| Manil Suri, the author of this erotic, dystopian, Indian adventure, is a professional mathematician. And so, it is not surprising that there is some mathematics in it. However, there really is not much and so that will probably not be the deciding factor in whether you love or hate this book, which seem to be the two most common reactions readers have to it.
Most of the mathematical content occurs towards the beginning as the protagonist's character is being set up. She majored in statistics as an undergraduate:
| (quoted from The City of Devi)
...all those exotic-sounding curves, from Gaussian to gamma to chi, I sheepishly confessed, drew me in.
|
Because of her choice of major and her success in school, she was pigeonholed into the role of the anti-social nerd:
| (quoted from The City of Devi)
By the time I finished my bachelor's in statistics, I had experienced the first inklings of how lonely a future might be lying in wait. "Numbers are her friends," everyone kept repeating, as if I shrank from the prospect of two-legged company.
|
However, the truth of the situation did not quite fit that stereotype. Her business internship after earning a graduate degree in statistics turned out to be a disaster, she continued to dream of romance and she did not share her colleagues' love of statistics:
| (quoted from The City of Devi)
But I kept yearning for something more -- I could not be sustained just by my love of the discipline. I envied the most driven of my classmates, the ones whose eyes lit up with compulsive interest at the very mention of Bayesian theory, who launched into animated lunchtime discussions of unbiased estimators and Markov chains. Why wasn't I as possessed as they were? Why didn't I share their obsessive desire to blaze a fiery career path across the subject's firmament? Why did I keep mooning over such mundane distractions as falling in love or getting married?
|
Soon, she finds romance in the form of a physicist that a friend sets her up with. There is even a bit of statistics there, which she uses to analyze their sexual encounters, but mathematics becomes less important as the main plot develops. The city of Mumbai, where they live, faces nuclear disaster and its society collapses into lawlessness. With the aid of a gay man named Jaz, she searches the city for her lover and witnesses both human horror and the appearance of Hindu gods. |
