Ram Karan, the protagonist of Akhil Sharma's The Obedient
Father, is a civil servant in the Delhi education system who collects bribe
money for his boss. His adult daughter, Anita, has moved back in with him,
along with her child, even though he repeatedly molested her when she was
young--Ram's apartment is the only place she can afford to stay. He's already
had one heart attack, and the political and domestic crises he faces are
threatening to finish him off for good.
Some readers will be surprised at the richly detailed depiction of a man in his
early sixties living in India, given that Sharma hasn't even turned thirty yet
and spends his days as an investment banker in New York's financial district.
But Sharma's been writing for some time now--and studied creative writing as
an undergrad at Princeton. "The only writers I was being taught by were
extraordinary," he recalls. "I mean, I had Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner,
Russell Banks, John McPhee--I had no duds at all, and I thought this was the
way it should be. It was thrilling to work with people who were so smart and
who cared so much about language, about books." But after that, he went to law
school, and then followed a few other career paths, before ending up as an
investment banker. "I wanted to earn a steady living, a good living," he says.
"I was just sick and tired of not being able to order an appetizer with my meal,
things like that." His work keeps him so busy that he ended up calling me from
his office on a Friday night to do this interview.
RH: Where did you find the time to write a novel?
AS: To be honest, I wrote the book before I became a banker. I don't
know where I would find the time to write it now. I had four days off this summer,
including the weekends. But before, even if I had a whole day to write, I could
only write for an hour or two hours, and a lot of what I was writing I was throwing
away because I was just learning. I find that now it's easier to write for extended
periods and it's easier to avoid some of the mistakes that I was making
before.
RH: What were some of those mistakes?
AS: I think that my characters tended to be a little bit
thematic. I used to write in first person a lot, and it's very
restrictive, in moving in and around a scene, for example, jumping in
time, things like that. I think I have much more control over my
voice now.
RH: You came to the United States from India when you
were eight, but did you return to India frequently as you
were growing up? Because the novel seems to capture daily
life in India quite well.
AS: I would go back almost every other summer for three
months at a pop. My parents speak Hindi at home almost exclusively
and they're quite traditional, so I never really lost touch with Indian
culture. It mattered a lot to me to capture that world exactly. If
you're not correct with the details, it could be anybody or anyplace--
how much food costs, that people buy ice on a cart, because they
don't have refrigerators, knowing all these details and presenting
them was very important to me.
RH: What was it that drew you to this story?
AS: The stakes were incredibly high. It seemed like a very
good idea because the situation itself was always creating dramatic
tension. If you have a character who commits a crime, even one of
the major crimes, the person often isn't haunted day to day because
it begins to slip from memory, time passes, et cetera. But if
you have the victim right in front of you all the time, it creates this
incredible tension. I found that very effective.
RH: Were you at all squeamish about writing this from
the perspective of a child molestor? Did you ever get to a
point where, even temporarily, you felt as if you had to
back off?
AS: Yeah. I was always backing up from the material. I
would write a little bit and then I would back away from it. I found
the scene where he actually rapes her and there's blood everywhere
very creepy. I found him going to the brothels very creepy. But for
me, writing a book has always had some element of loving what I'm
writing about, even when I'm writing about despicable people. And,
it seems to me, a lot of what love is is the ability to observe in
sincerity, in frankness, or in honesty. To capture these details
exactly, to make these characters complicated--those were the things
that motivated me to keep going back and revising.
RH: Do you have much time to read, given the nature of
your work?
AS: Not really. I read something at night before I go to bed,
but that's often just a magazine.
RH: The bulk of The Obedient Father, you said, was
written before you got into investment banking. Have you
started thinking about a second book?
AS: I've begun working in a very desultory way on a
second book, set in America dealing with the Indian immigrant
experience.
RH: How hard is it find the time to work on that
book?
AS: Very difficult.
RH: So you clearly anticipate a fairly long wait until it's
actually done.
AS: Right. I think that's realistic.
RH: What was the reaction of your colleagues when they
find out that you were a published novelist?
AS: I tried to hide it, because it shows a lack of commitment [to the
job]. People have been pretty nice about it, though; nobody has made a big deal
about it. It's sort of funny: People do ask for free copies. And I always think,
you guys make millions of dollars a year, why are you asking for free copies?
