bodyType

customContents

entityId

printArticlePageQuery

filter

article

body

urlAlias

articleSectionsContent

articleSeoArticle

articleSourceHeaderArticle

contentSchemaRenderContent

contentSubHeadlineContent

contentHeadlineContent

mainImagePrintArticleArticle

authorBlockPrintArticleArticle

contentSponsorTagContent

articlePianoPaywallContent

scmpYoutubeContent

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

query printArticlePageQuery(
  $entityId: String!
  $customContents: [CustomContentInput]
  $bodyType: BodyFormatTypeEnum
) {
  article(filter: {entityId: $entityId}) {
    entityId
    body(customContents: $customContents, type: $bodyType) {
      json
    }
    urlAlias
    ...articleSectionsContent
    ...articleSeoArticle_3o8td4
    ...articleSourceHeaderArticle
    ...contentSchemaRenderContent
    ...contentSubHeadlineContent
    ...contentHeadlineContent
    ...mainImagePrintArticleArticle
    ...authorBlockPrintArticleArticle
    ...contentSponsorTagContent
    ...articlePianoPaywallContent
    ...scmpYoutubeContent
    ...hooksTrackPageViewArticle
    id
  }
}

fragment articlePianoPaywallContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  ...hooksPaywallPromiseContent
}

fragment articleSectionsContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  sections {
    value {
      ...helpersCheckIfNewsSectionInFirstIndexSection
      ...entityLink
      name
      id
    }
  }
}

fragment articleSeoArticle_3o8td4 on Article {
  ...hooksArticleSeoArticle
  ...helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle
  ...helpersGetArticleTypeArticle
  entityId
  publishedDate
  updatedDate
  summary {
    text
  }
  subHeadline {
    text
  }
  body(customContents: $customContents, type: $bodyType) {
    text
  }
  keywords
  sections {
    value {
      name
      id
    }
  }
  topics {
    name
    entityId
    id
  }
  urlAlias
  authors {
    name
    id
  }
  images {
    style(filter: {style: "768x768"}) {
      url
    }
  }
  readingTime
}

fragment articleSourceHeaderArticle on Article {
  urlAlias
  ...entityLink
}

fragment authorBlockPrintArticleArticle on Article {
  ...defaultArticleDateContent
  ...authorNamesArticle
}

fragment authorNameAuthor on Author {
  ...entityLink
  name
  entityUuid
}

fragment authorNamesArticle on Article {
  authorLocations
  authors {
    entityId
    location
    ...authorNameAuthor
    id
  }
}

fragment blockquoteQuoteContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  ...contentShareWidgetContent
}

fragment checkersCheckContentContainsStarlingImageContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  topics {
    entityId
    id
  }
}

fragment contentHeadlineContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  headline
  socialHeadline
  ...contentHeadlineTagContent
  ...helpersUseContentSponsorContent
}

fragment contentHeadlineTagContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  ...hooksContentHeadlineTagContent
}

fragment contentNewsletterWidgetContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  topics {
    relatedNewsletters {
      ...helpersMassageToNewsletterItemNewsletter
      id
    }
    id
  }
  sections {
    value {
      relatedNewsletters {
        ...helpersMassageToNewsletterItemNewsletter
        id
      }
      id
    }
  }
  ... on Article {
    relatedNewsletters {
      ...helpersMassageToNewsletterItemNewsletter
      id
    }
  }
}

fragment contentSchemaRenderContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  ...blockquoteQuoteContent
  ...imageContent
  ...inlineWidgetContent
  ...photoGalleryWidgetContent
  ...scmpYoutubeContent
}

fragment contentShareWidgetContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  entityId
  urlAlias
  shortUrl
  socialHeadline
  headline
}

fragment contentSponsorTagContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  ...helpersUseContentSponsorContent
}

fragment contentSubHeadlineContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  subHeadline {
    json
  }
  summary {
    json
  }
  ...contentSchemaRenderContent
}

fragment defaultArticleDateContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  ...hooksArticleDateUtilsContent
}

fragment entityLink on BaseWithApplicationAndUrlAlias {
  __isBaseWithApplicationAndUrlAlias: __typename
  __typename
  entityId
  entityUuid
  urlAlias
  urlRedirect {
    toUrl
    id
  }
  application {
    entityId
    id
  }
  ... on Section {
    fullSectionPath {
      entityId
      id
    }
    parentSection
  }
  ...helpersAppBarVariantBase
  ...helpersApplicationBase
  ...helpersCheckIsPlusArticle
  ...helpersStyleSectionContent
}

fragment helpersAppBarVariantBase on BaseWithApplicationAndUrlAlias {
  __isBaseWithApplicationAndUrlAlias: __typename
  ...helpersCheckIsLiveArticle
  ...helpersCheckIsPlusPage
  ...helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle
  ...helpersCheckIsPostiesPage
  ...helpersCheckIsPostMagazineArticle
  ...helpersCheckIsStyleArticle
  ...helpersSectionContent
  ...helpersStyleSectionContent
}

fragment helpersApplicationBase on BaseWithApplicationAndUrlAlias {
  __isBaseWithApplicationAndUrlAlias: __typename
  ...helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle
  ...helpersCheckIsPostiesPage
  ...helpersCheckIsPlusPage
}

fragment helpersCheckIfNewsSectionInFirstIndexSection on Section {
  name
}

fragment helpersCheckIsAmpEnabledArticle on Article {
  entityId
  types {
    value {
      entityId
      id
    }
  }
  sections {
    value {
      entityId
      id
    }
  }
  disableOffPlatformContent
  sponsorType
  published
  ...helpersCheckIsPlusArticle
  ...helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle
}

fragment helpersCheckIsLiveArticle on Article {
  flattenTypeIds
  liveArticle {
    status
    id
  }
}

fragment helpersCheckIsMainTopicContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  topics {
    entityId
    id
  }
}

fragment helpersCheckIsPlusArticle on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  ... on Article {
    paywallTypes {
      entityUuid
      id
    }
  }
}

fragment helpersCheckIsPlusPage on Page {
  urlAlias
}

fragment helpersCheckIsPostMagazineArticle on Article {
  sections {
    value {
      entityId
      id
    }
  }
}

fragment helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle on Article {
  sections {
    value {
      entityId
      id
    }
  }
}

fragment helpersCheckIsPostiesPage on Page {
  urlAlias
}

fragment helpersCheckIsStyleArticle on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  sections {
    value {
      entityId
      id
    }
  }
}

fragment helpersGetArticleTypeArticle on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  ... on Article {
    types {
      value {
        entityId
        id
      }
    }
  }
}

fragment helpersMassageToNewsletterItemNewsletter on Newsletter {
  entityId
  name
  alternativeName
  description {
    text
  }
  summary {
    text
  }
  homepageDescription {
    text
  }
}

fragment helpersSanitizeArticleTypeEntityIdsArticle on Article {
  types {
    value {
      entityId
      id
    }
  }
}

fragment helpersSanitizeAuthorTypesArticle on Article {
  authors {
    types
    id
  }
}

fragment helpersSanitizedAuthorEntityIdsArticle on Article {
  authors {
    entityId
    id
  }
}

fragment helpersSectionContent on Section {
  fullSectionPath {
    entityId
    id
  }
}

fragment helpersStyleSectionContent on Section {
  fullSectionPath {
    entityId
    id
  }
}

fragment helpersUseContentSponsorContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  topics {
    entityId
    sponsor {
      ...sponsorTagSponsor
      name
      type
      id
    }
    id
  }
  ... on Article {
    sponsorType
  }
  ...helpersCheckIsMainTopicContent
}

fragment hooksArticleDateUtilsContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  createdDate
  publishedDate
  updatedDate
}

fragment hooksArticleSeoArticle on Article {
  ...helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle
  ...helpersCheckIsPostMagazineArticle
  ...helpersCheckIsStyleArticle
  ...hooksContentHeadlineTagContent
  ...helpersCheckIsAmpEnabledArticle
  entityId
  headline
  socialHeadline
  types {
    value {
      entityId
      id
    }
  }
  authors {
    entityId
    id
  }
  images {
    generic_og: style(filter: {style: "og_image_scmp_generic"}) {
      url
    }
    styles(filter: {styles: ["og_image_posties_article", "og_postmag", "og_image_style", "og_image_scmp_analysis", "og_image_scmp_explainer", "og_image_scmp_editorial", "og_image_scmp_fact_check", "og_image_scmp_debate", "og_image_scmp_live", "og_image_scmp_obituary", "og_image_scmp_opinion", "og_image_scmp_review", "og_image_scmp_series", "og_image_scmp_generic"]}) {
      url
      style
    }
    type
  }
  urlAlias
}

fragment hooksContentHeadlineTagContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  __typename
  ... on Article {
    types {
      value {
        name
        entityId
        description {
          text
        }
        id
      }
    }
    ...helpersCheckIsStyleArticle
  }
  flag
  sections {
    value {
      name
      id
    }
  }
  ...hooksContentHelperContent
}

fragment hooksContentHelperContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  ...helpersSanitizeArticleTypeEntityIdsArticle
  ...helpersSanitizeAuthorTypesArticle
  ...helpersSanitizedAuthorEntityIdsArticle
  flag
}

fragment hooksPaywallPromiseContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  entityId
  ...helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle
}

fragment hooksTrackPageViewArticle on Article {
  entityId
  publishedDate
  headline
  sections {
    value {
      name
      id
    }
  }
  urlAlias
  authors {
    name
    id
  }
  entityUuid
}

fragment imageContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  headline
  ...checkersCheckContentContainsStarlingImageContent
}

fragment inlineWidgetContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  ...contentNewsletterWidgetContent
}

fragment mainImagePrintArticleArticle on Article {
  images {
    title
    url
    isSlideshow
    size_652x446: style(filter: {style: "652x446"}) {
      url
    }
  }
}

fragment photoGalleryDialogContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  __typename
  ...contentShareWidgetContent
}

fragment photoGalleryWidgetContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  ...photoGalleryDialogContent
}

fragment scmpYoutubeContent on Content {
  __isContent: __typename
  entityId
  urlAlias
  publishedDate
}

fragment sponsorTagSponsor on Sponsor {
  name
  type
  images {
    url
  }
}


sections

types

disableOffPlatformContent

sponsorType

published

headline

socialHeadline

authors

images

publishedDate

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

keywords

topics

readingTime

authorLocations

entityUuid

Ben Naparstek

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.'
Suri showed the first two chapters of The Death of Vishnu to his writing instructor, novelist Vikram Chandra,  who pressed him to complete the novel. 'He said, 'This is going to be a real trenchant novel.' That word trenchant gave me a year of writer's block because all I had to do was write this 'trenchant novel' and I couldn't do it.' But Suri became unblocked after a five-day workshop with American writer Michael Cunningham,  who told him: 'You are a writer. You have to do this at any cost.'
He still had much to learn. When influential literary agent Nicole Aragi  agreed to represent him, Suri travelled to New York to interrogate her. 'I had no idea how difficult it was to find an agent so I really tried to trip her up. After I put her through all this, she told me that she gets about 20 applications a week and takes only two or three a year.'
The Death of Vishnu explores various lives in a Mumbai  apartment block modelled on the building in which Suri grew up, where an alcoholic odd-jobs man named Vishnu lived on the landing. 'I saw his death and I wanted to give some meaning to it. It was a question of coming up with a background and life,' he says.
Though Suri, an only child, lived with his parents in a single room of a flat shared with other families, they  scrimped to send him to an elite school. 'I was careful never to invite people over because I was always anxious about people finding out about my humble origins,' he says.
He discovered privacy for the first time on moving to the US to pursue his PhD in 1979, which enabled him to come out as gay and find a partner. 'I didn't meet a single gay person in India. It was completely invisible.'  In India then,  'whether you were gay or straight it was a very closed society where there wasn't any premarital sex and there wasn't much dating. Everybody was in the same boat.'
Suri's move was traumatic for his parents, planting in him an enduring sense of responsibility for their happiness. After years of receiving letters every second day from her son, his mother Prem wrote to Guinness World Records  but was told there was no entry for which she could qualify. Suri returns to India three times a year to visit Prem, now in her 80s, whose family were Hindu refugees from Pakistan after Partition  in 1947.
The tensions between Hindus and Muslims in post-independence India form a backdrop to Suri's newest novel, The Age of Shiva. Whereas The Death of Vishnu takes place in one day in a single building, The Age of Shiva incorporates several decades and cities, telling a story surely shaped by Suri's intense bond with his mother.
The novel's narrator, Meera, marries the handsome but remote Dev, an aspiring pop singer from a less affluent family. Even before Dev descends into depression and alcoholism, Meera realises her mistake. She sees the birth of her son, Ashvin, as offering an escape from her bleak life; she becomes devoted to him with a suffocating and latently sexual ardour.
The novel is partly narrated by Meera in the second person addressing her son, which Suri says makes the reader 'really get to see how close this woman's bond is with her son'. Suri speculates that his homosexuality contributed to his depiction of the mother-son relationship because 'being gay means that the strongest relation you have with a woman is probably with your mother'.
Writing in the voice of an assertive female was second nature given his family's history of independent women.
Suri's grandfather died soon after his mother fled with her parents and three siblings from Pakistan, leaving five women to fend for themselves in a rigidly patriarchal society. Desperate for a job, Prem wrote to Indira Gandhi  - and served as her secretary in 1952 before becoming a teacher. Suri's father Ram was an assistant music director in Bollywood and Suri's familiarity with that milieu fed into his portrayal of Dev's dispiriting experiences in the music industry.
Meera's story reflects the Oedipal myth of Shiva's wife, Parvati,  who, neglected by her puritanical husband,   trained all her attention on  her son at Shiva's expense. Suri set out to remedy the cliche of Shiva as a purely destructive force that 'goes around with a flaming sword and smites down everything'. He is a destroyer 'but in a very different sense', he says. 'He's an ascetic and he withdraws from the world and his presence is needed for the world to keep going. It's without him that the world starts dying.'
The Age of Shiva forms the second part of a triptych about the trinity of Hindu deities, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.   But Suri says the trilogy has become primarily about India rather than mythology, with The Death of Vishnu being a snapshot of contemporary India and The Age of Shiva tracing its history. His next novel, about Brahma, will imagine India in the near future. After writing 100 pages set in the US, he recently started again from scratch after deciding to set the work entirely in India.
'I keep being pulled back there,' Suri muses. 'I don't know if some day I'll break free.'
Writer's notes
Genre: literary fiction
Latest book: The Age of Shiva
Current project: another novel
Age: 48
Lives: Washington
Family: Larry Cole, engineer, partner for 18 years
Other works: The Death of Vishnu
Other jobs: Mathematics professor
What the papers say: '[The] constant juxtaposing of the banal and the profound, the domestic and the quasi-supernatural, the earthy and the lyric, combined with Suri's feeling for his characters ... makes The Death of Vishnu not just a very fine Indian novel, but a superb, cinematic performance of texture and humour.' - The Irish Times
Author's bookshelf
The Elephanta Suite   by Paul Theroux
'Three novellas set in India.  The middle novella summarises the dynamics of the new relation between east and west.'
No God in Sight   by Altaf Tyrewala
'He has a circular structure where he jumps from one story to another and comes back to
the end. Set in Bombay, it is wonderful.'
India After  Gandhi:  The History of the World's Largest Democracy   by Ramachandra Guha
'A voluminous book on the history of India after independence. It brings things to life which I always thought would be very boring to read about.'
Shame   by Salman Rushdie
'One of the first literary novels that I read, way back in the 1980s. I used to read a lot of genre fiction and someone presented me with this and it was completely unlike anything I'd ever read before.'
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found  by Suketu Mehta
'He really gets beneath the skin of Bombay. Even though I lived there for 20 years he showed
me sides of the city that I didn't know existed.'



Secret passions