Suri's book has aroused a measure of controversy in the U.S. for its depiction of the intensity of the mother-son bond. This is how The Age of Shiva starts:
"Every time I touch you, every time I kiss you, every time I offer you my body, Ashvin. Do you know how tightly you shut your eyes as with your lips you search my skin?"
It's only after several pages that the reader realizes that the narrator is talking to her infant son, not a lover.
Suri recently read these passages during a high tea for the Columbia Festival of the Arts. Standing behind the podium, he was a tall, slender exclamation point of a man - an impression emphasized by his monochromatic attire in shades of beige, which blended in with his skin tone.
But the novelist's lips are full and sensual, as if designed to expose as many nerve endings as possible to the air.
Suri later admits that he deliberately misleads his readers in the novel's opening pages.
"One thing that I really would have liked to have more knowledge about, instead of having had to feel my way through it, was the physical attraction from a mother for her son," he says. "I read Freud and I talked to psychologists, but there's not really a lot in the literature looking at the relationship from the mother's point of view. I grew up extremely attached to my mother, but not to the extent that Ashvin is in the book."
Though some reviewers have found the suggestiveness to be, in the words of The Washington Post's Michael Dirda, "slightly yucky," Suri says that it's only Western critics who interpret Meera and Ashvin's relationship as incestuous.
"It's a very cultural thing," Suri says.
"In India, boys are much closer to their mothers, and there's a very physical bond. The reviewers there all cherished the book as a very tender and natural extension of that relationship. I wanted to push the line, but I did not want to go over it. I wanted readers to wonder, 'Where is the next step, where could this lead?' "
The son whom Parvati created from her own flesh is named Ganesh. He is the god of wisdom and of luck.
Suri's parents knew their son was bright, and they scrimped and saved to send him to an elite school.
The Indian educational system placed a strong emphasis on the sciences, so, though young Manil was fond of writing, he was steered toward a career in math.
Luckily, the boy not only loved math, he excelled at it. He came to the United States in 1979 to study for his doctorate, and joined the faculty of UMBC four years later.
