Product Description

A stunning novel about family secrets, hailed nationwide
as a masterpiece.

Ram Karan, a corrupt official in the New Delhi school system, lives in one of the city's slums with his widowed daughter and his little granddaughter. Bumbling, sad, ironic, Ram is also a man corroded by a terrible secret. With the assassination of the politician Rajiv Gandhi, Ram is plunged into a series of escalating and possibly deadly political betrayals. As he tries to save his family, his daughter reveals a crime he had hoped was long buried-and Ram, struggling to survive, must make amends after a life of deception. Taking the reader deep into a world of Indian families and politics, gangsters and movie stars, riots and morgues, An Obedient Father is an astonishing fiction debut, a work of rare sensibilities that presents a character as tormented, funny, and morally ambiguous as one of Dostoyevsky's antiheroes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #707014 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

Amazon.com 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's 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 of great subtlety and care. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly
A supernova in the galaxy of young, talented Indian writers, Sharma debuts with a bold and shocking novel that casts a mesmerizing spell. Ram Karan is a widower whose widowed daughter, Anita, and eight-year-old granddaughter, Asha, live with him in a tiny apartment in one of Delhi's poorer sections. Nominally a functionary in the physical education department of the city's schools, Ram is in fact "Mr. Gupta's moneyman"; that is, he coerces bribes for his boss, who funnels the money to the Congress Party. At first, Ram's candid admissions of "general incompetence and laziness" are perversely endearing, but when the real cause of his self-hatred comes to light, the reader's perceptions begin to change. In a moment of temptation, Ram commits a furtive sexual act with his unwitting granddaughterDand his downfall begins. Twenty years ago, he had repeatedly raped Anita, who now becomes unhinged at the thought that her daughter may be in peril. Anita's bizarre revenge will result in Ram's complete degradation; ironically, the repercussions of her obsessive need for disclosure cause even more emotional damage to everyone involved. Concurrent with these personal tragedies and the breakdown of one family, Sharma draws an acid-etched picture of modern Indian society, in which the corrupt political system victimizes all citizens. When Rajiv Gandhi is assassinated during the 1991 parliamentary elections, Mr. Gupta switches his allegiance to the rival BJP party, commencing a dangerous political game that embroils Ram. Sharma's depiction of a society riddled with graft, violent religious prejudice, male chauvinism and bigoted cultural attitudes is a cautionary tale about what happens to the individual spirit when poverty, superstition, racial tension and general hopelessness are exacerbated by the absence of judicial morality. This caustic yet darkly comic story resonates powerfully, as the reader comes to sympathize with fallible human beings trapped in circumstances that corrupt the soul. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Storywriter and investment banker Sharma's first novel is in equal parts squalid and compelling: the tale of a corrupt civil servant in Delhi who ruins lives, his own included, by having seduced his own daughter. Ram Karan, 48 and obese, is moneyman for Mr. Roshan Gupta, education head. Karan's job, which he's very good at, is to keep the budget in operation by extorting money and collecting bribes for Mr. Gupta, which he does on a steeply increased scale when Mr. Gupta is put up as a political candidate and needs breathtakingly large amounts of money to campaign. As Karan gets drawn more deeply into the frightening criminality of political financing, he also relates the story of his life--love for his mother, his grief when she died in his childhood (and witnessed her cremation), his joyless marriage, the births of four children--and his unspeakable, repeated, compulsive seduction and rape of his second daughter, Anita, when she was 12. And now? Grown, Anita herself has a daughter who's 12, and, one night after Karan has had too much to drink, she walks in to find him touching the girl with his penis--with the result that the volcanic power of her previously repressed hatred and rage begins to emerge, to the point that her father may not--does not--survive it. The story is almost Aeschylean in the tumult of its misery--deaths, heart attacks, widowings, suicides, even murder--yet the plain, unstoried quality of life itself is never neglected by Sharma. The daily life of poverty-stricken Delhi is ever made real, and even the ruinously monstrous Karan--narrator of much of the book--consistently makes evident his intelligence, depth, and sensitivity as one who's light-years away from any sort of cardboard villain. So full it threatens sometimes to collapse or overflow; but a debut, on balance, that's pathetic, remorseless, and wrenching. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

No heroes.
I am not going to argue that this book is pleasant to read, because it is not. But I will argue that it is worth reading-- perhaps would go so far as to say that it should be read, despite the unpleasant subject matter.

And I suppose that it is worth warning that the subject matter *is* unpleasant. It has fairly explicit descriptions of violence, incest, and poverty. People who are very reactive to these issues, probably want to find a different book.

So often when a writer tackles issues like these, they lose all objective perspective. Somehow Sharma takes some of the most loaded topics imaginable and still places them in a landscape of moral ambiguity. While Mr. Karan (the father)commits acts that seem to put him beyond the pale, it is hard not to feel yourself sliding into sympathy for him. And while you want to like Anita because of what happens to her, it is awfully hard to do. Meanwhile, the landscape of Indian politics around them (which is a bit hard on the reader, since it assumes that you know something about it) also seems to imply a decided lack of ethical clarity.

I think that it is a very strong book, extremely well written. Recommended for people who like books that are thought provoking, if not necessarily uplifting.

A brave and disturbing novel
An extraordinary story of moral, physical and political corruption. The protagonist is in almost all ways despicable and weak, yet at times I found myself sympathising with him, and I was always riveted by his unhappy predicament. This is a horrifying and fascinating story, and, unlike one of your other reviewers, at no point did I feel the author was muckraking unfairly. He has written a brave and intelligent book.

A Novel About Corruption, Moral and Political
Don't enter into Akhil Sharma's AN OBEDIENT FATHER expecting the romantic exoticism of many of today's Indian writers. His India is not mystical or lush or dream-like but instead peels away exterior layers to show what lies beneath. This is a story of corruption, both moral and political. Ram Karan is a self-pitying hedonist, and he knows it, even hates himself for it. Others think even less of him. When his daughter confronts him with their shared secret he hopes she had forgotten, two days after the assassination of Rajiv Ghandi, both Karan and India face an uncertain future.

To Sharma's credit, he allows the reader deep enough into Karan's psyche to elevate him from despicable to pathetic, and yes, you do start to feel for this man, however guiltily. Sharma's greatest strength here is his characterizations, from Karan to Anita to the corrupt bureaucrats who work with Karan to his extended family.

If you are just now sampling the range of Indian fiction available in the United States, this is a good place to start. If you are familiar with the wider range of voices, Akhil Sharma's adds a nice balance to the rest, perhaps more American than most but still in his heart Indian.