Suri was born in Bombay (Mumbai), India. He attended the University of Bombay before moving to the United States, where he attended Carnegie Mellon University. He received a Ph. D. in mathematics in 1983, and became a mathematics professor at UMBC (University of Maryland, Baltimore County). He still continues to hold this job even though he is more notable as a writer, and has risen through the academic ranks of the university. Suri began writing short stories in the 1980s during his spare time, but none were published. In 1995 he began writing The Death of Vishnu, a novel about social and religious tensions in India taking place in an apartment building in contemporary Mumbai. An excerpt "The Seven Circles" appeared in The New Yorker and the novel was published in 2001, becoming an international bestseller. Suri received a six-figure advance as a result of a bidding war between publishing houses, ultimately won by W.W. Norton.

According to an interview on the audio book version of the novel, Suri is planning to write a trilogy of novels with titles featuring the three Hindu gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. The second book in the trilogy, The Age of Shiva, was published in 2008, with The Birth of Brahma slated as the third. His work contains many allusions to Indian cinema and Hindu mythology. A profile of Suri appears in the January/February 2007 issue of Poets and Writers Magazine which expands on his biography and details his struggles in getting his work published.

Suri's mathematics research is in the numerical analysis of partial differential equations.