Akhil Sharma's Family Life shows why all unhappy families are not alike

If a book can fill you with tenderness after you’ve laughed and cried with it for 200-odd pages, then it’s a book worth remembering, revisiting. Akhil Sharma's Family Life is one of them.

In Sharma’s semi-autobiographical Family Life, Ajay Mishra’s brother Birju has a near-fatal accident that causes severe brain damage, after their middle-class Indian family moves to the United States. He can no longer walk, talk or even roll over in his sleep. That one incident shatters their family’s centre and his parents cannot find the strength in them to protect themselves from the arrival of this torrential grief.

Throwaway sentences that seamlessly describe the American dream as dreamt by a young mind that’s yet to fully comprehend the vastness of this shared fantasy are peppered throughout the narrative. There’s an unmistakable ease with which the writing shifts from moving images of lives in dislocation to unsentimental portraits of people immersed in a state of permanent sadness, to often also darkly humorous terrains.

As Ajay’s parents fight and argue over the years – his mother dedicates every ounce of her energy in “waking” the maimed Birju and his father turns into an alcoholic mess – they don’t realise how in all this they forget to nurture Ajay as the young boy moves from adolescence to teenage. But the novel never lets the readers forget it. When he’s fifteen, Ajay breaks down in one scene and demands pizza, to remind his parents that he too deserves something from them.

Akhil Sharma had said in an interview that he can be more truthful in a novel than he can be in a memoir. Isn’t that true for most of us? Don’t we all at times find it easier to share something intimate with a stranger than with someone in our family or a friend?

One of the most well-known questions in philosophical thought experiments asks: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” I don’t know the answer to it, but I can assure you that every time a heart breaks in this novel, it does.