It probably takes a lot of work to get people to call you a mathematician. In fact, I am sure of it. You have to be good at math. You have to be good at calculus—because, as I learnt with a lot of struggle—those are two different beasts. You have to take it up and stay at it. Go through it in college. Probably get a doctorate.
But Manil Suri wasn’t content just being a mathematician. He figured he needed to expand his horizons, and writing would be the way he would do it.
“And what was great was I met people who were not mathematicians and thought very differently from how I did,” Suri tells me on a Zoom call from Maryland, the US.
Suri, who is a professor of Mathematics at the University of Maryland, had his memoir, A Room in Bombay, out earlier this year. The book is the account of his childhood in a cramped single-room apartment in a crumbling Bombay flat and his complex, lifelong bond with his mother.
“Writing was one of the main things that kept me going, even though I was only writing maybe a couple of stories every few years. And, I think, in terms of the training aspect, in the beginning, I was very precocious as a mathematician. My first story was called “Unfulfilled Expectations”. And it was just two pages. And when you look through it, you don't know whose expectations were unfulfilled. And then you realise, ‘Hey, it’s the reader’s expectations that are unfulfilled,” Suri adds.
Thankfully, the same cannot be said of A Room in Bombay: A Memoir. Suri has limned a poignant account of growing up in a room inside a ramshackle building in Mumbai and the way his life emerged distinctly along the unique channel of its memory.
“What really helped was that there’s a very good story behind it. And being a novelist, I was driven by that. There’s this house, and we’re fighting over how it’ll be disposed of, there’s money at stake, there’s all these intrigues and so on,” Suri says.
“So, that was one of the main things. And you read the strand story, so that story gradually drops away, and then it’s only the memoir part, which is my mother and I. And only the two of us are left at the end. So I think you need something like that, at least for me, to get people involved, invested in not only the characters, but also the narrative.”
At various instances in the book, Suri expresses the extremely urgent and frenzied need to leave the burden of where you come from, behind, and reclaim the reins of your own life. In the very beginning, when the narrator returns to the ‘room’ where he grew up, he wonders whether his mother ever “left it” in the same way that he did. It’s a staggering realisation and one that establishes fairly early to a first-time reader what sort of a narrative craftsman Suri might be.
Further on, in a chapter where he’s travelling with his husband, Larry, and he feels he has finally got his life together the way he’s always dreamt. As he’s leaving it all behind, one wonders if the long process of escaping the fishbowl existence of his old life ever got him to a point of paralysis.
“Yes, there were several instances where I was just frustrated. And I remember, once, Larry wrote to me a letter where he said that he could see my problem and he couldn’t see any easy solution. My mother came to visit, my father came to visit. They couldn’t really come here together because they were just so far apart in terms of how they behaved with each other. And so, it’s like, there are these intractable problems in life and this seemed to be one of them,” Suri recalls.
At some point, Suri had to loosen control and let things take their own course. “I finally realised that no matter what I try to do, I can’t really control my mother. And so, it was really luck in a way that managed the process to get her out of that room because the room was suddenly sold, or at least so she thought,” he says, adding, “So, with some of these problems, you just have to give it a lot of time and it might look like there’s no solution, but eventually, things have to tautologically work themselves out.”
A Room in Bombay is a rearranged culmination of the two thousand and seven hundred letters Suri wrote to his mother. As we rush headlong into the glut of communication systems and applications, that sort of a serendipitous possibility of a resource like that might be thinning out. How would one have access to correspondence of this nature from so long ago that impels them to create something as momentous as this out of that?
“Yeah, well, this is a little facetious, but when I had that jacket cover, it went through my mind: Will the current young readers even know what a letter is? Do people get letters anymore? And of course, it wasn’t just the fact that you have to write these letters out by hand, a little message; you had an aerogram and you didn’t want it to go to waste because you’re paying for it. So, you wanted to fill in as much information as possible. So the letters were more voluminous,” says Suri, adding that the fact that these letters would take between 1-2 weeks to get from the US to India, which was what made each of them that much more precious.
There are reverberations of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, EM Forster’s A Room with a View and Ruskin Bond’s The Room on the Roof in the title of the book. All evocations of a pained desire for space and spatial autonomy. But interestingly, when Suri embarked upon writing about this room that he grew up in, it wasn’t as something larger than its signified meaning.
“It was interesting because once my book was read by my literary agent and my editor, they all seemed to remark that the room is obviously a metaphor. That it’s something that constrains you, that binds you and you have to break out of it in order to find yourself. And this might sound odd, but that was the first time I thought of it that way because I was just taking it literally and it didn’t feel like a metaphor when I was living through all of these things, but you know, having completed it, I really started to see that it's not only a prison where you're kind of constrained. It’s also a haven because you’re being protected from all the hostility outside. And this is where you can come into and relax and be safe,” he explains.
Often, when one thinks about their life in the kind of introspective way that memoirs often channel, the catharsis can be particularly intense. Last year, Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me did it with a profoundly, but lovingly devastating reconstitution of the narrator’s mother’s psyche and what it did to their relationship. In A Room in Bombay, Suri skips the anticipated bitterness—and connotation of trauma—entirely.
“I think trauma is a little more intense than what I experienced. But there is some aspect of post-traumatic stress syndrome. But one case of trauma was when I was really in charge of my mother’s health. And at one point, I let the ball drop and that had a disastrous consequence on her health. And that was traumatic,” he adds.
“I was guilty about that for a long time. And I think this book helped ease some of that guilt because as I said, you have to do the best you can and you also have to forgive yourself. You have done something and it hasn’t gone right. And you have to live with that. And you have to find a way to go away from there—rise above it,” Suri concludes.