It's a Long Story

Young lovebirds can be ingenious, particularly those for whom privacy is in short supply. No big shock to readers of Manil Suri's new novel The Age of Shiva, then, to find hormonal Delhiites Meera Sawhney, 17, and hunky songster Dev Arora, not much older, on the floor of a Sufi mystic's decaying tomb in flagrante delicto. The only surprise comes for the two paramours, whose rendezvous has been espied by a nearby stationmaster's son. Word quickly reaches both their homes, which shudder with the news. "You may not realize this now," Meera's father scolds her, "but you've just ruined your life."

Teenage entanglement was a feature of Suri's 2001 debut novel The Death of Vishnu, a tale of Muslim-Hindu elopement and mob violence that garnered much critical acclaim for the Bombay-born writer (who also happens to be a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland). This time there's no bloodletting, partly because Meera and Dev are both Hindu, meaning that a hasty marriage can be arranged. It's India, 1955, after all — still an ultraconservative country. Even Meera's bullying dad Rajinder, a hard-line atheist and ostensibly a progressive who quotes John Stuart Mill and owns a company that publishes pamphlets about India's nascent freedom struggle, encourages the union. But the consequences for Meera, enacted over a quarter-century — and some 450 densely imagined if often plodding pages of her diaristic flashbacks — are unhappy indeed.

They begin with her unexpected pregnancy. Dev, whom Meera had first fallen for as she watched him compete in a school singing contest, is working as a clerk. But he's a tortured artist, and a baby, for him, would only derail his lingering fantasies of making it big in Bombay as a Bollywood playback singer. Meera's father, meanwhile, still hopes that she'll go to college and make something of herself beyond being a housewife, which for him symbolizes the feudal India of illiteracy and ignorance.

So, coerced by Dev and Dad, who has promised to send the newlyweds to Bombay and buy a flat for them as a reward, Meera, already four months along, aborts. Suri's description of the procedure, in a scuzzy room above a bathroom-fixtures shop, is macabre and grating, but typical of his hyper-realistic prose, which animates the best parts of the novel with its frankness. "Scabs of green paint were peeling off the wall and ceiling," and a "strong meaty odor, like that from a fatty cut of mutton boiled in a curry, emanated from the door."

There are two layers to this sweeping though uneven and too long tale. The first is Meera's Austenian struggle as a caged woman seeking self-realization in a chauvinistic world. Hers is a moving story in theory, as she fights against the reign of her petty tyrant of a father, against Dev's alcoholism and neglect, and later, when Dev dies, against advances from her oily brother-in-law Arya. But she's also an irritating egoist and self-styled tragedienne who blames everyone else for her problems while selfishly, and in one case quite perversely, smothering teenage son Ashvin with her maternal affection.

Secondly, there's India's fitful, parallel struggle as a nation. As a mathematician, Suri is fond of symmetries, and India's political tumult — from bloody partition through to the difficult years of Indira Gandhi's Emergency — backdrops Meera's narrative in sometimes contrived, sometimes clever ways.

As the title suggests, though, the novel's intended allusion is to India's legendary past. In this case, it's the cosmic myth of Shiva, the Hindu god of annihilation. But the deity's link to Meera (and to India as she self-destructs and regenerates) is labored. If anything, Meera more closely resembles, even fantasizes about being, the goddess Parvati, Shiva's spurned consort and the mother of Ganesh, the elephant god.

The Age of Shiva is Suri's own pachyderm of a child. It's a huge and lumbering novel that took seven years to write and leaves hardly any ground unfurrowed. But Meera's growth from narcissism to selflessness is too slow, and her core epiphany — what it means to be a parent — is a cliché. Suri's cyclorama of a newborn, metropolitan India, where streets are clogged not with carts but cars, can be engrossing. Too bad a prima donna stands center stage, blocking the view.