Manil Suri’s memoir, A Room in Bombay, is dedicated to “Prem”. It becomes clear in the first few pages that it refers to his late mother, Prem Suri née Bindra. The decision to refer to her by her formal name is revealing. Instead of instinctively reaching out for a more intimate form of address, Suri seems to want to distance himself from this primal filial bond, which, as is evident from his account, was an all-consuming force in his life. While he wants to dedicate his life’s story to the “Mummy” he adored, at times with a fiercely disturbing intensity, he also wants to acknowledge the unique person behind that figure who pushed him to discover aspects of himself he would probably not have done, left to his own devices.
In choosing this route into life writing, Suri echoes the legacy of great memoirists like Roland Barthes. When the French writer wrote his famous treatise on photography Camera Lucida, he spent a sizeable portion of the book contemplating, with what felt like survivor’s guilt, the larger-than-life canopy of love that his recently dead mother had held over him through the years. For Suri, as the only child of a couple stuck in a loveless but co-dependent marriage, the duty of being a loyal son was far more onerous than it is to most other children. For, apart from living his truth (embracing his homosexuality, for instance), he had to be the lifelong supplier of the “intimacy” that was absent from his parents’ marriage.
Born in 1958, Suri grew up in one room (hence the title), which was sublet to his parents for a modest rent, in a four-room apartment in south Bombay (now Mumbai) by an Ismaili family. Life in Razia Mansion, overrun by belligerent stakeholders, was a nest of trouble. The shared kitchen was barely made available to the Suris by their landlord, while the common bathrooms remained filthy, their occupation a sore point of contention among all the residents. When the quarrels erupted, expletives were spat out like cannon fire. If some people spewed bile liberally, others conjured up inventive humiliations (such as switching off the light every time someone went into the loo or leaving a gift in the toilet bowl to discourage their neighbours from using it).
Despite these daily frictions, irregular source of income (Suri’s father was an aspiring playback singer who never made it in Bollywood; instead, he worked as an assistant to directors like Kalyani-Anandji and Laxmikant-Pyarelal) and interpersonal squabbles, Suri’s doting parents, Prem and Ram, left no stone unturned to give their son the best life they could. He got a solid education, the tastiest delicacies even when money was tight, and the slightest hint of a sneeze from the boy set his parents on a flurry of medical attention and tender loving care. In return, Manil had to promise unflinching love to them, expressed in the form of frequent hugs and kisses “on the lips”.
This physical affection was the “drug”, Suri writes, his parents were addicted to. Another child may have usurped such advantage and exploited their parents’ emotional dependence. But Suri says he experienced this “power” he wielded over two adults as a profound, at times abject, sense of “responsibility.”
In a memorable instance, when he is too groggy to talk with his mother on the phone due to the time difference, he apologises to her in his next letter home by writing “I love you” 365 times. Over the years, he wrote more than 2,700 letters to his parents. While Prem was keen for this fact to be recognised in the Guinness Book of World Records, it was eventually counted as a national record of sorts.
Suri, now in his 60s, recounts these episodes with a wry sense of humour. But the reader only needs to put themselves in the shoes of his teenage self to get a sense of the unspoken trials of such a childhood and adolescent. Admittedly, many of the unsavoury scenes in the flat may be familiar to viewers of Bollywood cinema of a certain era (Hrishikesh Mukherjee chronicling life in the chawls) or readers of Bombay fiction of a specific vintage (Rohinton Mistry writing about the Parsi subculture). But Suri’s vision of his past is much more menacing and psychologically harrowing, rooted as it is in the “room” he remained trapped in with his parents.
Inside the microcosm of the room, young Suri discovered the perfect haven to run his own little kingdom. There he played cards with his mother, kissed his father goodnight even as he disliked the latter becoming drunk every evening. The room was where he indulged his love for reading; it was where his pubescent body awakened to desire. Yet, as the years go by, it also seemed to exert a malevolent hold over the life of the family, refusing to let them go, thwarting their efforts to find another place to live in. Even after Suri literally escapes the room by going to the US to get a PhD in mathematics, he could not fully free himself off the hold the space had over his heart and soul.
And so, thousands of miles away, he feels wracked with guilt, thinking of his parents’ inability to stand up to the machinations of the neighbours. Suri’s father eventually dies in his 80s, without ever achieving his long-coveted dream of finding a home for his family away from the room. Prem, who spends her final years in an assisted care facility in Nerul, gets a small, though not insignificant, sum of money out of a crooked promoter in exchange for her tenancy rights to the room. Once the room is handed over, Suri never ventures back in, not even for old times’ sake.
Apart from the life of his family, the other major theme of Suri’s memoir—his reckoning with his homosexuality—is told with a refreshing equanimity. Prem, who had studied psychology and Freud, was seemingly at ease with her son’s sexuality, though she was conflicted about making it public knowledge. Suri’s father’s reaction, in contrast, was more benign, even mystifying. Instead of the adversity he had feared from him, Suri finds Ram reacting to his coming out to him (much later in life) with a poise that was unusual for men of his generation.
It is tempting to explain away such unexpected behaviour as proof of unconditional parental love. However, in Suri’s telling of their story, the reader becomes keenly aware of the unique, if inscrutable, individuals that Prem and Ram each were in their own rights. Our parents are also other people, Suri seems to remind us, who we shall never fully understand, or make sense of.
For Suri, umbilically attached as he remained to his parents till their deaths, the truth behind this realisation dawns much later in life as he nurses his mother through a prolonged and harrowing spell of dementia, leading to her death. As Prem’s condition worsens, Suri is wracked with the usual doubts. Did he do everything he could to make her life easier as a dutiful son? Was it selfish of him to refuse to take her back to the US to live with him? Should he have found a better way to manage his job and his relationship with his partner Larry, while he looked after his mother at his home?
The only definitive knowledge he has in the end is that it was his unique privilege to know such a great love as he got from his mother, and that it was also “liberating for this love to have come to an end.”