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BOOKS:
MANIL SURI
God's
Algebra
A mathematician's
first novel creates big-money publishing frenzy and sets new standards
in India Imagined
By
S. Prasannarajan
Offpage:
Tonight the distance between Manil Suri and the Arabian Sea is negligible.
Between them, there are only lovers lost in the breeze and loners lost
in dreams. He walks past them, one hand buried inside his trouser pocket,
the other holding a Bisleri water bottle, he walks along Marine Drive,
his pace programmed by memory, slow, calm, aimless. "My childhood
haunt," he remembers, and the waves in the darkness endorse as he,
the grownup Bombay chokra, shows the way to one who is comparatively
new to Bombay-or Mumbai. "I had an aunt who lived in one of those
flats," he points to the buildings overlooking the sea, their visage
blackened by the sea wind. Lucky aunt, who was a not-so-famous actress
in hindi movies. His parents live as paying guests in a room in Kemp's
Corner, "but we have our own kitchen". And he has already reached
Chowpatty, shoes deep in the sands. Massage? The soliciting voice finds
its way through balloons, kids and nightshift hawkers. Manil Suri refuses
to get massaged, though someone has already laid a makeshift bed for him
on the sand. He ignores it, and wishes to be in Hanging Gardens. "It
must be closed now", as if intimacy has to be sought out elsewhere,
as if the sands of Chowpatty have lost their innocence. The romance is
always yesterday, and tonight, Manil Suri, debutant novelist, formidable
mathematician, forever Bombay boy, cannot afford to be alone with the
sea. His old parents are alone at home, tomorrow is another hectic day,
and he is not so sure whether he would be able to meet a photographer
from London's Daily Telegraph, and a friend is coming down from America
to holiday with him in Kerala. So he hails a cab, not before giving this
suggestion, "You should perhaps spend some time at the Gateway before
you return to the hotel ... perhaps we should have gone there first."
And Manil Suri was driven away from the sea, into the midnight of a city
that has added new theorems to the mathematics of his existence, suddenly.
 On-page:
"They are parked just below the overlook of Hanging Gardens, in
the darkness of a building under construction. Down below, curving next
to the inkyness of the bay, each pearl of light glitters in its setting
along Marine Drive. He lays his cheek against her breast, and feels the
resilience of her flesh ..." He is Vishnu, the drunken reincarnate
who lives in the backyard of humanity, the dying god who lives on the
lowest landing in the hierarchy of class, and she is Padmini, a seducer
from the lowest zone of womanhood, his dream girl, and tonight, they are
romancing in stolen luxury, they are living an enchanted life outside
their chosen space. They have even made love by the sea, they have driven
all around in a Fiat ... god's own moment tonight. "Vishnu follows
the road curving into the darkness ahead ... The sun will not rise for
many hours, and it will be a long drive through the night." Later,
he will go back to god's zone of zero gravity.
Tonight
the distance between Manil Suri and Vishnu is as wide as the sea, and
it can be reduced by nothing but the applied science of faith.
Manil Suri,
professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, US, is the author
of The Death of Vishnu (Bloomsbury; 329 pages, £16.99), to
be released in India in the first week of January. Another first novel,
the latest item in the marketplace of India Imagined? Harrumphers are
requested to hold back judgement. The story of Vishnu, dramatic and redeeming,
is worth the hype, worth the publisher's hope, the mathematician's faith
and the reader's curiosity. In the beginning, it was that five-million-dollar
buzz: W.W. Norton's record-breaking advance to an Indian mathematician's
first novel for the American rights alone, outbidding ten other publishers,
and rights sold to 13 other countries. Apparently, the five-million part
was overexcited misreporting on India Writes Back. "I got only $350,000."
Then Suri as one of Time magazine's people to watch. And the esoteric
in the context: "My research area is the numerical analysis of partial
differential equations." Profoundly Greek for you? But not the novel,
so close to the algebra of everyday existence, even if you are not a born-again
god, even if your crisis is not as comical, as ridiculous and as tragic
as the life and lamentations of Vishnu's subjects.
"Not
wanting to arouse Vishnu in case he hadn't died yet, Mrs. Asrani tiptoed
down to the third step above the landing on which he lived, tea kettle
in hand." So begins Suri's novel in which dreary familiarity merges
with veiled divinity. Vishnu, everybody's odd-job man, is the unlikely
axis of a downsized solar system, which is as mundane and as predictable
as this apartment building in Kemp's Corner, maybe a miniature India in
its diversity. As Vishnu lies there dying, dying young and drunk and unattended,
around him, more aptly above him, life unfolds with all its diverse comedy,
as if it's scripted not by a god but by a wicked Bollywood writer. Mrs
Asrani and Mrs Pathak share a common kitchen, and they hate each other
with a quaint passion, they even fight over who should pay for Vishnu's
ambulance. Mr Jalal, or Ahmed for Mrs Jalal, is struggling to achieve
perfect harmony between reason and religion. The Asrani daughter Kavita,
who plays out a filmi-style elopement with the Jalal boy Salim. Widower
Taneja who relives the prematurely lost romance with the aid of a gramophone.
All slices of life mined from memory, their personal history so intimately
familiar, their private sorrows and public comedy being copied from the
subtext of suburbia.
The exception
is Vishnu, whose death, rather his state of dying, provides life to this
extraordinary novel. He was born with his mother's teasing prophecy: "You
are Vishnu, keeper of the universe, keeper of the sun. What would be the
world without you?" Indeed, keeper of the universe that Suri, with
mathematical precision, captures in 329 pages of exceptional brio. Vishnu
is dying so that he can live a god's life, or as god, he can keep the
sun that will illuminate his loss and others' longing. He can achieve
godhood and enlighten the one who is caught between reason and religion,
doubt and faith. Jalal is the chosen one to spread the good news, he is
the chosen prophet. But prophets are no longer allowed dignity even in
fall, they are destined to lie suspended between the tragic and the ridiculous.
As dramatic
as the life-expanding journey of the science student from Jai Hind College,
Bombay. Post-college, at the Institute of Science, Manil Suri switched
to mathematics. He took applied mathematics as his subject for a fellowship
at Carnegie-Mellon University, though everybody else wanted him to be
a doctor. He went to the US in 1979, at the age of 20.
How did
Vishnu happen?
"There
was a man who lived on the landing between the ground and first floors
of the apartment building near Kemp's Corner where we lived. He was always
drunk and nobody knew where he came from. Whenever we met, he said 'salaam
baba' to me. In 1994, when I came home for my annual holiday, I found
him lying sick. I too fell sick, and it turned out to be chicken pox.
There were red rashes all over my body. But it was he who died. His name
was Vishnu."
Suri remembers
it all, now sitting in the seventh- floor room of a Mumbai hotel, taking
another sip from the Bisleri bottle. "Then I thought I would write
the Vishnu story, maybe a novella. I wrote the first chapter, and then
wrote the last three pages of the book." It took quite a few creative
courses and excited teachers like the Pulitzer-winning Michael Cunningham
to finish the book. But Suri's real tutor was Vishnu Himself. "The
Bhagavad Gita changed my life. Everything till then was intellectual."
So, will
we be soon meeting a mathematician who has discarded the theorems and
courted the Book?
"Mathematics
is not absolute. After all, the set theory of axiomatic mathematics begins
with a general assumption and out of which emerges a consistent structure.
Religion too starts with an axiom. But I won't take any side." At
least for the moment. But the Gita effect, you will never know what happens
tomorrow. But this much we know: Vishnu is the first of a trilogy, The
Life of Shiva and The Birth of Brahma will follow. He is trapped inside
the mathematics of mythology, which can only be counterbalanced by the
sovereign sociology of Bollywood, and in Vishnu, it provides immense structural
relief. Quite natural for the only son of Ram Lal Suri, a former assistant
to playback musicians Madan Mohan and Lakshmikant Pyarelal.
Even in
the political, Suri defies the Hindu-Muslim stereotype when it comes to
the 'communal' crisis in Vishnu's world. The thin word between faith,
farce and frenzy is too subtle to be categorised. Like Manil Suri himself,
who marks the third blast in province of India Imagined, after Rushdie
and Arundhati Roy, and in its glow we see the beginning of a brand new
story. Even if it marks the end of mathematics.
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METRO TODAY
Forget
endology, writes INDIA TODAY Senior Editor S. Prasannarajan. Celebrate
2001, celebrate the future in 