THE DEATH OF VISHNU
By MANIL SURI.
New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001. 295 pages, $24.95

Arshia Sattar

In the subcontinent these days, an author's literary merit seems to be connected to the kind of advance that he or she receives from a Western publisher. In those terms, Manil Suri's $350,000 advance from W.W. Norton and Company would indicate that his first novel is a critical success. Take a look at the way the book appears on the shelf-glossy dust-jacket with a rich Indian-brocade print, inset sepia-toned photo of a man and a sari-clad woman, author photo, also in black-and-white, all harking back to an era of maharajas and gentlemen. The title, The Death of Vishnu, tantalizingly suggests the Orient and the death of god. And the contents of this carefully constructed package live up to every suggestion, every nuance, every whisper that the wrapping invokes. Manil Suri's novel oozes Indian mythology and folk tale through its minute details of life in a bustling Indian city with its modern divisions of caste, class, and religion.

Not for Suri is the broad canvas of Salman Rushdie's historical universe. Rather, like Rohinton Mistry and Kiran Nagarakar, Suri focuses on microcosmic communities and situations. The eponymous Vishnu is a derelict who lives and dies on the landing of a middle-class Bombay building. His looming death, in a state of destitution, causes the bourgeois conceits of the building residents to come to the fore, and we learn about the lives and loves of the neighboring families. The Hindu Asranis and Pathaks share a kitchen, and the women of the two families compete for servants, for water, for status, and for rewards in heaven. Above them lives a Muslim family, the Jalals, whose son, Salim, seduces the Asranis' daughter and talks her into eloping with him. Still above them lives Taneja, a lonely widower seemingly detached from the foibles and follies of his more worldly neighbors. It is the women that animate this small universe, squabbling and jockeying for position in the building as well as in the tale, while the men are detached and shadowy, each pursuing either a god or an epiphany.
There are three main strands in the story: Vishnu's pre-death visions and memories, the elopement of the young Hindu-Muslim couple, and Mr. Jalal's quest for spiritual truth. All three strands come together in a complex fabric that is illuminated by Indian mythology, but that is also shadowed by the violence of religious difference and stained with blood. To bring all this to life, Suri draws heavily on personal and cultural memory, using myth, folk tale, and remembered experience with equal facility and ease. He recreates the central theophany of the Bhagavad Gita for Vishnu and Jalal and juxtaposes it with the gritty realism of a Bombay cab ride, a ladies' lunch party, and the life of the street with the cigarette man and the paan seller and the radio man. Suri's language is clear and lucid, and he has control over his material, indulging the exotic but keeping the larger whole accessible to the general reader.
There is an ascending movement in the story. Suri places Taneja in the topmost floor of the building. Of all the characters, he is the most detached, and therefore, by Hindu standards, the most spiritually advanced. Below him lives the desperately seeking, spiritually confused but eager Ahmed Jalal, and below him live the quarreling Asrani and Pathak women whose husbands seek more tangible religious favors from the local gods and temples. Similarly, as Vishnu dies, apparently peacefully, his soul ascends the steps of the building, and his vivid memories of his mother and his prostitute lover turn into surreal cosmic visions that culminate in the revelation that he is the god for whom he is named, that he is, in fact, the upholder of the universe.
But despite the packaging and the obviously sincere attempt to capture something of the physical and spiritual clutter of India, this first novel fails to deliver all that it promises. Manil Suri falls short of the grand narrative and swirling leaps of imagination that characterize Rushdie's better works. He is also unable to grasp the solid reality, the bitter but poignant truths that Mistry so artfully and gently illumines. It is almost as though Suri works too hard to "authenticate" himself as a writer from the subcontinent-there are too many set pieces of description, too much reliance on myth to elevate what is basically a fairly mundane narrative without a core. Even with the liberal doses of myth and exotica, the cosmic visions and the revelations, neither the writing nor the plot soar above the short staircase on which Vishnu dies. On closer inspection, what could have been a rich and complex tapestry turns out to be a clever hand-block print.

Arshia Sattar teaches Indian Studies at Mahindra United World College in Pune. She has abridged and translated Somadeva's Kathasaritsagara and Valmiki's Ramayana from Sanskrit for Penguin (India), and she frequently reviews books for newspapers and magazines in India.