Family Portrait

Akhil Sharma talks about the tragedy at the heart of his critically acclaimed second novel and calls it a love letter.

Akhil Sharma, Jaipur Literary Fest, Family Life, Books, Penguin

Akhil Sharma talks about the tragedy at the heart of his critically acclaimed second novel and calls it a love letter.

In Akhil Sharma’s Family Life (Penguin) eight-year-old Ajay’s older brother Birju had gone for a swim at the neighbourhood pool when he hit his head on the concrete floor at the bottom and lay there. Around 180 minutes later, the water flooded his lungs and by the time Ajay had received word about his brother’s accident, Birju was brain damaged and paralysed for life. “One of the unfortunate things about life is when we have to deal with our loved ones getting sick. When I was writing about what had happened to my family, I wondered, how much pain can you reveal to the reader before they put the book down,” says Sharma, 43, speaking to a full house at the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival.

One of the most feted books of 2014, Family Life is a mostly-autobiographical story of a family that moves to New York from New Delhi in the 1970s and how their immigrant’s aspirational tale is rudely interrupted by a freak accident that mars the course of their lives. “I wanted to write it as a memoir but I didn’t think I would be able to justify the events as they had occurred. For most of my life, my brother’s condition was a secret; my friends in school would not have understood. I wrote it as a novel because I had to take something interior and turn it into something dramatic and compelling,” says Sharma, who took nearly 13 years to complete the novel, his second after An Obedient Father (W W Norton & Company) was published in 2000. “I really feel that I shattered my youth against this book,” he says.

While his novels and short stories are known for their pithy, clinical and yet moving prose, Sharma didn’t start off his writing career as a novelist. During the course of a creative writing fellowship at Stanford, he realised that all he wanted to be was rich. “What’s an easy way to make money without doing much work? Let me write screenplays. I thought to myself, ‘what kind of rubbish would people like to watch’, and I concocted a screenplay based on Beowulf and sent it in to Universal Studios. And I was right, they loved it!” he says. But life in Hollywood wasn’t for him, and after nearly two years, he quit and went to Harvard Law School and soon, became an investment banker. “I quit that too, when I was 30. I’d had enough, I was working such enormous hours and travelling constantly. It came to a point when I went to watch a movie and when I sat down at my seat, my hands reached to my sides to buckle myself in,” says Sharma.

Family Life made it to the New York Times’ top books of last year but Sharma says that his family hasn’t been very interested in the novel. “My father doesn’t read and he thinks that other people don’t read either. If they do, they’re showing off. My mother read it and asked me why some parts were true and others weren’t. I’ve presented characters who are difficult and complicated and troubled but they’re also very devoted, faithful. To me, the book feels more like a love letter to my family,” he says. Sharma is currently working on a collection of short stories and essays.

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