In 2001 Indian-American maths professor Manil Suri made headlines when his debut novel The Death of Vishnu created a big buzz with wild figures being tossed around as advance the author got for it. The novel was also long-listed for the Booker Prize. After that headline-hogging outing, this Mumbai-born writer vanished for eight long years, when he reappeared with the second book in the trilogy – The Age of Shiva. Thankfully, the third, The City of Devi, didn’t take too long, hitting the stands early 2013. As he says, he has spent nearly one-third of his life – 18 years – immersed in the themes of love, sexuality, self-discovery and geo-political tensions set against the backdrop of the Hindu trinity. The City of Devi is set against a near apocalyptic Mumbai, which has emptied out of its people. As everybody runs helter skelter, Sarita searches for her missing husband and in this journey she is joined by a gay cocky youngster Jaz, who is also searching for his lover. The novel coalesces a twisted love triangle, a schizoid Mumbai bristling with complex emotions and a meditation on the end of the world into a serio-comic narrative of resonance and depth.
In this conversation with Manish Chand, Editor-in-Chief, India Writes (www.indiawrites.org), Suri talks about the intertwined themes of love and self-discovery, the fine line between eroticism and pornography, why he needs to write as well as teach mathematics and whether the American Dream still exists.
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Excerpts from the interview)
Q) On the face of it, your new novel City of Devi’s plot deals with a love triangle – the staple of so much fiction being written. How do you breathe new life into a well-worn theme?
A) I think in this book I have taken the love triangle. Yes, I agree it’s a well-worn kind of theme. The other theme that I have is love at the end of the world. So, how do you make all these themes relevant to our times? The way I have done it is I’ve tried to set this story in a global setting — there are geo-political tensions, there is this nexus between China and Pakistan, the nuclear capability of China, Pakistan and India. There is also the political instability in Pakistan. And then there is the looming prospect of nuclear apocalypse.
Q) How do you deal with serious issues like nuclear annihilation in a fictional setting?
A) The idea came to me a while ago. In 2002, when India and Pakistan came close to war; it was so bad that some of the embassies evacuated their personnel. The reason that nothing happened was that UN and the US calmed down things. So, what happens in this book is that India and Pakistan get very close to war and there is this articulated nuclear threat by Pakistan but instead of the West stepping in, there are suddenly these cyber attacks. The West gets obsessed with these cyber-attacks. With all these things happening, it becomes a real threat. So, that is the basis of the story. The reason that I created all this is to make these characters absolutely desperate. They might die in a few days and that is where love becomes really essential. They want to see their loved ones for the last time and they need to do this. So, that is what makes them take great risks.
Q) You explore the theme of love in this novel and love is the oldest theme in literature. It will always be there. When you talk about breathing new life into the narrative of love, what are the new insights you gained into this great mystery called love while writing your novel?
A) The new insight is love of someone who is elusive, someone whom you don’t understand. But you still can’t help loving them. And the other, the people who find themselves changed by love. There is Sarita who is married to Karun and she is not sure of her own attractiveness, and not very confident. Once she marries Karun, she realizes that her sexual awakening is very slow. They can’t really consummate their wedding. And it takes her a long process to work her way into that. It is that awakening that I am looking at.
Q) Is this awakening triggered by love or is it the awakening of love?
A) It’s both. It is an awakening of love and the stirring of sexuality. There is another character called Jaz, who is gay and sex is everything for him on the other hand. He has never considered the possibility of love. It was always sexual obsession and it was a healthy option for him. He enjoys it thoroughly and is completely honest with it. When he actually meets someone with whom he is falling in love, he doesn’t even realize it and he lets that person go. In the rest of the book, he is trying to find the person he had let go, trying to get him back. These are two parallel tracks that I am working on in the story.
Q) Do you also look at issues related to sexual addiction?
A) There is a very fine balance in portraying Jaz. I haven’t made him perverse. I am trying to portray that for him sex is a healthy thing. It is always a little complicated to present that.
Q) What are the creative challenges of writing about sex? It’s very difficult because one could be anatomical and graphic in portraying sexual encounters. How can you creatively write about sex? Where do you draw a line between eroticism and pornography?
A) It is neither erotic nor pornographic. Sex is so essential to the narrative, that with each sexual scene you actually learn more about the character. The sex reveals the character, the act of love-making. In terms of actual writing of sex, as you said, it is very hard because you may just go too far and you are in pornography which you don’t want. But you still want to be completely honest. So, what I do is I try to make it a little bit clinical. That somehow seems to work. For the reader, it is not like it is always for titillation. I am not trying to titillate you with it. I am actually trying to tell you something. I am inviting the reader to look beyond the sexual act and delve into what it means.
Q) Tell us more about the trilogy, starting with The Death of Vishnu and Shiva and the whole idea of weaving fiction thematically around the trinity in the Hindu pantheon. How did the idea of trilogy come to you and what kept you going? How did you live through writing this trilogy?
A) It started with an accident in a way. There was a man named Vishnu and he died. I knew him a little bit. And then I started with this book called The Death of Vishnu. Then a friend of mine, Devdutt Pattnaik, pointed out that if you have Vishnu as a character you need to look into the mythology of it. So, he pointed out that there is this alternative idea of Hindu trimurti which has Vishnu, Shiva and Devi. Somewhere in the middle of the book I realised that it is about Mumba Devi and the mother goddess fits this trilogy idea much better. So, that is how this idea came about.
Q) You said you spent eighteen years living with a set of interlinked books or themes. It’s quite a lot for a writer. How has it changed you as a person? How have you managed to juggle the two realms or double lives as a tenured professor of mathematics and a creative writer?
A) It’s one third of my life. It has made me realise that I really need to write, but I also need to do mathematics. I can’t do one or the other. My mathematics has a lot to do with teaching mathematics. I really enjoy teaching mathematics. It’s finally that I am getting into better modes of partitioning my life into different activities. So, I find that I can write in the morning. Unlike some people, I am not dazed in the morning and especially when I have written the night before I want to complete it and it comes nice and fresh. After breakfast, if I haven’t written anything before, I can’t do anything after it. That is my modus operandi. So I know it is going to be a great day if I have written in the morning. Mathematics — I just have to teach during the semester.
Q) What are the master themes that recur in your books?
A) This flat had three families of Muslims and we were the only Hindus. We all shared a kitchen, toilets and so on. This was Mumbai when I was growing up. That is always the backcloth of my narratives. There is also the idea of being gay, discovering yourself through sexuality. There is another theme of rational thought versus faith. This idea or dialectic between science and religion. That has also come in a lot of my work.
Q) You have been living abroad for a long time. As a man who co-habits different geographies and cultures, do you think the so-called American Dream still endures, specially after 9/11 and the global slowdown?
A) The American Dream is still very much there. What has happened is that there are other dreams too now. There is the Indian dream, the Australian dream, the Chinese dream. There is more opportunity in other places. So in a sense, it’s like America has to share power and share the dream perhaps. A lot of these things are cyclical, so it is hard to say where America is in terms of world order but again if you look at the economy and the stocks, European stocks seem to have been doing a lot worse than the American ones; we are the only ones to be able to survive. China and India are not doing too well. Economically, the American Dream, in a sense, is still alive.
Q) What’s next?
A) I plan to mix the two genres. I am writing a maths novel. It is tough to write it – much harder than I thought. I have made several false moves and beginnings. The problem I keep coming on with is what to assume of the audience. Earlier it was a non-fiction book, now it is a fiction book. It is more about the ideas of mathematics. It is not going to make any one a mathematician; it is not going to make you be able to balance your textbook or anything. But it’s about ideas of mathematics that often get obscured by people’s inability to calculate. You know people might be bad at calculation from high school so they got a cloud over their head. So, it is nothing about calculation but the basic ideas of mathematics.
Q) Writing is an act of meditation and a form of self-transcendence. How does the process of writing transform you? Does it make you feel happier, lighter, liberated…
A) It is not a pleasant process. It is uncomfortable and it is like really looking hard at words and trying to find the best word, and it could be just clerical in some way. But then there are flashes that really take you above all that. When you have completed something and you have got a phrase just right. I sometimes give myself a pause and take a day for just reading what I wrote and enjoy it. I derive a lot of enjoyment in what I have written and that is what keeps me going, and leads me to believe that it is worth pursuing…
Author Profile
- Manish Chand is Founder-CEO and Editor-in-Chief of India Writes Network (www.indiawrites.org) and India and World, a pioneering magazine focused on international affairs. He is CEO/Director of TGII Media Private Limited, an India-based media, publishing, research and consultancy company.
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