Who would have thought Manil Suri, the only child of a middle-class Punjabi family growing up in a one-room paying guest accommodation with a shared toilet and kitchen near Bombay's Kemps Corner, devouring the pulp fiction from his local circulating library and queueing up every Saturday for the matinee show of the latest Hindi film, would turn out to be one of India's three highest-paid writers? Certainly not the lanky 41-year-old Maryland mathematics professor and author of a debut novel, The Death of Vishnu, who now joins Vikram Seth and Arundhati Roy in bagging the highest advance ever paid to an Indian writer.
"I handed over the manuscript to my agent and came to Bombay for a visit, thinking it would take weeks or even months before I heard from the publishers. But within two days, I heard from my agent that my book was going up for auction, and then the bids started getting higher." It almost frightened Suri, who decided to turn down the top bid of $405,000, "because the expectations would be too high".
Suri confesses his writing was "a matter of luck. So much so that it is almost terrifying." If he hadn't left for the US at the age of 20, for instance. "Living in that environment, it would have been physically impossible to think of writing." Or if Asian authors, like Amy Tan and Salman Rushdie, had not led the way. "Wait a sec, I told myself, I have an identity too, and I'm going to write about it," recalls Suri, who structured his novel "like a mathematical theorem which can be applied in different settings". The apartment building in which his novel is set "is also India, or the different stages of Hinduism".
The greatest stroke of luck, according to Suri, now working on the second of his trilogy, The Life of Shiva, was in being able to tap into the popularity of Indian fiction abroad. "People there are looking for new things to read, and India is exotic. But merely being exotic won't work. You need good characterisation. We have a headstart because of our long tradition of storytelling like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. There is great hope for Indian fiction."