Interview with Manil Suri, Author of The Age of Shiva

JMF: How did you choose this point of view of Meera, to have this extended interior monologue talking to Ashvin?

MS: Well, I knew that the book was originally more about Ashvin than Meera. It was supposed to be; he was the Shiva character in some sense where he would be an ascetic almost and unattainable to those who loved him. I started with his mother and I also wrote later on in his life other characters who loved him. I started with Meera and once I sat down to write the voice just came to me exactly as you see it where she was talking to him. The first two pages in the book are the first two pages I wrote down. This was in September 2000. She really manifested herself in that second person voice talking to her son. That's what I just continued with. I decided to write a chapter about her back story. Basically, two hundred pages later Ashvin still wasn't born so I knew it was really going to be her story. I just followed her, my intuition, her voice, or whatever you want to call it and that is what she led me to.

JMF: Ashvin is the 7th lunar month with 3 major festivals that are important in the novel. As a child he is nearly a "god" in Meera's eyes. She dotes on him, embraces him. Is this a reasonable reading of the significance of his name?

MS: There are several meanings of Ashvin. One of them is there are supposed to be these Ashvin twins who race through the universe. There is a constellation, a pair or stars with that name. That's the interpretation I used. Ashvin is also related to horses and physicians, different meanings. The one about the twins is the one I picked. Of course, if you have read the novel, he is named to pair him with someone that Meera lost. The real onus for me when I started working with this is the name has this interesting anagram quality where it's close to Vishnu and it's close to Shiva, too. You see this constant pull in Ashvin where….Because Shiva is the character who withdraws from the world, the ascetic. Vishnu is always trying to pull Shiva back into the cycle of life because his participation is needed to keep the world alive. So you see these two attributes playing out in Ashvin. The interesting thing is that one has to say which one is the stronger one, the dominant one. At the end, he's shown, in the last glance you have of him, looking up at the sun, suggesting more of the Vishnu character whereas his father - it harks back to something where his father is looking at the moon, more of a Shiva character.

JMF: How do you see America and India relating to each other as part of the world family? Are we closer together than we have been in the past?

MS: Yeah. I think so. That's one of the things I kind of touched in this novel, just the relation between India and the West and America in particular. The analogy that I tried to bring out, actually, I didn't try to bring out; it was something I realized after I'd finished the novel. It was that just like Meera is constantly rebelling against her father Paji. She is always trying to follow her own path even if she makes mistakes. India was doing something similar to the colonial powers that left where the West wanted her to behave in a certain way. It was always that Nehru and Indira Gandhi were always non-aligned and not all their decisions were good ones. People starved as a result of them, but they seemed to have made this channel and reached a point where India is in an interesting position now. Certainly, during those years India was not very friendly to the US. Nixon deployed the 7th Fleet against India. There were strained relationships for many decades, which I suspect is going to grow even stronger.

JMF: In any story about India one of the major themes is the religious divide between Hindus and Muslims, the question of a religious versus a secular state. Is that diversity helping now or hurting?

MS: I think that it not just those two, but all this other diversity that goes along with it. I think that people in India are very conscious of their differences, the fact they are divided by language and caste and skin color and religion and social class and all sorts or things, education levels. They discriminate against each other regularly on all these bases. If you grow up in India you get a thick skin in some sense where you expect to be discriminated against. Where it is not necessarily discrimination, but people of one group will stick together. This has a very interesting effect. I don't know if you looked at my website; I've written an essay on this. What it does is it stops the country from breaking apart, because whenever you get a very quick group that might try to secede or have enormous political power, if you look inside you will always find these sub-groups and there is always this tension or friction among these sub-groups so you can never have this enormous tidal wave which is going to change the country dramatically. Religion is a big thing in that. Hindus and Muslims is a big divide; that is always going to continue. There have been governments that have come into power by promising things against minorities, laws against minorities, or laws that don't favor minorities. But, then, they always have to go back once they are in power and get their votes so it is very interesting how that balances out.

JMF: In your youth (say 10-16) were your intellectual interests in math/science or literature or some combination?

MS: I read a lot of genre fiction, not what you would call literature. In India, even now, if you are good in studies (and I was) you are pushed into the sciences. I was interested in chemistry. That is what I took. When I finished school, then I switched to physics, and I finally switched to math. I always knew I was going into the sciences, and I never really considered any other route. I did have this habit, this hobby of writing. I used to enjoy writing, and that is something that when I joined my university I decided let me once again try to write, and that's how I started writing.