Monday, May 5: The Death of Vishnu

by Manil Suri

Discussion leader: Ellen Getreu

As Vishnu lies dying on the staircase he inhabits, his neighbors argue over who will pay for an ambulance. Each neighbor has his or her own drama: Mr. Jalal is searching for higher meaning; Vinod Taneja longs for the wife he lost; and Kavita Asrani is planning to elope. This story becomes a metaphor for the social and religious divisions of contemporary India, and Vishnu's ascent of the staircase parallels the soul's progress through the various stages of existence.

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Glossary of Indian terms (copyright from the 2008 Harper First Perennial edition)

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Reviews for this Title:
Booklist Review:

Suri, a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, has entered the realm of literature with assurance, agile humor, and an impressive breadth of social and religious concerns. His first novel, set in Bombay, the city of his birth, conjures a beehive-busy microcosm within the walls of an apartment building. Two Hindu families bicker about water and ghee; a Muslim household is pitched into confusion when its mild-mannered patriarch turns fanatic in his pursuit of enlightenment; a Hindu girl and Muslim boy imagine that they’re in love; and Vishnu, the drunk who sleeps on the first-floor landing, drifts peacefully toward death. As he lies dreaming about love, his childhood, and his divine namesake, his neighbors fret over their tired marriages, knotty questions of status and faith, and responsibility for Vishnu. The gospel of the movies is just as influential as the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita in Suri’s tenderly comic, wryly metaphysical, and hugely entertaining tale, in which profound longings for romance and deliverance shape even the most modest (perhaps the most precious) of lives. (Reviewed November 15, 2000) -- Donna Seaman

Publishers Weekly Review: Visualizing a village, a hotel or an apartment building as a microcosm of society is not a new concept to writers, but few have invested their fiction with such luminous language, insight into character and grasp of cultural construct as Suri does in his debut. The inhabitants of a small apartment building in Bombay are motivated by concerns ranging from social status to spiritual transcendence while their alcoholic houseboy, Vishnu, lies dying on the staircase landing. During a span of 24 hours, Vishnu's body becomes the fulcrum for a series of crises, some tragic, some farcical, that reflect both the folly and nobility of human conduct. To the perpetually quarreling first-floor tenants, Mrs. Pathak and Mrs. Asrani, Vishnu is a recipient of grudging charity and casual calumny; each justifies her refusal to pay for his hospitalization. Though locked in perpetual bickering, the women are united in their prejudice against their upstairs neighbors, the Jahals, who are Muslims. While Mr. Jahal seeks to test his intellectual agnosticism by seeking spiritual enlightenment, his son, Samil, and the Asranis' spoiled, willful daughter, Kavita, prepare to defy their families by running away together. On the third floor, reclusive widower Vinod Taneja still mourns his young wife, Sheetal; their story of tentative love blossoming into deep devotion and truncated by early death is an exquisite cameo of a marital relationship. Interspersed are Vishnu's lyrically rendered thoughts as his soul leaves his body and begins a slow ascent of the apartment stairs, rising through the stages of existence as he relives memories of his gentle mother and his passion for the prostitute Padmina. Suril has a discerning eye for human foibles, an empathetic knowledge of domestic interaction and an instinctive understanding of the caste-nuanced traditions of Indian society. The excesses of life in that country--the oppressive heat, the mixture of superstitions and religious fanaticism, the social cruelty--permeate the atmospheric narrative. By turns charming and funny, searing and poignant, dramatic and farcical, this fluid novel is an irresistible blend of realism, mysticism and religious metaphor, a parable of the universal conditions of human life. Agent, Nicole Aragi. (Jan.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal Review: The lives and loves of residents of an apartment house in Bombay unfold as Vishnu, a drunk, lies dying on the steps that serve as his home. As his neighbors argue over the cost of an ambulance, the sick man drifts in and out of consciousness, reflecting on the meaning of his life. The well-developed and often humorous characters who make up the world of the building include the Pathaks and Asranis, whose difficult wives begrudgingly share a kitchen; the Asranis' lovesick teenaged daughter, Kavita, who plans to run away with her Muslim boyfriend; and Mr. Taneja, who still mourns the loss of his spouse years earlier. This nicely paced narrative is full of Hindu mythology, and, as Vishnu nears death, the belief that he might be a god causes a disturbing confrontation. The author of this radiant first novel is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland. Recommended for all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/00.]--Cathleen A. Towey, Port Washington P.L., NY Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews Indian-born Suri's imaginative first novel, set in and near a volatile Bombay apartment building, employs the figure of a drunken handyman as the catalyst for a linked series of charmingly improbable seriocomic catastrophes.The eponymous Vishnu lies crumpled in a stuporous heap on a landing just outside his door. Scandalized neighbors throw covers over his offending carcass, checking occasionally for a pulse, or telltale snores. The life of the building at first proceeds pretty much as always: fastidious Mrs. Asrani and stolid Mrs. Pathak bicker over privileges abused in their communal kitchen, while their weary husbands attempt to keep the peace. Snooty Mrs. Jaiswal disapproves of everybody; reclusive widower Mr. Taneja warily emerges from his shell; devout Mrs. Jalal fears for her unbeliever husband Ahmed's soul—and really despairs when Ahmed envisions Vishnu in the figure of his namesake deity ("with fire and smoke, and more heads than I could count"). Furthermore, the Jalals' gorgeous daughter Kavati plans to elude an arranged marriage by eloping with the Asranis' prematurely jaded son Salim—unless she becomes a film star instead. Meanwhile, Vishnu's disorderly dreams revisit his chaotic past (notably his obsession with Padmini, a dictatorial prostitute with expensive tastes), and extend to a delirium presumably derived from half-overheard conversations: he decides he has become the god Vishnu. This transformation creates insoluble problems when his neighbors finally call an ambulance to remove him, and the slumberer "becomes" the last of Vishnu's traditional avatars: Kalki the destroyer. Suri plots it all beautifully, and his suggestible characters' varied eccentricities and delusions are often very funny indeed. But the crazy-quilt inner life of (the mortal) Vishnu seems essentially unrelated to their lives, as if it belongs to another novel that Suri hasn't yet written.An amalgam of early Naipaul and R.K. Narayan, with just a whiff of Kosinski's Being There. A highly likable, if oddly conceived and assembled, debut novel. (Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2000)