There are perhaps three main sets of popular images that come to mind when we hear the name "India," and Manil Suri's novel The Death of Vishnu contains all of them.
The first is an image of lotus flowers, saffron, turmeric, sandalwood, peacock feathers and rich saris, against a background of a gold and crimson decor, and to the accompaniment of sitar music and the moon riding high over the Taj Mahal. It's an aromatic world, heavy but clinging, and the appeal is entirely, and very strongly, sensuous.
The second is of a rarefied spirituality, profound states of meditation in the high Himalayas, astrology, and the playful but fateful gods -- Rama, Krishna, Indra and, of course, Vishnu.
The third is an image of dreadful poverty, a teeming population out of all demographic control, beggars, people dying in dusty streets, outbreaks of plague, and a shabby and ancient hopelessness.
The basic situation in this book, which is set in modern Mumbai (Bombay), is that a desperately poor man called Vishnu, who sleeps on the stairs of a modest apartment block, is dying. But the surprising fact about the book is that all three of the above versions of India belong to him, either to his past life or to his imagination. By contrast, none of them in any serious way touches the other inhabitants of the apartments, all of whom have to pass by him daily on the stairs.
Their concerns are mostly mundane in the extreme. We are shown one of them applying Tru-Tone to her hair, with pages of the Times of India spread out to protect the floor. Another is having a running battle with a neighbor, with whom she shares a kitchen, secretly marking the side of the bottle of cooking oil in the hope of catching her stealing from it.
As for the men, one of them goes to a small hotel nearby to take his afternoon tea to escape his wife, and to engage in what are clearly facile philosophic and political discussions. Another, a Muslim, tries to emulate the agonies of the religious flagellants who, from time to time, process down the street by hitting himself with the buckle end of his belt.
Meanwhile, Vishnu of the exotic dreams lies dying. He had previously made himself useful to the building's inhabitants by doing small chores such as delivering their milk, but now he has lost control of his bowels and is an embarrassment to everyone. They would like him taken away to a hospital, but they cannot agree on who should pay the hospital fees.
It's not that there aren't attempts at romance, sensuality and even transcendence in the other characters. One young girl makes a half-hearted show at an elopement to escape an arranged marriage, even though she is at the same time strongly tempted by the idea of a comfortable, well-heeled life with the ambitious, if pock-marked, engineer her mother had selected for her through an advertisement in the press. As they tiptoe down the stairs, the girl slips a hundred rupee note behind the head of the sleeping Vishnu. Her Romeo, however, good-looking but a brutal realist, stoops and pockets it as he follows her down into the darkened street.
This is a first novel by a professor of mathematics in the US who is of Indian descent and was himself brought up in Mumbai. While having to make the customary statement that all the people depicted in the book are fictional, he presumably feels he is on safe legal ground when he admits that "the central character was inspired by a man named Vishnu who lived on the steps of the apartment building in which I grew up. He died in August 1994 on the same landing he had occupied for many years."
The impulse behind this novel is clearly that the India that nourishes our imaginations is a far cry from the world most of its modern citizens inhabit. Having successfully achieved the move to the US, Suri is in a strong position to take both a knowing view of the majority of his former compatriots, and a skeptical one of the images that inhabit many Western minds.
Nevertheless, the book struggles to come alive in its later pages. A new character, a would-be altruist, appears. He is a former bank-manager who, having made enough money to last him the rest of his life, resigns from his job and plans to dedicate himself to improving the lives of the city's slum-dwellers. On the whole, the book would have been strengthened by concentrating more on this character (who resembles Levin in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina) and by introducing him earlier.
The various threads of the narrative, too, are tied up towards the end, but there is a touch of routine about the process. The eloping lovers' escapade, which turns out to be very brief, has unexpected and unpleasant results. The masochistic Muslim, whose son has earlier featured as the unsatisfactory Romeo figure, is attacked by a Hindu mob. Even the would-be altruist's mission runs into the sand.
The story is complex, but even so, it never really achieves the status of a compelling read. For one thing, the building's inhabitants, other than Vishnu, are for the most part intended as comic and absurd grotesques, but they are none of them ever quite comic, absurd or grotesque enough. And the sections dealing with Vishnu's memories or dreams (which they are isn't always entirely obvious) are lovingly penned, but Suri doesn't write with quite the imagination of a true poet.
Publication Notes:
The Death of Vishnu
By Manil Suri
W.W.Norton
295 Pages
Available at Bookman Books
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