For years, Manil Suri wrote in secret. Fearing disapproval from his fellow mathematics professors if they discovered he spent his leisure time writing fiction, Suri attended writing courses clandestinely while establishing himself as a tenured academic at the University of Maryland.
Absconding to a writers' retreat one summer, he said he was writing a textbook. When asked to show his efforts, Suri said he needed to return the following year to complete the book. 'People, at least in the sciences, really want to hear that you're spending all your time doing whatever your field is,' says Suri, 48. 'I decided that I wouldn't take any chances.'
But when his debut novel The Death of Vishnu (2001) won a US$350,000 advance and was featured in extracts in The New Yorker, Suri's cover was blown. After coming out as a writer, he realised he wasn't alone in the mathematics fraternity in having secret hobbies. Two colleagues confessed to being closet actors; another confided that he was a passionate pianist.
By that point the mathematics department risked losing Suri to writing altogether. With a novel translated into 22 languages and shortlisted for the respected PEN/Faulkner Award, many novelists would happily abandon academe to write full time. But Suri's numerical interests continued to consume him. 'It would be just too difficult to sit at home and write all day,' he says. 'You have to wait many years for any gratification.'
Elegantly dressed in a gold-striped shirt and tan Versace suit, Suri exhibits angular features and careful, professorial speech. He exudes the neatness and precision of someone drawn to mathematical formulae and finely chiselled prose.
Over his black cod with miso at a Japanese restaurant in New York, where he has commuted from his Washington home, Suri explains that he started writing after becoming an academic and deciding he needed an interest. His first short story, The Tyranny of Vegetables, was printed in Cyrillic after an editor asked him for a story without telling him it was for a Bulgarian journal.
It was only after he began writing about India that he found an assured voice. 'When I first started I was writing things that were not geographically specific. Then I wrote a story about India and the writing seemed much more alive.'