Shiva kept refusing his wife, Parvati's, pleas to give her a child, so she went by herself into the forest. She mixed together sandalwood paste and bath oil and flakes from her own body, and fashioned them into a baby, a son, and she made him just the way she wanted him to be.
- From the Hindu myth about the birth of Ganesh, as recounted in "The Age of Shiva"
Manil Suri and his mother, Prem, have always been the best of friends, as close as the two corners of the same smile, or two tears trickling down the same cheek. So when he became a man, Suri knew that he had to break away if he were to become his own person. Now, he makes his home in Silver Spring, 8,026 miles away from the city where he was born.
"My mother, father and I lived in one room," Suri says. "I was an only child, and we were always together. In India, there's a tradition that unmarried sons live at home. That's why it was so essential that I leave home at age 20 and come to this country."
It's fair to say that Suri's efforts to forge his own identity have been successful. His second novel was recently published to laudatory notices as far away as China, India and Britain. And, in Suri's other life, he is a tenured professor of math at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Though he has become a novelist and mathematician, Suri has remained a son.
He has written so many letters home that Prem Suri once petitioned the Guinness Book of World Records to add a new category for the greatest number of words written by a man to his mother.
Her petition, though unsuccessful, read, in part:
"Manil Suri sent his first letter to his mother in 1979 when he was a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. Since then, till May 2001, he has written 2,411 letters with a total of 1,324,996 words."
"Yes," Suri says, "she counted all the words."
The mother-son relationship is the central theme of The Age of Shiva, Suri's recently published novel, the second in a planned trilogy based on the three major Hindu gods. (The novelist's first effort, The Death of Vishnu, was published in 2001.)
Shiva is the god of upheaval and destruction, so the author begins his newest story in 1947, when India was split off from Pakistan.
The story is told, not from the point of view of the god, but from that of his consort, Parvati. In the novel, she is embodied by a 17-year-old girl named Meera, who seeks to escape her domineering father by marrying the sweet, ineffectual Dev.
