While working as a banker, Akhil Sharma wrote his first novel
Akhil Sharma's first novel explores life in his native India. His upcoming book will focus on an immigrant family.
As a middle schooler growing up in Edison, Akhil Sharma wasn’t happy when Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was released.
In one scene, Indian characters dine on snakes, and Akhil, one of a handful of Indian children at his school, was taunted mercilessly. “All havoc broke loose,’’ says Sharma, who arrived at Rutgers-Newark this semester to teach in the Creative Writing MFA program. “The level of torment was exponential.’’
In his early fiction, Sharma didn’t write about things like that. For many years, none of his characters were from India.
“The first stories I wrote were about white people and the books I read where about white people,’’ says Sharma, who emigrated from New Delhi as child. “I thought for a book to matter it had to be about white people.’’
Paradoxically, Ernest Hemingway was the writer who inspired him to write about India. The exoticism of novels like The Sun Also Rises helped Sharma find a way to present Indian culture to a broad audience.
Sharma immigrated to Edison in the early 1970s, before the town became an enclave for Indian immigrants.
“It was so rare to see an Indian on the street that if you saw one, you stopped and asked where they were from,’’ he recalls.
At school, he was cruelly teased for eating the Indian food his mom gave him for lunch, but he refused to bring something else.
“All the people who brought food from home would be tormented,’’ he says. “Kids would pretend to vomit. But I chose to do it because it felt disloyal to ask my mother to not be who she was and not make this food. I imagined my mother would have worried about me if she knew what was going on. And partially it was stubbornness.’’
Later, he left banking, a career he disliked, and focused on his fiction.
“I went into it to make money,’ he admits. “Making money is a wonderful thing and having a lot of money is even more wonderful. But it was stressful. I didn’t really care. If you don’t care, it’s hard to do a great job. I was mostly interested in not screwing up.’’
Sharma, who lives in New York City, joined the creative writing faculty at Rutgers-Newark because of the department’s burgeoning reputation.
“More than almost any other MFA program in the country, it appears to be going places,’’ he says. “Each year, it gets more and more applicants. Each year, we hear good news from recent graduates. To be part of an institution on such a rapidly upward trajectory feels incredibly exciting.’’
An Obedient Father is set in India, where Sharma lived until his parents immigrated to the United States.
The book, released in 2000, won the Penn Hemingway award and much acclaim. But although it was successful in the U.S., it sold only 400 copies in his homeland and drew negative reviews that refuted the corruption described in his book.
The main character is a crooked official who has incest with both his daughter and his granddaughter. But Sharma doesn’t portray him as a monster. While he’s not a sympathetic character, he’s a complicated man with feelings of guilt, remorse, and tenderness, despite the suffering he inflicts upon others.
“We’re all such mixed people. I wanted to capture the inconsistencies of that,” he says.
The incest was also used as a metaphor for the rampant corruption that Sharma says exists in India. But he also created the incestuous father to exorcise some of the guilt he felt after his brother was brain damaged in an swimming accident.
“I had a lot of shame and guilt as a child and it felt important for me to write a book where that shame and guilt was deserved,’’ he says.
After the accident, Sharma often sobbed in class and was sent outside by the teacher. “I would walk around the school field and cry until I lay down and fell asleep. I would talk to God and God said to me, ‘if you could change places with your brother, would you?’ And the answer was no. And I thought, ‘I’m a bad person. I need to be watched, I can’t be trusted.’’’
Sharma’s second novel draws from that part of his childhood and is expected to be published next year.
As a writing instructor, Sharma encourages students to be honest in evaluating their own work and the work of others. “It’s important to be able to say, ‘This thing is wonderful because it speaks to me. But the dialogue is for crap and why is this character here?’’’
He’s also a stickler for word choice. Quoting Mark Twain, he said, ‘The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. It’s the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning.’’