Our hearts of darkness

Even though he is mostly praised for his ability to write sparse prose, Akhil Sharma’s greatest gift is his ability to keep an unflinching eye on our disgusting inner selves. His first book, An Obedient Father , about a government employee — an alcoholic, an abuser — starts with the sentence “I needed to force money from Father Joseph, and it made me nervous”. As that story progresses, the 48-year-old Ram Karan lays bare every aspect of his disgusting life, including his compulsive seduction and rape of his own daughter, without humour, irony, compassion or guilt.

While reading that book, ever so often, I would pause to silently plead with the author to stop. “Please, please stop!” But Sharma shows no mercy. He is there to lay bare the darkness of our souls, and he is a man who goes about his mission quietly.

His second book, Family Life , which found international acclaim, is the story of lives revealed through a tragedy. Birju, the older son of an immigrant family in the US, hits his head on the bottom of the pool. This leaves him blind and unable to walk or talk. Narrated through the eyes of Ajay, the younger son, we see the family lurching through the process of dealing with this new reality — financially, socially. Even here, Sharma cuts no one any slack. “Where is Ajay? What is the point of having raised him?” his mother grumbles in the opening paragraphs of the book.

Which brings us to the book in question, A Life of Adventure and Delight , Sharma’s first collection of short stories. Here, he wields his skill of masterfully stripping people down to their ugly core to a diverse bunch of characters. The stories are varied — his protagonists are men, women and children. And whether they live in the US or Delhi, they are all intrinsically Indian in their heart.

In ‘Cosmopolitan’, Gopal Maurya, a middle-aged Indian man in America who has been abandoned by his wife and daughter, tries to seduce his neighbour with the help of dating and sex tips gleaned off magazines. It could have been a charming tale, but Sharma tells us of the inner workings of Maurya, his pettiness, the disguise as well as the disgust of his desire, that much like real life, everything comes tainted with the depravity of the human mind. What this device effectively does is take the reader out of the story. It is impossible to take a side, no one that Sharma writes about is worth throwing your lot with. Therefore you are suspended above the story, your job is to only observe, sometimes in horror, often in distaste, and wince every once in a while because Sharma has tapped into all your uncharitable thoughts, all your private perversions and laid it bare for you to see through his cast of characters.

Even though several of the stories have appeared in various magazines before, and I was reading most of them for the second time, held in a collection, the book reveals several strengths in Sharma’s writing. Two aspects particularly jumped at me. One, his remarkable skill in writing an opening sentence. Sample this: “Late one afternoon, seven months after my wedding, I woke up from a short, deep sleep, in love with my husband.” Or this: “Arun Kumar had just turned twenty-four when he decided that he would marry the chubby, round-faced girl he had never met.” Or this: “‘ Break her arms, break her legs,’ Lakshman’s grandmother would say about his mother, ‘then see how she crawls to her bottle’. What she said made sense.”

The second is Sharma’s ability to show and not tell, to give the reader access to large chunks of the character’s personality by alluding to some minor thing. The man who secretly pockets a chit of paper with the lyrics of a song while getting ready to go to a party, in the hope that he’s called to sing. Or the young man who hires prostitutes but always tries to bargain the price first. Or a couple of students who soap and wash their hands elaborately after lunch because they don’t want to smell Indian.

One of the difficulties in writing about Sharma’s work is underscoring that just because it all sounds dark and dreary, it really isn’t. No, there isn’t a lilting lightness to his characters. No, the places he describes aren’t bright and shiny. But these don’t matter, because there is the humour of self-discovery. As Sharma reveals the inner workings of people, he reveals to you that other people hold the same secrets of self-disgust as you do. That there are at least two other people in the world to whom you could conspiratorially confess to your shortcomings — the characters in the book, as well as the man who thought them up. Even if no one does, these two will understand what you mean. And what a relief that is!

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