Someone living a dual life’ is far too simple a description to explain the paradox that is award-winning Indian American author Manil Suri. Meet him in the day and he can give you a lecture in calculus but meet him in the night and he won’t shy away from talking about King Lear. But the two halves of Suri are not as distinct as day and night, as he himself tells us. Currently on a visit to the country to showcase his latest play, The Mathematics of Being Human (Of which he even gave a small performance during a recent talk organised by Avid Learning), the author who gave us the much loved trilogy, The Death of Vishnu, The Age of Shiva and The City of Devi, gives us a deeper insight into his life and work.
A mathematician by education, Manil explains how the author in him first came about: “The writer part initially developed as a reaction to being a mathematician. I needed a hobby that would ensure I didn’t end up like one of those professors so immersed in their subject that they can’t think of anything else. But over time, the two sides have learnt to not just co-exist, but also unify.” But while the decision was spur of the moment, the journey to becoming an award-winning author was definitely not an overnight one, he adds. “Initially, I was only writing a story or so a year — starting way back in 1983, when I first became a professor. Gradually, I started going to writing groups, workshops, etc. Rather than writing a lot, I concentrated on refining just a few pieces. An oft-repeated formula is that it takes 10 years before you can learn any craft — my first book was only published 18 years after I began.”
Although he is not the first mathematician to dabble in literature, his last famous predecessor lived about 150 years ago in the form of Lewis Carol. But while there is a dearth of people from fields such as math and literature mixing with each other, the fields themselves have a lot more in common than one would think, opines Manil. He says, “I think the techniques we, as humans, use to solve problems are the same — we only have a limited repertoire of tools at our disposal. For instance, while approaching a mathematical problem, we try and break it down into smaller parts — something that fiction writers would of course recognise as a key to writing a novel. And getting a piece into shape means revising over and over again — essentially, the mathematical process of iteration, which hopefully leads to convergence.”
Talking about his future projects, Manil says his next work will deal with another subject that is close to his heart — numbers. Titled The Godfather of Numbers, it will combine fiction, mathematics, and even a bit of mythology. “It’s aimed at non-mathematicians, so a definite challenge,” he says. Although famous for tackling the realm of fiction with great skill, Manil is best known for his vivid and distinct characters. But be it Jaz, Meera or Vishnu, it was certainly not an easy process to etch these characters, he reveals. And while the sketch of these characters is derived from some aspects of his life, such as his memory of his mother or his sexual orientation of being gay, the rest is mostly creative invention, he adds. “Most of my characters have been composites — ranging from the protagonist Meera in The Age of Shiva who definitely had some aspects of my mother to the gay Muslim character Jaz in The City of Devi who was very much an invention.” His original last piece of the trilogy was his long stagnant work, The Birth of Brahma. Telling if Brahma is still on cards, Manil says, “It has been put on the back burner. After tackling India — a topic so vast that it took a trilogy to try and capture it, I decided it’s time to take on something even more difficult to explain — mathematics.”
While the recent past has seen several prominent figures from different fields coming out of the closet and talking openly about being gay. In the context of India, where the fight for LGBT rights has been a debat du jour, Manil says the issue is a lot more complicated. He says, “India is a paradox: it’s one of the most diverse societies (think of all the religions and languages and class differences, etc) — and yet one of the most resistant ones to change. The LGBT movement is relatively new for it, so I expect it will be some time before the community finds the integration it seeks.” Revealing about the role his sexuality plays in his works, especially with the current focus on LGBT fiction as a separate stream of writing, Manil says, “LGBT fiction as a genre is most relevant during the period when their rights are being fought for. In the West, the genre has long peaked, and is essentially spent — gay characters are so commonplace, so assimilated in the mainstream, that many gay bookstores have closed. I’m glad I was able to write The City of Devi just when this issue was emerging in the forefront in India. It gave me a chance to draw upon my own gay orientation, just as other projects involve other aspects of my identity — for eg, being Indian or a mathematician.”
