TheDaak review

Book : Family Life by Akhil Sharma, New York : W.W. Norton & Co., 1 May 2014, 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0-393-35060-9, $14.95 (Also, Family Life by Akhil Sharma, India, Penguin, May 2015, 240 pages, ISBN: 9780143422907 ₹399.00

by Jigyasa Sogarwal

Author Akhil Sharma had proven to be a critical hit when he first published in 2001 but had remained quiet for a very long time before coming with ‘Family life’ in 2014 which is a semi-autobiographical work. He writes in his acknowledgements,  “When I handed it in, this book was nine years overdue. Each year, on the anniversary of the novel’s due date, Jill would email me and invite me to lunch…”(p234). In an interview with the Guardian, he discussed the problem of the sensorium, which was a technical writing detail. Once he could resolve that, he published. However, what struck my mind were other things he said about waiting before the book was for the world to read. He wanted it to be something that could not be ignored, something demanding a lot of the reader. And the book did. It demanded a lot.

The book begins in nostalgia. The narrator Ajay, the younger son of the family, introduces us to his parents and his elder brother. They are immigrants in the US who left India in the 1970s. Immediately, we are taken back to the India of the 1970s. India listening to radio sets and a period of emergency where the postman bringing air tickets to ‘Amerika’ (America)hoped for an ‘Inam’ (prize). India of red-tapism and socialism. Both parents embody the Indian ethos of the time. Six year old Ajay perceives the father as “…being assigned to them by the government’ (p27) and hence serving “no purpose”(p27) reflecting on the anxieties associated with the bureaucratic apparatus of the 1970s  in the figure of the father. Ajay’s mother, on the contrary, embodies Nehruvian socialism. He remarks that his “mother viewed gloom as unpatriotic.” (p7) Their Indian story is one of aspiration tied to education and free liberal values presumably at the time of the West (term used loosely to speak of the first world). 

When the Mishras arrive in the US, as a new migrant family, we watch them from Ajay’s perception – the child’s eyes. He feels powerful, even commandeering upon learning that the elevator moves as he presses the buttons. Compared to his rooftop cold baths in India, the hot water flowing from the tap makes it dreamlike. When Ajay’s older brother makes it to a prestigious school, they find themselves acquiring celebrity status among the local Indian community. The story culminates like most emigrant stories do in ‘apna time aa gaya’ (our time has come). 

But they also find themselves estranged from the universe they had once known. When their father takes them to a library and offers to give them money in exchange for every book they read, he wonders “If my father wanted us to read, what he should have done was threaten to beat us.”(p31). Ajay felt deeply wounded for his father’s un-Indian behavior. Upon visiting the local grocery store with their mother, the sons checked the labels of canned food. In India, there was the smell of cooking oil and loud voices of the vegetable vendors. Here they could neither afford nor worse, find that food. When the mother wears jeans for the first time, they exclaim “your thighs are so big”(p37).They are astonished to find that the pandit (priest) at the local temple is a full time engineer and a part time priest. In India, they had seen no such thing. They are also bullied at school and sneered at on roads.

It is a usual emigrant story except when it is not. Within two years, they find their American dream shattered because of a tragedy that then becomes their life. In the span of the book we stay with Ajay and his family from his early childhood in India to when he was a man in his forties in the US. 

The many days and nights they spend in hospitals and nursing homes, feeding, cleaning and changing the elder son. The endless number of people who visited their home and the prayers that never ceased. The waiting was ongoing and cyclical. Days of hope and spirit, followed by months of frustration and fear. When Birju the elder brother falls to an accident, the others go in waiting. The mother becomes divine-like through the power of her prayers. She remains devoted to Birju’s care and escapes into God what Ajay calls superstition. The father finds alcohol as a way of escaping his terrible reality. He finds himself dealing alone by checking himself in a rehabilitation home hoping-waiting to get better. He does and also does not. He stops drinking but he is never happy.

We see them carrying pain until it goes away, in effect waiting for it to go away. ‘Eating pain’ (p228) is the expression that Akhil Sharma uses. It is a devastating expression. How do you eat pain? Do you wait for it to be digested, does it go away or it jams your veins and becomes a thick layer underneath your skin? Do you carry it on you all the time? How? I picked this book because I needed something to take my mind off my mind. Reading can be an immersive experience. You get invited into another world. A world that is not your own but threatens to become one, as you read. Akhil Sharma’s world was tragic. Back in 2015, when I first read this book, my world was tragic. Perhaps less tragic than Sharma’s but tragic nevertheless. Somewhere half past the novel, I had scribbled in a small handwriting “will the pain ever go?, waiting”. Almost a decade later, I picked ‘Family Life’ again wondering who was the note for, myself or the Mishra(s), the family in the Family Life.  I had never intended to review this book. It is not the kind of book you can speak of without feeling things. As I sit here to talk about Family Life , I ask why now and why here? The answer, perhaps, is the waiting. Reading this book felt like waiting the entire time for something or someone to come pull me and my author’s book out of its grief. 

If one were to allow oneself to think of reading as an act of waiting, what is one waiting for? Your world has fallen apart and you bury yourself in a book. Some would say it is a daring act to enter the world(s) of others when your’s can’t hold. Hence, it is an escape. Pushed into a book, or into an imagination of a distant land with sand or sun or both and ocean with cool breeze. Hence, one could be exiled in reading, or maybe writing a book. You do hope to return, someday, any day. Or maybe not. When I tried escaping in Sharma’s book, I found myself in Ajay’s life who found Ernst Hemingway’s writings as an escape of his own. For him, writing became co-terminus with leaving. He would wait through the piles of grief, his brother’s illness, his father’s alcoholism, his mother’s superstitions, the bullying at school. He would wait until he escaped into writing. In great tragedy, he was present, he cared, loved and stayed. But in great tragedy, he was also exiled in his thoughts wandering, making notes, jotting what he will write in his book. 

It probably gave him more control. “Reading a book a second time was more comforting than reading it the first because during the second reading everything was in its place. ” (p 65) It was also because, after the initial tragic incident, the family goes down a vicious path of hope and its denial. Hope, however irrational, is powerful. Hope makes waiting palatable. Hope makes waiting  reasonable. Hope makes waiting bearable. But hope and denial of hope in loop causes Ajay to ‘wait for worse’ his default setting. “I got happier and happier. The happiness was almost heavy. That was when I knew I had a problem.”(p233)

Ajay grew up torn and neglected by emigrant parents worn out by the cards life dealt them, the tragic cards. It is a story of a home left behind. It is a story of shattered youth. A story of both parental neglect and parental devotion. The parents devoted to Birju’s care neglected Ajay’s entire childhood. It is also a story of forgiveness. This is deep grief. Grief that moves down the system like sediments. It is not heroic. It is not charismatic. You cannot remember who you were before it. If you ‘were’ before it. It does not change you. It becomes you while you become it. ‘Will it ever get over? Probably not, but you can try and ‘eat pain’ and just like that, the waiting becomes part of life, like the pain and grief does and so does the ‘escape(s)’, the self-exile mirroring the grief but also creating pathways to move forward and onward.

References: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/26/akhil-sharma-family-life-books-interview

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