indian orthodoxy came a few years later, when the partition had settled into reality and people had to get on with their lives.
The Age of Shiva came out in India before being published here, and Suri had just returned from a tour that took him to Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, and Madras. (He also goes back throughout the year to visit his mother.) Because there are so many authors of Indian descent prominent in American literary circles right now—Suri mentioned that he likes to get together with Suketu Mehta, Akhil Sharma, Kiran Desai, and Meera Nair whenever he comes up to New York—I was curious about how much Indian literature American readers might be missing out on, because it’s not being brought over by U.S. publishers. “There is a huge amount of great books coming out now,” he confirmed. “So much of it is in regional languages like Bengali, though, and so even people in India who don’t speak those languages are cut off from it.” (One Indian press that is trying to redress that balance somewhat, Katha, translates works from more than of the nation’s language groups.)
Reaching back to Suri’s comment that he only started writing about India with the story that became The Death of Vishnu, I asked if he felt any risk of being pigeonholed into strictly Indian subjects for his fiction. He acknowledged that there was some slight risk; though his work had appeared to great acclaim in The New Yorker before, the magazine turned down a story that he’d written about mathematicians (on the grounds that they’d just published another story about similar characters—based on the timeframe, I’m guessing Leonard Michael‘s “Cryptology“). But, after several other submissions, that story did wind up being published by David Leavitt at the literary magazine, Subtropics, and Suri expresses hope that he might one day go back to those characters for a novel.
In the meantime, though, he’s preparing for the final volume of his Indian trilogy, The Birth of Brahma. Where The Death of Vishnu dealt with the present, and The Age of Shiva with the immediate past, Suri says this new novel is likely to take place in the near future. As for the mythological aspects, Suri notes that Brahma is the god of creation but, at the same time, does not receive much adoration among Hindus. “Imagine being a god and no one worships you,” he smiles.