Review: 'An Obedient Father' with skeletons in his closet

"An Obedient Father"
By Akhil Sharma
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Fiction
282 pages

In this story: Questioning reactions Moral ambiguity RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Joshua Kuritzky
Special to CNN.com

(CNN) -- There is no other way to begin:

Ram Karan, the antihero of Akhil Sharma's novel, "An Obedient Father," molested and raped his daughter when she was 12 years old. Ram would prefer that this skeleton stay in the closet, but, now that his recently widowed daughter and 8-year-old granddaughter have moved into his tiny flat, he's somewhat short on closet space.

As dirty secrets go, Ram's makes for a large and unwieldy skeleton, which, once acknowledged and unearthed, cannot be forgotten or explained away. This becomes especially difficult when Anita, Ram's daughter, catches Ram developing an eye for Asha, his granddaughter.

After the expected confrontations and threats, and after she has done her best to separate grandfather and granddaughter, Anita drags Ram and Asha to the house of her aunt, where she proceeds to tell, for the first time, what her father did to her. She is hoping that her aunt will take her in, that when faced with this story the only thing any responsible relative can do is to invite Anita and Asha to stay. Anita is disappointed, however, when her aunt never makes an offer, claiming that if her uncle were to find out he wouldn't approve.

A similar thing happens when Anita tells other relatives. They agree that Anita needs to leave her father, both for her well-being and for the safety of her daughter, but they also admit that homes "don't grown on trees," and that Anita will have to marry to find the support that she needs.

These scenes between Ram, Anita, and their relatives are useful in gaining an understanding of the novel. With a crime of this severity, and a skeleton of this size, we tend to see things as almost intractably black and white -- we feel sorry for the victim and hate the victimizer. It is a sign of Sharma's skill at characterization that "An Obedient Father" becomes almost infuriatingly gray.

Sharma presents the story to the reader in much the same way as Anita presents hers to her relatives, with the same unexpected results. Much like the relatives, the reader then must question his or her reactions -- one's first response is to see Ram as the villain and Anita as a victim-cum-heroine, but the characters themselves make this response very difficult.

Indeed, every character in the novel can be unlikable in his or her own way. Ram, a shamelessly corrupt "moneyman" in the Delhi school system, bumbles through the first chapter as a sad but endearing antihero. He is old, out-of-place, and, as the title suggests, too obedient. He is pitiful and pathetic to such a degree that one can't help but care for him. It's not until the third chapter, when Ram, on his way from Delhi to Beri in order to hire a pundit for his wife's memorial ceremony, begins to tell his story -- a story that begins with some youthful tales of dallying with prostitutes and ends with a brutal description of Ram's experiences with Anita.

Compounding the grayness of Ram's character is his lack of outright remorse. His primary feeling is one of shame. "But I understood the connection between what I did with Anita and my shame the way a lake understands the connection between the cloud above it and the reversed image bobbing on its waters."

After this chapter, the character of Ram does not change, but the reader's perception of him does. Sharma, with the flair of a born storyteller, does this with all three of the main characters, presenting them in such a way that they all, despite their crimes and failings, alternate between being likable and despicable, sometimes doing so in the course of a paragraph.

This is, by anyone's standards, a miserable and pitiful trio. Ram is incapable of seeing and understanding the severity of his crime; Anita, who thrives on playing the victim, is torn between her desire to leave and her reliance on her father's money; and Asha, who begins as a precocious but innocent child, is shaped by these two adults -- her caring, but overbearing grandfather, and her weak and distant mother -- into a mean and crabby teenager.

All of this misery is made worse when seen in context of its milieu. The majority of the novel takes place in Delhi around the time of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination. Ram has been enlisted to help gather money for his boss's run for parliament, a corrupt and dangerous undertaking, with those who betray their parties often "disappearing" when the elections are over. That this corruption is so commonplace (Ram has a number of chats with the man tapping his phone) makes the moral topology of the novel that much more difficult to chart. Things become even more complicated when Anita decides to help her father embezzle some of the money he's collecting.

The moral ambiguity of these characters and the reader's conflicting reaction to them makes for an unsettling but affecting novel. Perhaps the novel's only flaw is its scope --with its combination of political and domestic stories, it often reads as if it were a compilation of two, or perhaps even three, different novels.

But this crime is minor and easily forgiven, especially after reading Sharma's nearly virtuosic final chapter, in which he introduces two likable characters who love and respect each other. These characters, by virtue of their being nice people, provide a dry and solid ground from which to better survey and understand all that's come before.

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