Obedient Father - Tapa blanda

'Sharma's prose crackles with immediacy, shimmers with sensuality. His vision is as intense as that of an exile yearning for home. Karan may be a monstrous man... but when it comes to his environment, Sharma gifts him with the eyes of a poet.' Financial Times 'A subtly rendered, marvellously detailed tragicomedy of contemporary India by an enormously gifted writer.' Joyce Carol Oates 'In Karan, Sharma has created an iconic character in South Asian literature: a cross between Jubba the Hut and Uriah Heep.' Daily Telegraph

Ram Karan, a corrupt official in the Delhi school system, lives in one of the city's slums with his widowed daughter and his eight-year-old granddaughter. Bumbling, ironical, sad, Ram is also a man tortured by a terrible guilty secret. When Rajiv Gandhi, the soon-to-be Prime Minister, is murdered, the country is plunged into confusion and Ram, as his department's resident bribe-collector, is trapped in a series of escalating, potentially deadly political betrayals. While he tries to protect himself and his family, his daughter reveals a crime that he had hoped would be buried forever. An Obedient Father takes the reader to an India that is both far away and real - into the mind of a character as tormented, funny, and morally ambiguous as one of Dostoevsky's anti-heroes. This is a subtly rendered tragicomedy of contemporary India by an enormously gifted young writer.