Manil Suri shares the idea behind his book The Death of Vishnu and what inspired the two succeeding books
Manil Suri shares the idea behind his book The Death of Vishnu and what inspired the two succeeding books
MANIL Suri grew up in Bombay. Looking out of the window of the flat he lived in, you could see Warden Road on one side, and Napeansea Road forking out on the other. He and his family were P.G.'s and lived there with three other families.
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He left to study in the US when he was twenty, and is now a tenured full professor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
Speaking at the Literary Club recently launched by the Asiatic Society of Mumbai, Manil Suri made a PowerPoint presentation and talked about his work.
About his first novel The Death of Vishnu, he said that Vishnu was a real person, a servant who lived on his building staircase. "The building was a microcosm of the city," he said, "and that diversity went into my book.
Bollywood was very important, and there's a lot of it in the book. In fact, I even painted a Bollywood poster as a possible cover for the book but unfortunately it was rejected by the publishers!" Showing the different covers of his books, he explained how different cultures respond to different images.
When he began writing this story in a creative writing course, the teacher suggested that he could connect the character with the god Vishnu. "I said no, in our country we're all named after gods! But then I started thinking Vishnu did take care of people! He did know what was going on everywhere!"
Once The Death of Vishnu was in production and his agent called asking about what he was now working on, the thought struck that this might be a trilogy.
"I had put everything of myself into my first book all the scenes of my life. Most first-time novelists do this. So now for my second book I had nothing, except just the one word Shiva! It became like a homework assignment!"
Turning to his parents' lives for situation and detail, Partition and the refugee saga became part of his story, and here the PowerPoint displayed the poignant image of his father's Refugee Identity Card.
Starting with three characters, Manil Suri began to explore the concept of motherhood: "while breastfeeding, at what angle would the baby be held? Where would its head be, where its hands and feet? Comparing pictures of Mary and Jesus with Krishna-Yashoda ones, I realized that in western culture, motherhood is more spiritual than emotional. And in our country, mothers are much closer to their children physically, especially their sons."
Soon it was Parvati rather than Shiva who was the central focus of the book, with the Indian mother-son love affair blazing through. After The Age of Shiva, his third book will be based on either Brahma or Devi "definitely not both! I don't want to be known as the guy who did the Trimurti Quartet!" he said.
In conversation now with Prof. Vispi R. Balaporia, who had actually taught him at Jai Hind College in 1975, Manil Suri remembered the text The Lord of the Flies and said that that was his first exposure to literary fiction, though he had always been an eager member of circulating libraries when he was young. When she commented about his exceptionally strong characters, he said, "They become an extension of me. I look at the world through their eyes. For me, the most important thing when writing a book is to get the character right."
It was a lively and informative session, but attended by fewer than fifty people. Launched to support the vision statement of the President of the Asiatic Society, Dr. Aroon Tikekar, the Literary Club aims to engage with the community and encourage youngsters to read and to join the society and make use of its considerable resources.
"Our aim is to interest youngsters with good contemporary literature," says Sonavi Desai, convener of the club.
The Asiatic Society of Mumbai met for the first time on 26 November 1804 as the Literary Society of Bombay.
The society has been housed in the Town Hall Building since 1830, and possesses an enviable library of more than a hundred thousand books, of which 15,000 are classified as rare and valuable, including one of only two known original copies of Dante's Divine Comedy. The Society's Literary Club had its first meeting in January 2009, addressed by Javed Akhtar. This was followed in February by a lecture by Dr. Frank Conron from the University of Washington, who spoke about the booksellers of Bombay. In March, besides the Manil Suri meeting, the Literary Club also hosted a session in association with the Alliance Francaise on feminist writing with panelists including Maryse Wolinsky, Noor Zaheer and Kavita Mahajan.
"I've enjoyed these sessions very much and learnt from them," says school teacher Marina Dutta, "I only wish more people would attend!"
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