Manil Suri kept his secret for years. It wasn't a deep, dark mystery by any means, but something precious shared only with family and friends. The kind of secret that the 40-year-old math professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, suddenly would remember while driving to work or retrieve from the back of his mind before falling asleep.
What few of his university colleagues knew was that Suri is a fiction writer of great imagination and beauty. In January, W.W. Norton publishing house purchased the Bombay-born mathematician's first novel for nearly $500,000. Almost simultaneously, the New Yorker magazine purchased a short story excerpted from the novel and published it in its Feb. 14 issue. Since then, overseas rights to the book, in which Suri weaves a highly textured tale about the tenants of a particular apartment building in Bombay, have been sold in more than a dozen countries. The U.S. edition is scheduled to be published in late January.
"I see plenty of people not just in math but in all kinds of jobs who become their job. Their personality just seems to be that job, and that is why I think it is important to do more than one thing," Suri says.
"The other thing is, of course, you have this delicious secret, and you are thinking, 'Oh, if only they knew what I was really up to.' "
Suri inhabits two seemingly unrelated, esoteric worlds. In academia, he does research in computational mathematics, a pursuit that involves designing and studying computer algorithms that can be used to approximate solutions for problems too complicated to be solved precisely with formulas. In "The Seven Circles," the short story published in the New Yorker, he describes a world in which an arranged marriage between Vinod, a young banker in Bombay, and Sheetal, a young woman of decided opinions, begins as a prickly negotiation and evolves into a lasting love affair.
But Suri's two passions -- mathematics and fiction -- are efforts to describe the same, enormously complex universe, one that resists attempts to reduce it to a simple formula.
"A similarity exists between writing a chapter and writing a math paper," Suri says. "You have to scan both of these so many times to find flaws or until they are without flaws or hitches or anything like that. Sometimes I spend an hour searching for just the right word, just like in math where I would look for exactly the right thing that I need. But in both cases, you can really tell when it is ready. There is something that happens, and you really feel that it is at the right stage."
