Manil Suri tackles religious
strife in an ambitious first novel
"The Death of Vishnu":
A Novel
Avg. Customer Rating: 
Manil Suri’s first novel, The Death of Vishnu, is a mélange
of social commentary, romance-novel lust, the mundane, the comic,
and the unbelievable. Blending fantasy and reality, the author
focuses on a Bombay apartment building inhabited by several
paralyzed characters. Each is unable to escape both his true
state of mind and the role he plays within the confines of the
apartment. Suri forgoes simple realism in favor of a multi-layered,
mystical, sexual tale, attracting even the most resistant of
readers with his lovely, provocative prose.
The
Death of Vishnu skillfully captures the struggles of urban life,
even if its central religious metaphor jerks the reader back
and forth between reality, fantasy, past, present and future.
In order to understand the author’s frequent mythological
references, it’s best to brush up on the basics of Hinduism.
However, even those who dive into The Death of Vishnu unfamiliar
with the Vedas will be awed by the rare treats of this sophisticated,
elegant novel.
Suri’s work was inspired by the actual death of Vishnu,
a man who had lived and died on the steps of the author’s
childhood home in Bombay. The Death of Vishnu depicts the slow,
poignant demise of the title character, an odd-job man whose
limp body lies motionless on the landing as the intertwined
lives of the building’s inhabitants unfold around him.
The light shining through the windows plays on Vishnu’s
face as it “passes through his closed eyelids and whispers
his past to him,” during his final ascension of the apartment
stairs. As his old, weak frame rises into the air above, “the
spell of gravity is broken, all the scents he has smelled are
upon him, blending together to form a new aroma,” and his
body changes into something liquid and luminous. He turns into
his namesake, the god Vishnu. According to Hindu mythology,
whenever there is an imbalance between good and evil, Vishnu,
“the preserver,” is born to re-establish order. The
deity of Vishnu has emerged from the old man’s body to
sort out the emotions flying through the apartment block, which
are completely out of equilibrium. Suri explores the deeper
workings of human nature as he approaches an electrifying catharsis
of illumination, love, and loss.
Suri’s prose, with its glowing, sensual language and powerful
imagery, fluidly draws readers into the mystical world of the
gods, with its potent, spicy-sweet scents:
“The perfume is so thick and potent that he can feel it
press against his face. Except that now it is the earth his
nostrils are pressed against, earth that is wet and aromatic,
earth that smells sweet and loamy…it is the land, it is
fertility…it is an aroma he has never smelled before, but
recognizes instantly”
Suri has called the Bombay apartment building in The Death of
Vishnu a microcosm for the ethno-political map of India. The
novel chronicles several relationships within the building:
a pair of feuding housewives, a bereaved widower who lives in
his own past, lovesick teenagers, and a Muslim couple whose
marriage is failing fast. By focusing the chapters of his novel
on how these different characters interact with one another
and with Vishnu, Suri is able to show how religion, death, faith,
and unexpected changes all work together to define each person’s
individuality.
Religious issues distress several of Suri’s characters,
including the Hindu Asrani family on the first floor and the
Muslim Jalals on the second. Kavita, the beautiful, teenage
Asrani daughter, must choose between the high-class Hindu engineer
her parents have selected for her, and her true love, Salim
Jalal. Kavita and Salim’s secret relationship places a
huge strain on the entire apartment community. Vishnu agrees
to become their “alerter,” and shares vicariously
in the dangerous lust and innocent beauty of first-time love.
Meanwhile, Salim’s father, Ahmed Jalal, in his deep effort
to understand the obstinacy and hysteria of religion, is determined
to experience “this thing they call faith.” Rejecting
his intellectualism in favor of enlightenment, he begins to
leave his wife at night and sleep wrapped up in the calm darkness
of Vishnu’s body. It is at these points in The Death of
Vishnu that Suri’s novel crosses the threshold between
awesome and extraordinary. Suri’s detailed account of Jalal’s
vision of Vishnu is so exquisitely crafted that it almost seems
to be an out-of-body experience for the reader as well.
…and then he was overcome with a sense of oneness, all
touch and feeling subsiding, all thought and emotion fading,
the intensity of the vision engulfing him in all its splendor,
and once fully encapsulated, an unexpected peace descending,
a quiet, a solitude, a meditative calm, and then, finally, sleep,
pure and silent, unusually deep.
Suri uniquely plays on the capacity of food to conjure deep
emotions and memories of the past. Kavita often brings Vishnu
his morning tea, sustaining and comforting the dying man as
he drinks the hot liquid that infuses the cool morning air with
scents of clove and cardamom. With this offering to Vishnu,
the old man recalls his love for the lusty and beautiful Padmini,
and his hunger for the affection that she would not return to
him. In Vishnu’s vivid memories, hot bhajia, or chili fritters,
remind Padmini of the times when her mother would fry up extra
batches because she loved them so much. Vishnu, wanting to “touch
her, taste her, breathe her in,” uses the power of food
to entice Padmini to expose her past to him—every bit she
opens up is a step towards the chance that she will love him.
However, food can also be a destructive force. The deep-set
animosity between Mrs. Asrani and Mrs. Pathak results from petty
arguments over miniscule amounts of ghee and gur. In these scenes,
Suri recognizes the futility of human life, often abruptly switching
to descriptions of Vishnu’s exorcism: his desertion of
the body and his ascent to immortality. The squabbles of Mrs.
Asrani and her neighbor seem especially trivial when compared
to Vishnu’s deeper sense of being.
Suri’s literary debut is a stunning, poignant combination
of starkly contrasting worlds. The seemingly mundane Bombay
metropolis is fused with the beauty and depth of Hindu mythology
in this impressive literary accomplishment. Reading The Death
of Vishnu, I was overtaken by both fantasy and reality, and
emerged with a new view of our own bizarre, maddening, beautiful
world.
