New York-based writer Akhil Sharma won the International Dublin Literary Award last year for his superb novel, Family Life. Now A Life of Adventure and Delight, just published, comprises eight short stories which explore the lives of Indian citizens, both in their native country or as American immigrants.
In Family Life, Birju was the promising schoolboy who has been accepted for the Bronx High School of Science. He is the eldest son on whom the hopes of his immigrant parents rest. However, he never makes it to that school, because of an accident at a swimming pool, involving his younger brother Ajay. Oxygen deprivation leads to serious brain injury and ultimately his family must refurbish the family home to care for him.
In a particularly poignant scene in the novel, Ajay asks God to get rid of the three minutes which Birju spent at the bottom of the pool. The self-same plea is made by Ajay in Surrounded by Sleep, the second story in this collection, which traces the fall-out from the same swimming pool accident.
Both the novel and the short story in question are closely based on the actual tragedy which occurred in Sharma’s own family, faithfully documented, we can assume, in these two fictional works. His elder brother did in fact become incapacitated following just such an accident.
The opening story, Cosmopolitan, is set in what seems to be the East Coast of the US (no towns or cities are mentioned). Gopal Maurya is the retired AT&T worker whose wife and daughter have effectively deserted him. Isolated and helpless, and sleeping on a couch in his living room, he is visited one day by Mrs Shaw, his divorced neighbour, who wishes to borrow his lawn-mower. Gradually, Gopal becomes obsessed with Mrs Shaw, they have drinks and dinner together, he finds her deeply sensual, they make love.
Despite Gopal’s earnest attentions – he reads Cosmopolitan in search of advice - Mrs Shaw remains ambivalent, almost stoic in her attitude to love and relationships. She is, it would seem, pathologically at a remove from passion. She is also reticent, or perhaps more accurately, withdrawn from her past. Gopal is fascinated by the gaps in her story, but can learn nothing from her to make him feel secure about either the present or the future. The love object – if she is a love object, that too is uncertain - remains mysterious, as though her image is perpetually out of focus. That fuzziness or blur, like an aura around Mrs Shaw, is what makes the peculiar charm of this brilliant story.
We didn’t Like Him is set in Delhi, and introduces us to 14 year-old Manshu who intrudes on the games of younger boys. "He was my father’s sister husband’s sister’s son," declares the unnamed narrator, himself once one of those put-upon younger boys. "Since he belonged to my aunt’s husband’s family, we had to show him the respect due to a family that takes a daughter away."
Manshu’s father died when he was six; his mother, a diabetes sufferer also dies early in the story. Sharma is master of the telling detail: 'His curved shoulders would remind me that his mother was dead, and then I’d feel ashamed that I was more fortunate than he was.' After his mother’s death, Manshu appears to turn religious and, in a controversial move, becomes the new pandit of the local Hindu temple. He marries a non-Brahmin woman, which goes down badly, and becomes keenly interested in making money.
God and mammon, in other words, explored in this instance by Akhil Sharma, who brings authentic flair to proceedings in what one can readily assume will be one of the richest collection of short stories to appear this year.
Family Life. Now A Life of Adventure and Delight (Faber & Faber) is out now.
