Blending satire with spirituality

The Death of Vishnu deals with the everyday concerns and petty jealousies of a closed world, with its insensitivity to lives beyond, with a gentle irony. Yet the novel does not quite live up to the media hype, says MUKUND PADMANABHAN.

LAUNCHED on a tidal wave of hype, Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu threatens to ride out on a ripple of reality. This is one of many first novels by Indian writers in recent years that has failed to match the hoopla accompanying its release.

This is by no means a bad novel but it is hardly much more than that. If it is difficult to escape a sense of disappointment, it is because The Death of Vishnu came packaged with the most extraordinary praise. Time magazine singled out the mathematics professor cum novelist as a person to watch. Publishers Weekly gave the novel a starred review, a literary event of sorts as the publication reserves this commendation only for the rarest of books. Other reviews were just as flattering.

Then of course, there were the news reports of the monstrous advances and how publishing houses scrambled to acquire the rights. One article stated (mistakenly as it turned out) that W.W. Norton had paid an astonishing US $ 5 million for the American rights. The correct figure, as it turned out, was considerably less, but even so amounted to an impressive $ 3,50,000.

Suri's debut novel is bound by the walls of an apartment block in Mumbai and his narrative picks its way from one dwelling to another. It's a small world. The Pathaks are engaged in a battle with the Asranis over the shared kitchen. There is some nooky on the terrace as Mrs. Asrani's 18-year old daughter Kavitha has secret trysts with Salim, the son of the Jalals. Shaken by his wife's unfaltering faith, Mr. Jalal abandons his rationalism for an eclectic spiritualism. In another dwelling, Vinod Taneja mourns the loss of his wife, his first and only love.

The panwallah, the cigarette-wallah and a few others intrude now and then into this seemingly self-contained world. In the background, Vishnu, is slowly dying on the landing, which he occupies in return for doing odd-jobs for the inhabitants of the building. While the residents are conducting their petty feuds and arguments break out over who should pay for the ambulance to take Vishnu to a hospital, the building's handyman lies in his own filth and wastes away. As Vishnu reflects on his past - much of which revolves around Padmini, a prostitute he loved - the atmosphere in the apartment block becomes vitiated as the pettiness and mutual suspicion breaks out into violence and bigotry.

It is a world that Suri explores with a gentle and comic irony. The narrow prejudices, the little jealousies, the selfishness and insecurities are examined with a dry and mocking humour. The attention to the details of everyday life and the exploration of middle-class sensibilities evoke Amit Chaudhuri. In a way though, his apartment block is a microcosm, a miniaturised representation of something much larger. As the love between Kavitha and Salim becomes public and a mixture of ignorance and bigotry results in the assault on the latter's Muslim parents, Suri seems to be asking the despairing question, If people live in such disharmony in an apartment block, is there any surprise it is not very different all over the nation?

The novel is suffused with Hindu mythology and although it may seem to broaden Suri's otherwise small world, the bits about the gods and the yogi-spirits weigh heavily on the satire and, in the end, don't quite work. Suri has suggested that the mythology is essential to the structure of the novel in which the narrative is a kind of journey through the different Hindu stages of life. ("There is a period in life when you go after money, then you do service to others and (then) get increasingly spiritual.")

Indeed, by the end of the novel, spirituality has blended totally into the satire with Vinod Taneja searching for meaning and enlightenment in religious works and Mr. Jalal believing that Vishnu - who is close to death - is some kind of a god. Vishu himself suspects he is divine as he mounts the stairs of the building for the last time and finds a cluster of gods beyond the terrace door, among them Yama.

Only Kavitha sheds a (perfectly formed) tear for him, highlighting the hypocrisy and the heartlessness of the residents, who allowed Vishnu a place in their building but no place in their hearts.

The Death of Vishnu, Manil Suri, Bloomsbury, £ 16.99.

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