A Chat With South Asian Literati

At the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Manil Suri is a professor of math. In either a testament to the work or a gesture of humility, he notes on his academic Web site, "This is the only job I've ever had."

It's true only if "best-selling author" does not count as a job. Because on the side -- in his other, less wonky life -- Suri is a novelist whose 2001 debut, "The Death of Vishnu," and second book, this past winter's "The Age of Shiva," received worldwide attention and made bestseller lists.

Suri, who lives in Silver Spring, is among the four authors slated to appear tomorrow at the fifth South Asian Literary and Theater Arts Festival at the Museum of Natural History.

"I just love talking," he says of his summer spent traveling to promote "The Age of Shiva," which tells the story of Meera, a young Indian woman whose rebellious streak causes her to marry below her father's expectations. "Some people hate meeting the audience, but I just love it. It's the real prize in some sense."

He likes to start his readings with the book's opening passage: "Every time I touch you, every time I kiss you, every time I offer you my body. Ashvin."

It's fun because it's a fake-out. It is not about a lover but a newborn, and Suri says the book ultimately is a veiled story of India. At the festival, he'll talk about "how you subsume the history into one character" -- to make Meera's story the tale of the nation after it shed its colonizers, after partition.

"The trick was to make them follow the same trajectory," he says. "The thing with Meera is she is trying to be very independent, even when, in the case of her father, it's not serving her best interest." He compares her striving for independence to Indians under the country's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Suri often talks about his writing in terms of "trajectory" and possible outcomes -- like, well, a math problem.

He has thought hard about how his worlds intersect. And he has figured out this much:

"There are all these things that people use to attack different problems, whether they are problems such as math or writing. . . . One process is breaking things down into their building blocks and using those to create new works.

"In writing, you're really looking at your characters and looking for different paths for them to follow. You look at these different trajectories, and you say, 'Aha, I'm going to select this one.'

"When I say this, people ask, 'Is this how you constructed your novel?' And I say: 'No, I didn't. A novel takes so much more.'