Manil Suri 'A Room in Bombay' in Conversation w/ Pamela Painter 7/21 at 6pm

A best-selling novelist turns to memoir in this compelling story of a son’s love, a mother’s obsession, and the malevolent grip of the past.
About this Event

East End Books Ptown presents: Manil Suri 'A Room in Bombay' in Conversation w/ Pamela Painter 7/21 at 6pm

Manil Suri is the internationally acclaimed author of The Death of Vishnu and other books. His work has been translated into twenty-seven languages and received several honors, including winning the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and being longlisted for the Booker Prize. He is a distinguished professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and lives with his husband in Silver Spring, Maryland.

• PAMELA PAINTER is the award-winning author of five story collections, and co-author of the widely-used textbook, What If? Her stories have appeared in numerous publications, anthologies, and lists, such as the Norton Anthologies, and Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. She has received grants from The Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, has won four Pushcart Prizes and Agni Review’s John Cheever Award for Fiction.

A best-selling novelist turns to memoir in this compelling story of a son’s love, a mother’s obsession, and the malevolent grip of the past.
Indian American author Manil Suri grew up in a large crumbling apartment in Bombay (now Mumbai) which his parents, who were Hindu, shared with three Muslim families. Their single room, at times a refuge from the religious and territorial tensions pervading the apartment, was also a Pr*son that held them captive—his parents stuck in an unhappy marriage, the author unable to explore the dawning realization he might be gay. At age 20, Suri managed to break free and come to the US, where he finally found the freedom to embrace his sexuality and find a life partner. But the room, which still held his parents hostage, kept wrenching him back to Bombay.

By now real estate prices had risen so much that neighbors had begun conspiring to take over the room, causing Suri’s parents to dig in even more. Eventually it was only his mother, Prem, left, who had staked all her happiness on her son but was unable to escape the room’s hold on her. When a rash of mysterious incidents seemed to beset the room, Suri realized how little time he had left to convince Prem that a happier life might await beyond the four walls that both enthralled and imprisoned her.

This remarkable, gripping memoir explores how an abode can shape destiny, while delving into the difficult question of how much to prioritize our parents’ happiness over our own. Inspired by over 2,700 letters the author wrote home over three decades, it is ultimately a testament to the abiding, unbreakable bond tying a son to his mother.