Moving up, floor by floor, Suri bares the life of the building’s residents in its rich diversity: mean and mad, petty and sad, hilarious and all too human. The novel, laced with allusions to the four-armed god of Hindu myth-the other Vishnu-and to the Hindi big screen’s song-and-dance soaps, prompted a publishers’ bidding war that resulted in a $350,000 advance from W.W. Norton. Just out, critics are extolling its plot, characters and luminous language. Suri spoke with Newsweek’s Vibhuti Patel in New York. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What brings a mathematician to fiction writing?

Manil Suri: An act of rebellion! I heard a senior professor say, “A mathematician who does something else-like play bridge-cannot do good mathematics.” The attitude that you’re expected to subsume your identity into your profession is so prevalent that I kept my writing a secret because I did not want it to adversely affect my tenure.

What do your colleagues think now that the secret is out?

They love the success of the book.

Has mathematics influenced your writing?

I help engineers solve real-life problems. I look at their method, abstract it and analyze it. Using this method to outline my novel, I abstracted the essence of the apartment house in which I’ve set the action: What does this building represent? Beyond the narrative of the families living in it, there’s the idea of the soul’s ascension after death. It’s also a story of India itself where different religions and communities fight each other, yet they coexist. It’s reminiscent of a mathematical theorem, which is an abstract statement that gives you different truths when applied to different settings.

Which writers have influenced you?

V. S. Naipaul’s “A House for Mr. Biswas” really moved me-I loved the dialogue. But I did not read anything else by him because I did not want to imitate him. I’ve read a lot of R. K. Narayan. His “Gods, Demons and Others” was an influence not as fiction but for its myths. A subconscious influence was the character of Simon in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies.”

“The Death of Vishnu” is so earthy on the one hand-the reader can literally smell the odors in the building-but surprisingly ethereal on the other. Are you religious?

I grew up in a religious home, turned into an atheist as a teenager and later, taking the mathematician’s way out, I became an agnostic. Then, writing and researching this book, I read the Bhagvad Gita and was pulled back into the realm of spirituality that I’d shut out for a long time. The Gita made sense to me in secular terms as a primer for life. It is very sharp and crisp, it appealed to the scientist in me. And its poetry is beautiful. It’s had a profound effect on me.

Is your novel autobiographical? The character of Mr. Jalal is a learned intellectual on a spiritual search.

There was a real person named Vishnu who lived and died on the landing in our apartment building in Bombay, and there was a shared kitchen which created all kinds of problems. The rest is fiction. But yes, Mr. Jalal is my alter ego: He’s a secular humanist who has a life-altering revelation. His vision is at the center of the book.

Hindi movies play such a huge-and funny-role in the book.

I grew up with them, they were a very important part of my life. My father worked as an assistant music director. There was no television in Bombay then, there was nothing to do but go to the cinema. As a family, we went regularly-often twice a week. Movies really tie everyone together in India-all my characters are entwined by this common cultural thread. Also, the idea of illusion is central to Indian philosophy. And cinema is the grandest illusion of all. My character Vishnu disappears into the screen.

Your descriptions are so vivid. How did you remember the details after 20 years of living abroad?

I reached back and thought of all the things I loved about Bombay. Many of the things I describe have disappeared now. Compared to my life here, my life in India had a lot of color. That has remained with me, it still seems very real. It’s part of my memory.

Did you have an audience in mind as you wrote?

I was writing for myself and to entertain my mother. Reading each chapter as I wrote it, she cheered me on. She’s my biggest fan.

What’s next?

There are three gods in the Hindu trinity-Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer-so, I’m thinking, why not write something on Shiva and Brahma? Matching up life, death and birth with these three deities, I came up with “The Life of Shiva” and “The Birth of Brahma.” I’ve started “The Life of Shiva,” it’ll be a title-driven book. Since Shiva is an ascetic, he is unattainable; that makes him very erotic. With Brahma, I want to look at creation-at science versus other theories of creation-and at creativity itself. These are potent issues to work with. My trilogy will look at them as a continuum. I want to trace this trajectory.