The Age of Shiva
Manil Suri
Bloomsbury, Rs 495
A skilfully crafted story about love and loss, The Age of Shiva is a substantial saga of family ties and betrayal that keeps you gripped from the first page onwards. Manil Suri, a professor of mathematics, is obviously that rare male author who can construct a perfectly empathetic world of a female protagonist, without tripping up, even once.
This, after all, is not unfamiliar territory: right from superbly written novels such as Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy to Manju Kapur’s Home, we have been introduced to Punjabi families preoccupied with the marriages of their adolescent daughters, and the uncertain results which follow. The trauma tosses up the usual suspects: the dominant patriarch, the pernickety mother, the rogue suitors, the rebellious daughters who delightedly discover their sexuality only to eventually succumb to boredom between the bed sheets (after their dreamboat husband turns out to be an inept lover). Normally, there will also be issues of inequality of wealth, stature, religion, education. And then, of course, comes the denouement, with the woman’s ultimate discovery of her own self, and sometimes, as in The Age of Shiva, this revelation is extremely painful, and difficult to accept.

But Suri triumphs as he manages to refashion the well-known rites-of-passage tale through some luminous writing and by endowing his characters with very human and equally fatal flaws. At the heart of it are the almost Oedipal ties between the narrator Meera and her son Ashvin, which result in an unbearably sensual and nearly illicit relationship. When the sexually naïve Meera nurses her young child, she is completely obsessed by his perfection and beauty — and is unaware of how her overwhelming desire to possess him, to physically bond with him, will lead to confusion and distrust as he grows up: culminating in a blurring of boundaries with beds being constantly pushed together and pushed apart. Her need for him, especially after her husband’s death, grows monstrously — almost annihilating her son, till he learns to resist.

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