By the Book

An Obedient Father: A Novel

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 282 pp., $23

"I wondered whether, if someone else had lived my life, he would have committed the same sins that I had," says Ram Karan, the "obedient father" and chief narrator of Akhil Sharma's piercing first novel. Not only is Ram a corrupt official in the Physical Education Department of the Delhi school systemí accepting bribes from city bureaucrats for his boss, Mr. Gupta, who then applies the money to his political interestsí but 20 years before the novel opens he had repeatedly raped his 12-year-old daughter, Anita. A repugnant character, for sure, and it would be easy to demonize him.

When the novel opens in the early Nineties, Ram is living in the slums of Delhi with Anita, a recent widow, and her child, Asha. Forced to live with the widower Ram because she has nowhere else to go, Anita suffers the common plight of a husbandless Indian woman. The novel essentially follows two story lines at once: Ram's involvement in the corrupt political machinations that transpire after Rajiv Gandhi is assassinated, and what happens when he is confronted by Anita for his past transgressions.

At times, the political intrigue can be a bit confusing, especially if you're not well-versed in modern Indian history. Ram involves himself in a sticky and dangerous situation from which he spends much of the novel extricating himself. After some initial setup, this story moves at a tense, pulse-quickening pace, and by depicting such moral decay, Sharma nicely ties these events in with the core of the novelí Ram's violation of Anita and the effect it has had on all of their lives. The corrupt side of Indian politics also mirrors the societal injustice of India, where women are treated more as property and less as human beings. As Anita remarks late in the novel, "A daughter is other people's wealth. If I had sons, I would own my own house."

Ram is a compelling achievement -- both comedic and tragic, vulgar but with flourishes of sweetness, delusional about his crimes while also guilt-ridden. Early in the novel, he says, "I did not actually believe that I would ever be discovered, for I could not imagine the world after I had been caught." As bleak as the novel is, it would be a shame for anyone to avoid the book on such grounds, because Akhil Sharma, who was born in India but raised in the United States, has contributed a powerful and devastating piece of literature to both countries.