An Obedient Father - Softcover

Sharma, Akhil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571206786 ISBN 13: 9780571206780

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2002

Synopsis

Ram Karan, a corrupt official in the Delhi school system, lives in one of the city's slums with his widowed daughter and his eight-year-old granddaughter. Bumbling, ironical, sad, Ram is also a man tortured by a terrible guilty secret. When Rajiv Gandhi, the soon-to-be Prime Minister, is murdered, the country is plunged into confusion and Ram, as his department's resident bribe-collector, is trapped in a series of escalating, potentially deadly political betrayals. While he tries to protect himself and his family, his daughter reveals a crime that he had hoped would be buried forever. An Obedient Father takes the reader to an India that is both far away and real - into the mind of a character as tormented, funny, and morally ambiguous as one of Dostoevsky's anti-heroes. This is a subtly rendered tragicomedy of contemporary India by an enormously gifted young writer.

About this title

Review

Readers opening this first novel from Akhil Sharma find themselves face to face with a wildly unappealing main character. Ram Karan is a corrupt civil servant, chubby and self-hating. "I had been Mr. Gupta's moneyman for a little less than a year and was no good". Ram has no illusions about his failings: "My panic in negotiations was so apparent that even people who were eager to bribe me became resentful". Things at home aren't so hot either: Ram's wife has recently died, as has his son-in-law, and so his daughter, Anita, and granddaughter, Asha, have moved in with him. The first chapter of An Obedient Father is lugubrious and oily and awkward, like its narrator; then suddenly the whole thing breaks wide open. Drunk one night, Ram touches Asha with his penis. Anita walks in, and the family's secret is out all at once, like a just-freed, very angry cat: Ram forced Anita to have sex with him repeatedly when she was 12.

Sharma, a Delhi-born New York investment banker, has written a novel that is satisfyingly ambitious and full of really lovely imagery (tulips, for instance, are "heavy-hearted"). He squares Ram's downfall in the context of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. As India descends into political turmoil, Ram is made accountable for corruption both at work and at home. What gives the book its engine is its even-tempered handling of Ram himself: he is always complex, never a moral lesson or a villain. By the time Anita exacts her quietly devilish revenge, we feel neither glee nor pity, just sadness. Sharma doesn't have perfect control of his material--the transitions between personal and political can be abrupt, the tension between father and daughter unravels sloppily. Still, this is a new voice emerging with great subtlety and care. --Claire Dederer

Review

Sharma handles his unutterably grim subject matter so sensitively and imaginatively that it never feels heavy going. -- The Times, 19 January, 2002

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0571206786
• ISBN 13: 9780571206780
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288