Death Of Vishnu A Novel [Hardcover]

The title of Manil Suri's first novel gets right to the point. His protagonist, having purchased the right to sleep on the ground-floor landing of a Bombay apartment house, slips slowly from a coma into death. As this aging alcoholic takes leave of the earth, his neighbors surround him, arguing over who gave Vishnu a few dried chapatis, who called the doctor for him, and who will pay for the ambulance to cart him away. Meanwhile, the hero of The Death of Vishnu is lost in memories. Drifting through increasingly vivid scenes from his past, he recalls his relatively rare snatches of love and joy--and especially his romance with Padmini, a self-involved prostitute. On one particular day, it seems, he stole one of his employer's cars and drove his love interest to the honeymoon town of Lonavala, where he showered her with gifts and finally lifted her veil to kiss her like a bride:

Then the absurdity of the situation strikes him. The preposterousness of his images, the foolishness of his feelings, the comicality of chasing currents that skim across Padmini's face. He thinks how absurd this whole trip has been, how absurd is the presence of the two of them in Lonavala, how absurd is the scenery itself that stretches before them. He thinks of poor, ridiculous Mr. Jalal, waiting back in Bombay for his Fiat, and of how Padmini will react when he asks her to buy them petrol so they can get back.

Vishnu also recalls his secret passion for Kavita Asrani, the beautiful teenage daughter of one of the families for whom he works. Given the protagonist's focus on his hapless love life, the scope of Suri's dazzling debut may appear narrow. However, the apartment house upon whose floor Vishnu spends his final hours functions as a microcosm of Indian society. It helps to know even a smattering about Hindu mythology or India's religious conflicts. But even if you don't, there is plenty to relish in The Death of Vishnu, with its comical, richly drawn characters, loving attention to the details of everyday life, and provocative exploration of destiny and free will. --Regina Marler

Visualizing a village, a hotel or an apartment building as a microcosm of society is not a new concept to writers, but few have invested their fiction with such luminous language, insight into character and grasp of cultural construct as Suri does in his debut. The inhabitants of a small apartment building in Bombay are motivated by concerns ranging from social status to spiritual transcendence while their alcoholic houseboy, Vishnu, lies dying on the staircase landing. During a span of 24 hours, Vishnu's body becomes the fulcrum for a series of crises, some tragic, some farcical, that reflect both the folly and nobility of human conduct. To the perpetually quarreling first-floor tenants, Mrs. Pathak and Mrs. Asrani, Vishnu is a recipient of grudging charity and casual calumny; each justifies her refusal to pay for his hospitalization. Though locked in perpetual bickering, the women are united in their prejudice against their upstairs neighbors, the Jahals, who are Muslims. While Mr. Jahal seeks to test his intellectual agnosticism by seeking spiritual enlightenment, his son, Samil, and the Asranis' spoiled, willful daughter, Kavita, prepare to defy their families by running away together. On the third floor, reclusive widower Vinod Taneja still mourns his young wife, Sheetal; their story of tentative love blossoming into deep devotion and truncated by early death is an exquisite cameo of a marital relationship. Interspersed are Vishnu's lyrically rendered thoughts as his soul leaves his body and begins a slow ascent of the apartment stairs, rising through the stages of existence as he relives memories of his gentle mother and his passion for the prostitute Padmina. Suril has a discerning eye for human foibles, an empathetic knowledge of domestic interaction and an instinctive understanding of the caste-nuanced traditions of Indian society. The excesses of life in that countryDthe oppressive heat, the mixture of superstitions and religious fanaticism, the social crueltyDpermeate the atmospheric narrative. By turns charming and funny, searing and poignant, dramatic and farcical, this fluid novel is an irresistible blend of realism, mysticism and religious metaphor, a parable of the universal conditions of human life. Agent, Nicole Aragi. (Jan.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In this debut, mathematics professor Suri introduces us to the varied denizens of an apartment building where Vishnu lies dyingAas neighbors argue about paying for the ambulance. Expect big promotion.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Suri, a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, has entered the realm of literature with assurance, agile humor, and an impressive breadth of social and religious concerns. His first novel, set in Bombay, the city of his birth, conjures a beehive-busy microcosm within the walls of an apartment building. Two Hindu families bicker about water and ghee; a Muslim household is pitched into confusion when its mild-mannered patriarch turns fanatic in his pursuit of enlightenment; a Hindu girl and Muslim boy imagine that they're in love; and Vishnu, the drunk who sleeps on the first-floor landing, drifts peacefully toward death. As he lies dreaming about love, his childhood, and his divine namesake, his neighbors fret over their tired marriages, knotty questions of status and faith, and responsibility for Vishnu. The gospel of the movies is just as influential as the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita in Suri's tenderly comic, wryly metaphysical, and hugely entertaining tale, in which profound longings for romance and deliverance shape even the most modest (perhaps the most precious) of lives. Donna Seaman
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A wonder.... Vibrant characters and freshly observed psychological insights illuminate The Death of Vishnu. -- Time Out New York, Catherine Saint Louis, 4 January 2001

An enchanting first novel...this tale of modern Bombay will delight readers who have had enough of skinny postmodernist fiction. -- Boston Sunday Globe "New and Recommended", 4 February 2001

Manil Suri packs his 295-page novel with memorable characters, convincing dialogue, dramatic, pathos-inspiring, and humorous situations, and open-ended meaning––no small achievement. On its most superficial level, The Death of Vishnu follows the inhabitants of a small middle-class apartment building in Bombay (Mumbai) over the course of 24 hours. The building, besides housing those who rent the individual flats within its four storeys, is central to a whole host of people. Such people, including small vendors (the "cigarettewalla" and the "paanwalla") low-caste servers ("tall ganga", "short ganga" and the "jamadarni") and vagrants such as Vishnu, spend most of their days either outside, or seeking shelter in places that affluent Westerners could never think of as "home" for anyone. In particular, the landings on each floor of the building are occupied by various lower-caste individuals who vie fiercely for the "right" of habitation, paying off those who have control over the squatting rights whenever a squatter dies or leaves for good.
Vishnu, a drunk who lives on the second-floor landing (having, eleven years earlier, bought his way up from the less comfortable ground-floor landing), now lies motionless on his precious square of shelter, letting go of his life by degrees. Like all those who exist in servitude, he lives in symbiosis with his masters––a fact that would be vehemently denied by the "civilized" top of the pecking order, but is utilized cannily by those at the bottom, to gain whatever advantage possible to ameliorate their desperate circumstances. And so Vishnu’s dying affects everyone.
Because he has no money, instead of being taken to a hospital he is left on the landing to die. The two families on "his" floor, who for eleven years have depended on him to run errands for them, cannot settle who should be responsible for costs that might be incurred by this final illness. Mrs. Asrani and Mrs. Pathak are at loggerheads over their shared kitchen and everything else; their husbands are impotent, childishly venting their frustration by indulging in small acts of rebellion against their wives. Each woman believes the other family does not pay enough or do enough for Vishnu; each struggles to maintain a virtuous stance and therefore a clear conscience, while doing and sacrificing as little as possible.
The story shifts back and forth from Vishnu’s dying reveries and experiences to the dramatic events that unfold around him. Kavita, headstrong daughter of the Asranis, who are Hindu, plans to run off with Salim, handsome son of the Muslim Jalal family who live upstairs. The self-involved parents of both young people have failed to notice the seriousness of the growing relationship, and are completely unprepared. In fact, it takes them so long to emerge from their narcissistic fog and realize that Salim and Kavita have actually gone away together, that events overtake them.
Meanwhile for Vishnu, letting go of his life involves revisiting his past, and he returns not only to memories of the prostitute who earlier in his life had been the unattainable object of his love, but also to the traditional Hindu stories his loving mother endlessly recounted to him when he was a child. The human Vishnu, carried away by his dying visions, begins to wonder if he himself may in fact be an incarnation of the god Vishnu, preserver of the world. This idea is suggested to him by Mr. Jalal, father of the wayward Salim. Mr. Jalal’s wife is devoutly Muslim but he himself has been cursed with the gift of reason rather than faith. He desires to penetrate the mystery of religious practice, but cannot. His failure to do this consumes him. At one point in the 24-hour period covered in the book, Mr. Jalal comes to believe that the dying Vishnu may hold the answer to his quest. This moment is pivotal to the storyline but also to the novel’s larger meaning. The Death of Vishnu imaginatively poses questions about the varieties of religious experience, and leaves them for the reader to answer. The character of Vishnu is central to the inhabitants of the apartment building, but is he the god Vishnu? Mr. Jalal has a religious experience that could be real in the accepted Western-scientific-worldview sense, or could be thought of as encroaching insanity. Our opinion about it will depend more on who we are than on anything the author tells us. That is what makes this novel so interesting.
Without the narrative structure Suri imposes, the novel as a whole might have spun off in too many directions. Too many characters and situations vie for attention. However, the story is successfully contained first by the arc of events concerning the elopement of Kavitha and Salim, and second by the conceit that Vishnu, in the dying process, separates from his body and climbs floor by floor to the top of the building. This device is not slavishly imposed but the reader does realize that when Vishnu’s spirit-self reaches the top of the building, he will die, the strands of the story will merge, and there will be some kind of resolution.
At first the characters seem too imperfect to be attractive. Given time, however, they grow in the reader’s affections. Vishnu, the central character, is something of a cipher, but those around him are less so. In particular I found Mr. Jalal, whose never-ending argument with himself about the nature of religious experience is drawn with painful clarity, a sympathetic soul. But each of the characters can be viewed with or without compassion, as the reader chooses. Certainly author Manil Suri is not inclined to gloss over human shortcomings.
This is a thinking-person’s novel rather than a good old-fashioned yarn. The writing is excellent, the story-lines interesting, the characters vividly human. The heart is moved; but it is warmed and chilled in equal measure, which can bring about an uncomfortable feeling. Sort of like being human. --Nikki Abraham (Books in Canada) -- Books in Canada

Suri is a writer of vivid gifts. His larger thematic preoccupations are balanced by seductively beautiful prose. -- New York, Daniel Mendelsohn, 8 January 2001

Suri misses no comic beat, and makes delicate and inspired use of passages from Hindu myth and indian religious life. -- Book, Padma Viswanathan, January 2001

This beautifully formed and carefully expressed work is a remarkable achievement. -- Bookselling This Week, Carla Cohen, 11 December 2000

Vivid and engrossing.... [A] work of fiction that seems not only universal but absolutely cosmic. -- Elle, Francine Prose, January 2001

[A] provocative tale of spiritual seeking in contemporary Bombay.... Suri contributes to our understanding of what it means to believe. -- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, Elizabeth Kadetsky, 14 January 2001

[An] enchanting novel....acheives an eerie and memorable transcendence. -- Time, 12 February 2001

[B]oth a richly detailed portrait of a crowded Bombay building and a Hindu allegory of the soul's ascent to Heaven. -- New York, Boris Kachka, 5 February 2001

[D]ynamic...elegant, clever prose and emotional and philosophical probing carry the action of the novel entirely. -- Salon.com Books, Suzy Hansen, 11 January 2001

[F]resh, original....[T]here is exquisite beauty in Suri's prose. -- USA Today, Carol Memmott, 25 January 2001

At the opening of this masterful debut novel, Vishnu lies dying on the staircase he inhabits while his neighbors the Pathaks and the Asranis argue over who will pay for an ambulance. As the action spirals up through the floors of the apartment building we are pulled into the drama of the residents' lives: Mr. Jalal's obsessive search for higher meaning; Vinod Taneja's longing for the wife he has lost; the comic elopement of Kavita Asrani, who fancies herself the heroine of a Hindi movie. Suffused with Hindu mythology, this story of one apartment building becomes a metaphor for the social and religious divisions of contemporary India, and Vishnu's ascent of the staircase parallels the soul's progress through the various stages of existence. As Vishnu closes in on the riddle of his own mortality, we wonder whether he might not be the god Vishnu, guardian not only of the fate of the building and its occupants, but of the entire universe.

The Death of Vishnu is the first in a trilogy of novels I plan to write.

As I mention in the front pages of the novel, The Death of Vishnu started with the death of an actual man named Vishnu, who lived on the steps of the building in which I grew up. I began it in 1995, and soon after took my first writing workshop, at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland with Jane Bradley, author of the searing works "Power Lines" and "Living Doll." Jane was the one who told me that I could not call a character "Vishnu" without connecting him somehow to the God Vishnu—it was too potent a name. That's when I started reading up on Hindu mythology and using it in my fiction—it was really the title that fueled the story.

Sometime after finishing the third chapter, it suddenly struck me. The Hindu trinity, known as "Trimurti" (or "three forms") consisted of Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer. With it were the three ingredients of the cycle of existence: life, death and birth. Matching them gave three titles, so that the next two books could be The Life of Shiva and The Birth of Brahma.

So now I have two more titles, that have both sprung up from the original event of Vishnu's death, and are waiting to generate stories of their own. The goal will be not to write treatises on Hinduism, but create narratives and characters that throb with the spirit of what each deity represents. Shiva, for instance, is not only the destroyer, but also the ascetic, and since he is unattainable, this asceticism makes him an erotic figure. The second novel will therefore involve characters who experience unrequited attraction, set against the backdrop of Shiva exercising his tremendous powers of purification. To renew the cycle will be regeneration, as represented by Brahma. This will be the opportunity to explore the process of creation—not only in a cosmic sense, but also by ordinary flesh and blood characters, whether they be artists or writers or scientists, or (dare I say) mathematicians.

PS: I could, of course, have called the other two books The Birth of Shiva and The Life of Brahma—but I think it's Shiva's life as an ascetic that is more interesting, and the moment of Brahma's birth that resonates most with the idea of creation.

Manil Suri was born in Bombay. He is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

This bestselling debut novel is an allegory set in an apartment building in modern Bombay. Named after the Hindu "Preserver," Vishnu is a dying vagrant whose only home is the stairwell of the building. His waning health presents numerous problems for the other residents, giving the author the chance to juxtapose the petty, the sensual, and the eternal in imaginative, perceptive, and distinctively Indian ways. In the mouth of John Lee, the tale has wonderful charm and character. His gentle, musical cadences enhance the beauty, pathos, and humor of the writing. He deftly contributes a mythic proportion that complements the Verismo atmosphere, reminiscent of such Kurasawa films as Do Des Kaden and Ran. He seems always in the moment, yet every incident, every conversation, presages something momentous, so that the suspense never flags. The production concludes with an enlightening interview with the author. Y.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.