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Visually rich canvas
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It’s more than a personal story of a woman caught in a society in flux.
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Before The Death of Vishnu hit the market, Manil Suri used to write for himself, pen a few short stories, maybe at one a year. He used to write for the pleasure, entirely personal, of expression. Then came …Vishnu and his isolation from the literary world could no longer continue.
For all the joy encapsulating the first book, Manil is a slow writer. It has taken him seven years, to pen The Age of Shiva, the second part in his Trilogy. This time off goes Mumbai, in comes Delhi. But there is little of urban edge here, more of an inter-weaving of a personal story, of a woman caught in a society in a flux, of maternal love, not often celebrated by those who write from the dispassionate environs of the West.
Gentle undertones
Besides a gentle undertone about a woman’s insecurity, there is that little aside from the beginning about sibling rivalry. We have Meera, not quite blessed with looks; there is her sister Roopa, every inch the flesh and blood encapsulation of her name. One sister is used, the other arrogant. One sister wins it predictably; the other…well save that for the book. Suffice to say, Manil has not gone too far off the tangent. His Jalal of yore, for whose character Manil read the Koran, is replaced by Dr. Munshi Afsar, said to be a devout Muslim who prays five times a day, but who settles for a court marriage with Sharmila, the youngest of the three sisters, who loves his beard, and is impudent enough to say as much to her sister!
Yet, Manil does not so much spin a personal story of a family as use his characters and situation to cast a wider net: his focus is on the changing times in post-Independence India, a society with the uneasy if compulsive marriage of faiths, castes and classes, a time when Nehru’s vision encapsulated what the country stood for. Incidentally, Manil uses Nehru’s word to devastating effect to further his story. Yet he seldom cares to be politically correct: on pg 199 he gets a little message across on the politics of the day. Talking of Lal Bahadur Shastri, he writes, “Shastri…All he seems to care about is shoving his beloved Hindi down the throat of the south.”
The Age of Shiva is neither a play-safe saga nor a trenchant critique of the socio-political geometry of the times. Instead, it is alternately wise and winsome, even mischievous, reminding us that he has lost none of the ardour in the years following Death of Vishnu. For instance, the book opens with a graphic, if somewhat erotic, parallel drawn between Meera breastfeeding her child, and being approached by her husband, Dev, whose hairy chest is the abode of the naag! Pun? Maybe.
Similarly, a little later he talks of youth’s brazenness infusing sensuality into something as mundane as having chaat in Chandni Chowk,. “Roopa kept insisting on feeding Dev herself, picking up chunks of spice-doused banana and sweet potato with her toothpick and ostentatiously transporting them to his mouth?…”
Nationalism
Not that he confines such details only to sensual matters. He brings the same visually rich canvas into play when he talks of the national flag being an embodiment of the country’s unity. “…the centuries-old Ashoka wheel at its center forming a bridge between the Hindu strand of saffron and the Muslim strand of green. A new united India, we had been taught, with a unified identity for the future.”
Interestingly, as in the first book, Manil refuses to make any concessions to the readers in the West. He uses Hindi/Urdu words but leaves it to the reader to decipher them. As he said earlier, don’t English novels have words from French or Latin without being backed up by a glossary? Manil’s book is intimate without being too specific; it is universal without the author spreading his wares too thin.
ZIYA US SALAM
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