2008 is One Book for Greater Hartford’s seventh year to gather the community around a work of contemporary fiction.  Each year’s selection has taken us far away, where, by learning about a different culture, we discover more about our own.  This year’s selection, The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri, takes us to Bombay.  We meet the residents of an apartment building who live side-by-side and one on top of the other, but share few social customs, religious practices, or living habits.  Their dramas, Mr. Jalal’s obsessive search for higher meaning; Vinod Taneja’s longing for the wife he has lost; and the elopement of Kavita Asrani, who fancies herself the heroine of a Hindi movie, are comically absurd as they play out against the squabbles and avoidance tactics of the Pathaks and Asranis, and the decline of the odd-job man, Vishnu, on the staircase he inhabits.