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A conversation between Manil Suri and Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer
Prize–winning author of The Hours.
I’m Michael Cunningham, and I have the privilege of talking to
Manil Suri about his remarkable first novel, The Death of Vishnu. Who are
some of your literary influences? Do you identify yourself particularly as an
Indian writer?
Both of these questions are kind of loaded questions, because
first of all I’m never quite clear in my mind what is meant by a literary
influence. How do you interpret that?
I would say, any piece of writing that stays with you, and in some
way influences the kind of writer you are, whether it be Henry James or
Jacqueline Susann, both of whom I claim as influences.
OK, well that’s good, because I certainly grew up on a lot of
Jacqueline Susann-type novels. But more serious writers I would have to say, the
one that comes to mind is V. S. Naipaul. I’ve just read one book of his, A
House for Mr. Biswas, and the thing that stayed with me out of that novel was
the way his characters speak. And they speak in English, but you can tell they
are speaking an Indian language. It’s their intonation, or, I don’t know how
he does it, and that’s certainly something I would love to be able to do. So
that’s something that definitely did stay with me. I’ve read several Indian
authors, naturally, growing up in India, Rabindranath Tagore comes to mind, R.
K. Narayan. Both of those, I don’t know if they were influences, but certainly
I liked them a lot. Another person I would say, completely different, is Paul
Bowles, and the journey that Mr. Jalal makes might have been influenced by
something I read of his. You also asked about whether I consider myself an
Indian writer, and again that requires some sort of definition. Being a
mathematician, I’m always looking for definitions. But, I think yes, I think I
am, certainly I’m writing about India in this book, writing as an Indian I
think. There are some books written by Indians which go overboard, bend over
backwards trying to explain things to foreign readers. I certainly have tried to
make things clear, but on the other hand I think I’ve resisted the temptation
to, what should I say, be too careful about what I put in and what I don’t put
in, so that people aren’t unduly disturbed by anything that they might not
understand. So yes, but I don’t want to say anything more, because there’s
this raging controversy as to what constitutes an Indian writer and what
doesn’t. But I think I am, yes.
Well, you are in fact a mathematician, you’re a professor
of mathematics. Do you find that mathematics and fiction writing are
complementary?
I think one helps the other, because certainly when I write a math
paper, I spend an extraordinarily long amount of time trying to make it
understandable. On the other hand, I think being a mathematician has its pros
and cons. When I first started writing, I would not really pay too much
attention to the characters. In other words, I would say: this is a character X,
and now I will let X do this, this, this. And the reader can fill in whatever he
or she wants, as their favorite character would be X. So there’s this
abstraction that goes on, which might not be good in terms of character
development, but on the other hand is very useful when you’re trying to keep
strands in place. For instance in this book I see it as a very vertical novel,
there’s this real mathematical structure, where there’s this constant sense
of things rising, so I think of it as a type of -- a very vertical type of
structure. Did I use mathematics in the book? Well, I did use calculus in it, I
actually had to squeeze that word in, and I think it’s on page 137 or
something. [Laughter] There had to be some way of doing it. I was at a
conference recently, just last week in fact, and I actually did a reading to a
group of mathematicians, toughest group you’ll find to read to. One of them
came up with this interesting idea. He said that all fiction can basically be
broken up into several components, much like a signal or any kind of wave can be
broken up into components. So he said that he looked at my story, he looked at
what I read out, and he said, "Well you have this element, this element,
this element, this element, and if I look at all the other pieces of fiction
I’ve read, they’re also composed of similar elements." And so I can
imagine him going back -- he’s from Finland -- going back to Helsinki
thinking: well, he’s solved this central problem of 2,000 years of fiction.
[Laughter].
Good for him.
Good for him. He’s probably waiting for the Pulitzer, or
whatever. [Laughter]
As a writer myself, I ask only out of curiosity, not in the least
out of envy, of course, how you managed to do such a remarkable job of keep the
voices of the different characters so distinct.
Well, I don’t know, how did I do that? [Laughter].
I always think that from a writer, “I have no idea” is an
entirely acceptable answer. [Laughter]. Now, The Death of Vishnu is part
of a trilogy that will also comprise The Life of Shiva and The Birth
of Brahma. Did you conceive it as a whole while you were writing this first
third?
Well that kind of appeared after the third chapter. I’d been
stuck for a long time, I had this horrible writer’s block. There’s this
ambulance that comes, and it had to leave without taking Vishnu away with it.
And it took me a year and a half to figure out how to make it do that. Once I
was writing again, I thought, death, life, birth. There seemed to be these three
words, and then there is this Hindu trinity: Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma. Shiva is
of course the destroyer, and Brahma is the creator, and Vishnu is the preserver,
and so I just matched these words with the three gods in the trinity and I came
up with three titles. And so I do see myself doing these other two books. The
next one is going to be The Life of Shiva. And that will be followed on
something on Brahma. And Brahma of course will be a lot about creation
and creativity, and that’s where I think that by the third book maybe I’ll
be bold enough to actually have a mathematician as a character. I don’t know,
maybe the world isn’t ready for that yet. [Laughter].
I’m ready for it, I can’t speak for the world.
Great.
Could you describe your process as a writer? Where did the
inspiration for the novel come from? And how did you work on it.
There actually was a person named Vishnu. The novel is set in Bombay.
And it’s the story of this man who lives on a landing in an apartment
building. When I was growing up Vishnu used to live on this landing below the
floor that I grew up on. One year when I went back, I think it was 1995, Vishnu
was very ill. And he actually died that year. I thought at that point: here’s
the person who’s just died. I started writing a short story about a year
later, and that was a story that I tried to end but I couldn’t end it. So it
just kept progressing. I actually wrote the end right in the beginning and tried
to finish it, first in one chapter, then in two, then it became a novel. So
that’s how it grew, from that death.
One of the most fascinating things about the book to me is the use
of the apartment as a sort of metaphor and as the dying Vishnu crawls from floor
to floor his journey resembles the stations of the Hindu ascension. Could you
talk a little bit more about that?
I think that was the one idea I had in the outline. In the sense
that here was this apartment building -- each floor represents a different stage
in life. In Hinduism, you’re familiar with the idea of reincarnation, where
you go through several lifetimes and each time you ascend a little bit more.
Parallel to that idea in Hinduism is there is also this idea that a person is
supposed to perform different things in one or perhaps several lifetimes. You
might start with a stage where the thing that propels you most is searching for
money or for bodily comfort or fame or whatever, and that’s supposed to be the
basic stage, and then when you’ve sated yourself with that, then you go on to
the next stage, where you might look for more spiritual things, perhaps you
serve other people spend your life doing charity work and so on. And after that
then there is a still more spiritual stage, and at the top a kind of grand prize
is enlightenment, or where you’re actually free of all these constraints. And
if you look at the book there are these different people who live on different
floors. There are the Pathaks and the Asranis who are contantly fighting over
their creature comforts and so on. Then there is Mr. Jalal, who is sort of just
embarked on his journey to look for other things. And then there is Vinod Taneja
on the third floor and he has sort of progressed perhaps the most of all. And
then there is Vishnu who is climbing these various stations. And he also
meetings some other people along the way who live on the landings. So that’s
the representation of the Hindu philosophy.
Were you raised Hindu?
Up to a certain age. My father is actually quite religious, he
practices and everything. I think there are several types of Hinduism in India.
Some of it is very cultural, you do certain things, and you perform certain
rites and so on. And then there is the more theoretical side, the Bhagavad
Gita and so on. I never had the theoretical side. I was never taught, this
is what this represents, this god represents this and so on. So up till about
thirteen or so I was quite busy doing the same things my father was. And then I
went through this stage, where, you know, rebellion and so on, so I stopped
doing all that. I think right now I would call myself an agnostic more than a
Hindu. But just writing the book has been very interesting because some of that
material, that theoretical side, has really come into this book. And I actually
went searching for it. And that’s been very eye-opening. I read the Bhagavad
Gita somewhere in the middle, you know that figures quite prominently in the
book, and after reading it, it was a true eye-opener, and for a while I was
wondering if I might start passing out Gitas at the airport like some other
people. In fact a strange thing happened. I was reading this book in an airplane
once and I forgot it in the seat pocket. And I can just imagine someone later on
pulling it out and saying, "Those Hare Krishnas, they’re been here as
well!" [Laughter]. So I don’t know where this is going to end. It’s
very interesting. I still call myself an agnostic. I don’t know. Previous to
this I would always look with great skepticism at these people who suddenly find
religion and go back to their roots, and now, horrors, it might even happen to
me. [Laughter]. It’s very scary.
Vishnu seems like an odd combination of power and powerlessness,
in Mr. Jalal’s vision he crushes people in his many mouths and yet as he
ascends the steps can’t even crush an ant. What are we to make of this
incongruity?
I guess that’s another type of contradiction almost, in the
sense of there’s this branch of Hindu philosophy that says that each person
not only contains God but is a part of God. But of course, Vishnu reflects both
these natures: that of a human being and that of a god. He appears as something
supernatural and very powerful to Mr. Jalal in his vision but on the other hand
this could also be a person who’s dying and who’s spirit or soul is rising
through these floors and does not have any kind of corporeal substance to it. So
I guess that’s the conflict that you see there.
Do ghosts have any place in a religion based on reincarnation?
I would say they aren’t ghosts, they’re more like spirits or
souls. And that’s what’s supposed to go from life to life. It’s the soul
this is indestructible. In fact in the Bhagavad Gita -- that’s how the Gita
starts -- where Krishna tells Arjun that he should go out and fight the battle
and kill people, even his relatives, because in fact you cannot kill anyone. All
that happens is that the soul goes from one body to another. So in that sense,
Vishnu isn’t really dying, it’s just the soul that is going perhaps on to
another existence.
In addition to the fabric of Hindu mythology that runs through the
book there is a second fabric, based on an equally powerful body of myths: the
movies. Could you talk a little bit about how these two religions, one sacred
and one profane, each pervade the other?
Movies are a big factor in India. When I was growing up, they were
practically the only form of entertainment that people really watched. There was
no TV really, and movies were everything. I see them as something that really
ties together the whole of society, whether you are rich or poor or whatever,
that’s a common frame of reference. Everyone sees movies and knows about them.
And so in terms of how they interact with religion, first of all I guess one way
of thinking about them is that there are all these movies about religious
characters. There was one movie called Jai Santoshi Ma some years back I
guess about twenty years ago or thirty years ago and that was about this
little-known goddess, I guess she was an incarnation of either Lakshmi or Durga.
But after that suddenly people discovered this goddess, and suddenly overnight
there were thousands of temples to Santoshi Ma all over the country and to this
day people perform fasts in her honor which they wouldn’t twenty years ago
because no one knew who Santoshi Ma was. So they’re really powerful. That’s
one kind of movie, that’s the mythological dramas you occasionally get.
What’s more common are the entertainment movies -- in fact my father, he was
assistant music director, he’s retired now, but he worked in the movies as an
assistant music director. So I certainly have just been completely brainwashed
by Hindi cinema. So that certainly comes true, because I think when you’re
talking about India, and talking about social life and so on there, I think
that’s really one of the key issues, one of the things that lies at the heart
of society there.
Would you describe in a little bit more detail the movies produced
by Bombay cinema? Most of us here in the U.S. are only familiar with the movies
of Satyajit Ray who
obviously is not typical of the vast output of the Indian movie industry.
Yes, he isn’t, and I have to admit that when I was growing up, I
think I must have been about -- I don’t know -- sixteen or seventeen before I
saw a Satyajit Ray movie. Most of the movies are what are called "masala"
films. Masala is basically curry powder. So it’s something that’s a mixture
of all these spices, and that’s the word that people use to differentiate
serious cinema and "masala" cinema. The masala films typically have --
people say -- that there are only three plots to these movies. One big plot is:
there are two brothers, and they are somehow separated at birth, and they
reunite at the last scene. Another plot is one grows up to be a police officer
and one is a thief, and the police officer shoots the thief and the mother cries
and so on. So that’s one. And then the third one perhaps is there’s a rich
girl and a poor boy or some such thing and they can’t marry. In fact in the
book there is this one line that one of the characters says, "This wedding
cannot take place." And that truly is the most repeated line in Hindi
movies. Because almost every movie has that line. There’s some dramatic point
where a wedding cannot take place. But the nice thing about these is that you go
to one of these movies, you can really count on certain things. You can count on
four or five or six or eight or now even ten or fourteen songs, each one nicely
choreographed, half of them with dances, half romantic songs, and so on. You can
count on maybe three or four fights, you know, a nice villain whom you can hate.
And some comedy. In fact the typical trailer of a Hindi movie goes pretty much
like that. It will flash things like COMEDY and then show you these people and
then there’ll be MELODRAMA, in fact melodrama is considered good, so it’s
actually called that, melodrama, and then there will be these people weeping. So
they are entertaining. I recently rented a Hindi movie and called a bunch of
friends from this country -- Americans -- to watch it, and they all enjoyed it.
But of course there was another movie too, and we could barely watch ten minutes
of it because it was so bad. But that’s something that everyone watches. And
the people in this book are similarly entranced by Hindi movies. I think just
about all the characters, maybe not all but pretty much all of them have
something to do with movies. Vinod Taneja -- his wife has been through this, I
mean his whole life pretty much mirrors a Hindi movie tragedy. And Visnhu
himself has this vision at the end about his life reeling back like a Hindi
movie. So I think certainly Hindi movies dominate or pervade all of society and
that’s one of the threads that I’ve played with here.
Let’s just finish up by talking about the book’s ending. That
haunting scene with the impish blue-tinged boy. What do we think of that?
That’s of course Krishna. Krishna is not just an avatar of
Vishnu. By avatar what is meant is someone who descends to earth. So he’s not
just a avatar, but he really is Vishnu. And in fact Krishna, out of the ten
avatars, has a special place, because everything is Krishna and Vishnu is
Krishna and Krishna is Vishnu. Krishna actually grew up as a boy. So in that
sense he hasn’t descended, he’s an incarnation. So when Vishnu actually
meets Krishna, it’s in some sense part of him that he’s seeing. And the
presence of Krishna, for me, actually seems to say that, well, here is Krishna,
he’s the central character of the Gita, everything is in his hands, and he is
in control of everything. So whatever has happened -- in some sense there is
this supreme being who’s controlling it. That’s one interpretation. This all
might be in Vishnu’s mind of course, because we are just seeing everything
through his mind. So that’s one interpretation of that.
It’s an amazing scene, it’s an amazing book. Thank you.
Thank you.
Reproduced with the permission of the publisher - WW Norton
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