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The Age of Shiva
The Death of Vishnu, said Suri in an interview, "gave a freeze frame of India in contemporary times", while The Age of Shiva explores how the country got there. The Birth of Brahma might answer the "obvious question": Where will India's future take it? It is a sign of the times that novelists are often read in the West as providing answers to such questions about the non-West. Perhaps the answers given by such writers are more palatable than those given by scholars, or simply more readable. Because, despite his tendency to select clich`E9s for titles, Suri writes well and continues to sustain the reader’s attention. The Age of Shiva is a love story and a family drama, painted on a large socio-historical canvas. It uses legends associated with Shiva as a kind of lightly-sprinkled garnish. Meera, less beautiful than her older sister, Roopa, falls in love with Dev, then the boyfriend of Roopa. When Roopa dumps Dev for a more suitable boy, Meera steps in and Dev reciprocates. Tongues wag, and Meera and Dev get married. The marriage does not thrive. Dev strikes a rather Faustian bargain with Meera’s rich father in order to follow to Mumbai his dream of becoming a singer. Their move does not improve their marriage, and only when their son is born do things change. But fate steps in, as it always does in such narratives. The plot sweeps across north and west India, and from Partition in 1947 to beyond the end of Indira Gandhi's Emergency in 1977. The early part, depicting Meera’s tribulations as a bride, is the most interesting, sustained mostly by her character, which remains central and gripping. As the novel proceeds, it loses momentum, but never grinds to a halt. Maternal love is powerfully depicted and the main characters are convincingly delineated. In general, The Age of Shiva is not thought-provoking or fresh in its subject matter: it is not the compelling epic that the blurbs seem to promise. And it does not challenge the limits of the novel. But it is always readable, in a manner that neither taxes the reader’s intelligence nor insults it. By arrangement with The Independent
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Manil
Suri's first novel was The Death of Vishnu; this one is The
Age of Shiva. What next, I thought: The Birth of Brahma?
Actually, Suri's next novel is to be called that, completing a literary
sweep of the Hindu trinity.