A Room in Bombay: A Memoir

Novelist and mathematician Suri (The Big Bang of Numbers) delivers a tender autobiography that unfolds primarily in the one-room Bombay flat where the author’s parents raised him. The first section concerns Suri’s childhood in the 1960s and ’70s, recounting the tensions between his Hindu family and Muslim neighbors and his humorous attempts to find privacy as he entered adolescence in cramped quarters. The next follows Suri to the U.S., where he pursued a degree and then a career in mathematics, came out as gay, and grappled with telling his family about his sexuality. In the melancholy final third, Suri returns to Bombay and chronicles his mother, Prem’s, agonizing decline from Alzheimer’s, detailing how flashes of her signature wit would cut through long days of terror and confusion. Suri expertly parallels the apartment’s combination of claustrophobia and coziness with his conflicted feelings about his aging parents (“This room that has been my crucible, controlled and tormented and driven me—how much has it shaped my history, my current self?”). His portrait of Prem is clear-eyed and prismatic, highlighting both her sweetness and her intensity. The result is a moving consideration of the ties that bind. (Apr.)