It is rare, even in these hyperbolic times, for a first-time novelist to be compared to Flaubert and Flannery O'Connor in the same sentence. Particularly when the writer in question is an Indian mathematician previously published only in a Bulgarian journal that he could not read. "That breakthrough was called The Tyranny of Vegetables. I regard this novel as my first non-Bulgarian success," Manil Suri says, displaying the sly humour that characterises his fiction and his conversation. Suri is talking about The Death of Vishnu. He has talked about little else recently. When the exquisite novel set in his native Bombay (now Mumbai) was published in the US in January, it got the kind of fanfare typically reserved for the warhorses of the literary field. It also propelled the 41-year-old professor of numerical analysis at the University of Baltimore, Maryland, on to the arts pages and on to the road for a 14-city book tour.
Today it is Los Angeles. Another hotel room. More interviews. Surely someone will ask: "Are you an Indian writer?"
"I prepared an answer, but nobody has asked," Suri laughs. "Do you want to hear it? Great. I think the question is supposed to emphasise `Indian', but I wonder more about the `writer' part. Am I really a writer? Or am I still a mathematician dabbling in writing as a hobby? Coming to the `Indian' part, though, I have never been asked if I am an Indian mathematician. I suppose one could classify me as an Indian-American mathematician. By that reasoning, I therefore must be an Indian-American writer. Q.E.D."
Suri is really a writer. How else do you explain passages like this from The Death of Vishnu: "The fight had ended an hour ago - the landing had been cleaned up, the children beaten, the husbands berated, and both Mrs Pathak and Mrs Asrani were being borne towards their afternoon naps on carpets of satisfaction and inner peace when Mrs Jalal came down."
So concludes a typical drama in the communal life of the Pathaks, the Asranis and the Jalals, squabbling neighbours in the Bombay apartment building that is also a microcosm of Indian life. They share not only a kitchen but also responsibility for Vishnu, a drunken scoundrel who lives - and now dies - on the landing. "Even yesterday he had barely stirred when she had filled his plastic cup," Mrs Asrani observes, "and she had felt a flutter of resentment at not having received her usual salaam in return. On the other hand, giving tea to a dying man was surely a very propitious thing to do . . . it would be foolish to stop now, when at most a few more cups could possibly be required." In the complex world so masterfully created by Suri, few human or even divine motivations are pure, and every act - man to man or god to god(s) - is based on subtly shifting economics. There are echoes of V.S. Naipaul, of R.K. Narayan.
"The depiction of the Asranis and the Pathaks, in all their convincingly human awfulness, brings to mind such masters of scrupulous meanness as Flaubert and Flannery O'Connor," Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, wrote recently.
Whatever its stylistic influences, the novel's content was largely inspired by the writer's early life. Suri's mother was a history teacher, his father wrote film music and the family lived in a one-room apartment, sharing a kitchen with the building's other residents. "As a child I didn't even know what privacy meant," Suri recalls, without a trace of bitterness. "Going back now, I certainly feel the lack of it. But as a child I just escaped into my imagination. It was actually very good training for being a mathematician or a writer. All we need is a little room where we can think."
Suri attended a "rather fancy school" that his parents struggled to afford, but he never owned a book. Those luxuries were provided by a circulating library mainly stocked with bestsellers. "I read a lot of Arthur Hailey, Irving Wallace; I read Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. It was a very strange mixture," says Suri. He lists childhood favourites such as Enid Blyton's "Adventure" series ("The River of Adventure was my absolute favourite"), Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and, above all, the forbidden pleasures of gung-ho writer James Hadley Chase. "I wrote several articles for the school newspaper that were very derivative of James Hadley Chase," he admits. "And they were quite properly rejected."
The real Vishnu lived on one of the landings in the Suris' building, doing odd jobs for food or money. "You couldn't give him too much money because he would just drink it away," Suri recalls. "Vishnu died while I was there visiting my parents in 1994. In a way, the novel was an attempt to give some meaning to his unmarked death."
While his body is decaying on the landing, the fictional Vishnu ascends to the rooftop, passing through various levels of Hindu existence at each floor. "I got horrible writer's block when the ambulance came for him," Suri recalls. "It has to leave without Vishnu and it took me almost two years to figure out how to make it do that."
Meanwhile, timid Mr Jalal takes his first steps towards spiritual enlightenment: "Recently he had seen a man recite several pages of the Koran while holding his palm over a gas flame . . . He had rummaged around the kitchen drawers and found a packet of birthday candles, which seemed perfect to start with instead." When Vishnu the handyman appears to Mr Jalal as Vishnu the god, caretaker of the universe, the mainly Hindu neighbourhood erupts in fury at the appropriation by Jalal, a Muslim, of their deity. Religious tempers are further inflamed by the elopement of the Asranis' daughter and the Jalals' son.
"My father is still very religious, my mother less so," Suri, a self-described agnostic, explains. "Growing up, I participated in all the Hindu festivals. I particularly remember as a child insisting that we observe the festival of Ganesh, keeping his statue at home for a week before immersing him in the sea. We had to ask the vegetable seller downstairs what the proper prayers were. Then my parents had to keep doing it every year in case we got it wrong."
IN 1979, Suri won a mathematics scholarship to Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. It was his first journey outside India, yet things seemed oddly familiar. He had, after all, read Erica Jong. He had grown up with Mad magazine. Only American fast food struck him as particularly disgusting. Today, the New Age version of Eastern religion distresses him. "Principles are taken from faiths which are quite intellectual, say Hinduism or Buddhism," he says. "Then they are clouded to make them more appealing. I admit it: I have a very low tolerance for mysticism."
Coming from a mathematician, the confession is predictable. Coming from a writer who plans a Hindu trilogy - Suri's next novel will be based on the life of Shiva, his third on the death of Brahma - the dismissal of mysticism seems contrary. But Suri prefers the intellectual aspect of the religion he portrays; the often comical attempt to impose on chaos a mathematical system of striving and reward. "I know what you're thinking," Mr Jalal tells his wife after his Vishnu apparition. "Why would he ever choose me? But it's hardly surprising, is it? After all the effort I've been putting in."
Joking that he even managed to work the word "calculus" into chapter eight, Suri acknowledges his debt to maths. "I think that years of writing mathematical papers has made me obsessive about cleaning up my prose - making sure that every sentence and word and idea is necessary, like a mathematical proof where brevity and compactness are essential," he says.
The Death of Vishnu began life in 1995 as a short story. But Suri's final three pages demanded more. "My mother read every chapter as I wrote it," he explains. "She liked the first, but not the second. It wasn't funny enough. So I had to make the third chapter lively. There had to be adequate amounts of action, drama, sex to satisfy or scandalise her. The trick was to get on with my own literary agenda as well."
The result is not only precise but beautiful, a judgment that pleases a writer who once painted film posters in India. "I write on a computer not only because I edit so much, but because I have to like the way the words look on the screen. Often, I will change a word because it doesn't look right," he says.
Suri may eventually see his work on a bigger screen; a Hollywood director has proposed filming The Death of Vishnu as a New York story. In the meantime, the mathematician will continue writing - or vice-versa.
The Death of Vishnu is published this month by Bloomsbury, £9.99 in UK