THE TAINT WITHIN
It is one of the oldest themes in literature--the corruption of an individual set against the back drop of a corrupt society. Akhil Sharma’s debut novel The Obedient Father (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, pp. 282, $23) tackles this theme in a book that is laudable for its ambition, even if it ultimately fails to live up to its promise.
Set against the background of former Indian Prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s fall from power--a fall that culminated in his assassination while campaigning to regain the highest office in the land--Father tells the story of Ram Karan, a petty bureaucrat who uses his position in the Physical Education Department of the Delhi school system to shake down school principals to collect bribes for Gandhi’s Congress Party. Seldom has a more unsympathetic character graced the pages of a novel--the elderly Karan is a sniveling, self-piteous, unprincipled man whose every moment of clarity, honesty and self-examination is immediately followed by blame-deflection, manipulative confessions, melodramatic tears and insincere mea culpas. He is a man unable to face himself in the mirror and unable to look the world in the eye.
Above all, Karan is unable to look his widowed daughter Anita in the eye because he is battling more than his public sins. The pubic corruptions have entered his soul, so that Karan even finds a way of rationalizing why he repeatedly had sex with his daughter when she was 12 years old. Since the death of her husband, Anita has returned with her young daughter Asha, to her father’s home. Sharma does a good job in portraying the social and economic conditions that force Anita to live under the same roof as a man she despises and fears. Karan feels several conflicting emotions for the solemn-faced Asha-- grandfatherly pride, pity and occasional lust. Soon, Asha becomes the battlefield upon which Anita and Karan wage their ancient war--Anita, struggling to keep her daughter safe from Karan’s lecherous gaze; he, looking to his granddaughter with a confused, misplaced hope for redemption.
Sharma is strongest in his cold-eyed look at the Karan’s dissolution as he drowns in a pool of deceit, self-pity and victimhood. Karan is a man prone to easy tears, a heavy-set, melancholy man whose heart is literally giving out on him. With a few deftly drawn strokes, Sharma transports us back to Karan’s childhood in his tiny village of Beri. We see Karan as a bullying, violent child and we learn the traumas of his childhood--the death of his much-loved mother, his witnessing of the random savagery of the Hindu-Muslim massacres that followed the 1947 partition of India into two countries. We witness Karan’s adolescent encounter with a child prostitute and understand that the seed of debauchery planted there will ultimately yield its bitter harvest when Anita turns 12.
The novel also does a good job in describing the intricacies of a corrupt system, where politicians see schools not as centers of learning but as easy sources of money. Schools are closed down and the land they sit upon clandestinely sold to real estate developers. Seldom has the cesspool of corruption at the heart of Indian politics--the rampant bribery, the buying and selling of elections, the shifting alliances, the physical violence, the religious demagoguery--been examined in fiction in such detail. Sharma makes it clear that the political is personal, so that the reader can draw a thin black line from Karan’s job as a money man for his boss, to his selfish, self-indulgent, sexually dysfunctional personal life.
And yet, ultimately, Sharma bites off more than he can chew--or we can digest. After Karan’s boss, Mr. Gupta, decides to switch political parties, the novel gets bogged down by its descriptions of political intrigue and shifting loyalties. As we move away from the unspeakable crime at the heart of Karan’s troubled relationship with his adult daughter, the novel begins to lose its hold on us.
Sharma, a 1998 graduate of Harvard Law School who works as an investment banker in New York, also makes the mistakes of a first-time novelist. The narration is confused and although the bulk of the story is told by Karan, there is early chapter which is told in Anita’s voice. It makes for an awkward juxtaposition and to make matters worse, the final chapter is told in the third person. And the waning chapters of the book, when Anita goes from one relative’s home to another to expose the sins of her father, are almost farcical. Karan meekly follows his daughter on her rounds and does not even try to deny her accusations, which would be more in keeping with a man as delusional about his motivations as he is. Thus, a denouement which should have had great emotional power, should have resulted in a catharsis, instead appears unrealistic. Anita herself is so unnuanced, is portrayed as so shrill a woman, that it is hard to muster much sympathy for her.
And ultimately, this is what makes The Obedient Father a less-than-satisfactory novel. There is not a single sympathetic character in this novel. Or, rather, although Sharma does a good job making us understand the external, social pressures that have forced each of the protagonists into their dysfunctional lives, we don’t feel for them. I suspect this is because Sharma himself does not like his characters very much. But as the great novelists--Chekov, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison-- have shown us, a writer may not always agree with his or her characters but must always sympathize with them and understand their humanity. It is a small point but almost every time a new character is introduced in the novel, Sharma describes him or her as short. This paints every character with the same strokes and makes them seem one-dimensional in a way that scarcely gives them the chance to unfold in their own humanity.
Sharma is clearly a novelist who has some serious and important things to say about the Indian condition and one looks forward to hearing his voice again in the future. If The Obedient Father succumbs to some of the temptations of a first novel--the tendency to say too much, to display all you know and believe--it also boasts some of its strengths--the freshness of a new voice and the vastness of a writer’s ambition.
--Boston Globe, July 2, 2000
