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Being hailed as an engrossing read, Suri smiles genially as the accolades gather around him.
“After The Death of Vishnu, my publisher asked me what the next book was going to be about. I thought there are two more Hindu Gods, Shiva and Brahma and maybe I can play around that. Before I could blink, I was straddled with two books that I haven’t even started to think about,” grins Suri.
The second part of Suri’s trilogy, The Age of Shiva is a powerful story of a country in turmoil and an extraordinary portrait of maternal love. Meera, the narrator, struggles to establish herself against the male-dominated landscape of India after independence. “Initially, it was The Life of Shiva and it was going to be more about the son. But after I wrote the first 200 pages, I found Meera take over. I read up about the Oedipus Complex but there is practically no text that explores it from the woman’s point of view,” says Suri. As Meera comes into her own with her child, newly independent India had her own idealistic and well-meaning sons to deal with. But as the story progresses, each will have to face the consequences of a tryst with destiny.
Mathematics and writing, Suri spends his time working his way around both. “For both, it’s like chess. You have your pieces and you plot their moves. In Maths, they are variables and in fiction, they are characters,” says Suri. He denies any autobiographical overtones, although he does take incidents from his own past and twists them around. A process of give and take from life that he intends to take forward in the final part of the trilogy, after which he says he might return to one of his first stories. “It’s about a mathematician and from where I am now, it can take the shape of a larger work someday,” signs off Suri.
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