The crinkling of aluminum being peeled away from the plastic top of a take-out tin sounded on the other end of the phone line. Eating his dinner while his fiancee watched the Olympics on mute beside him, Akhil Sharma '92 finally had a spare moment to talk.
Like most investment bankers, Sharma works endless hours, affording time for only an early morning or late evening interview.
But in addition to observing, analyzing and calculating the upward and downward roller coaster ride of the stock market, Sharma has also capitalized on a different kind of ride — the accelerating rise of the Indian novel.
At Princeton there is no end to the various amalgamations of interests and disciplines enjoyed and studied by students. But when one looks up a senior's name in the catalogue of theses, one expects to find a title for only one 80-page labor of love. And yet, for Sharma, who was a student of public policy in the Wilson School, there are two.
Above the title: "The Asian Indian — American Community Ethnic Markers and Ethic Organizations," is listed "Other People's Loves [Stories]."
Sharma, who chose to attend Princeton in part for its renowned creative writing department and took classes with Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates, spent a senior year that was characteristic of his present profession.
"I was very busy, but it was refreshing to think rigorously about two such different things," he said.
The two disciplines, however, turned out to be not wholly unrelated. To a certain degree, Sharma's research for his Wilson School thesis served as background for his creative writing pieces.
"I did not use the information directly, but having a sense of how Indian communities have evolved in other nations made me feel more confident about imagining my characters forward in time," Sharma said.
Most of Sharma's knowledge of the themes that permeate his stories and his recently published first novel, however, stem from personal experience. Sharma was born into a traditional Hindu household in India, and has frequently made trips back to his birthplace — providing him with an in-depth understanding of Indian and immigrant ideas and concerns.
Sharma's new novel, "An Obedient Father," focuses on family relationships set in the larger context of Indian history.
"It's a father-daughter story, told primarily from the point of view of the father," Sharma said. "[He is] a petty bureaucrat in India who makes a living largely through collecting bribes. His daughter has recently become widowed, and she has to move in with him because she has no money."
The protagonist had sexually molested his daughter years earlier, and when he becomes sexually interested in his granddaughter, the mother "attempts to come up with some sort of temporary truth, to control him, because she realizes she has very few choices," Sharma explained.
And when she realizes she cannot rely on her father, she decides to kill him.
Professor Paul Muldoon, head of Princeton's creative writing program, said he is eager to read Sharma's book and spoke enthusiastically about Sharma's accomplishment.
"Obviously we're thrilled that another of our students has published a book," he said.
But Sharma deserves the praise of the department not only for his mellifluous prose, but for his penchant for academic exploration. Muldoon stressed the department's emphasis not only on molding one's skills as a writer but on crafting one's ability as a reader.
Sharma's own dream as an author does not involve necessarily dipping into the profitable waters of prolific writers, but crossing an ocean to the land of his childhood where he looked up at the labels of library books with considerable awe and admiration.
"It wasn't that big a deal," Sharma casually remarked when asked how he felt when he saw the published copy of his first novel. "It was much more exciting to be published in The New Yorker, and it was very exciting to be published in India by Penguin because that's what I always think of as being real writers — because that's what I grew up with in India. The Penguin emblem marked the fact that you were a real writer."
As a child in Old Delhi — the poorer and less cosmopolitan counterpart to New Delhi — Sharma would survey the shelves of the two libraries in the city because borrowing cost less than buying. He read mostly comic books until he moved to Queens, N.Y., at age 9, and began developing his love for the novels of literary greats, such as Tolstoy.
"I wrote some short stories as a kid, just for requirements in school — in high school," Sharma explained. "I took a creative writing class and things like that. And I was just so immediately good at it that I just wanted to be praised, so I kept doing it. Vanity. It was all vanity."
And according to professor Michael Cadden, head of Princeton's theater and dance program, the vanity was justified. Cadden was reading submissions for a contest in the English department when he first saw one of Sharma's stories.
"It was a very mature piece of writing," said Cadden. "And I was struck that an undergraduate had come up with something so sophisticated."
Norimitsu Onishi, Sharma's roommate and former managing editor of The Daily Princetonian, also was impressed with Sharma's achievements as a writer, according to Sharma, though a certain degree of friendly rivalry often wafted between them in the dorm room.
Sharma said that the two supported each other, but that they also "used to talk about how much better we were than the other person."
Sharma himself tried his hand at journalism, working for United Press International the summer between his freshman and sophomore years. But he decided that he preferred creating to capturing an already existing reality.
Consequently, upon graduation from Princeton, Sharma attended Stanford University's creative writing program on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. Instead of completing his allotted two years, he left at the end of his first to write for the movies, and then in the middle of 1995 he left Hollywood for Harvard Law School.
During his three years in Cambridge, Mass., Sharma said he realized he "liked corporate work and that in corporate work, it's not the lawyers that drive the deals but the bankers."
So he became a banker — but also a writer, publishing four stories in major magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker.
Sharma went into investment banking, he said, in order to make a living.
Still, he is unlike the immigrant in "Fiddler on the Roof" who imagines a life full of riches and empty of endless hours of toil. Sharma said he would not be content merely to idle about if income ceased to be a concern. "I do so little writing because I work so much, but I don't know — if I were a rich man, I would not be a banker. But I would probably do something else and I would probably not do it well because, you know, if you're not really afraid and not driven, then it's hard to really do something incredibly well. And I feel incredibly driven about writing but not most other things, so I need the fear and lashing that investment banking provides."
While a recent New York Times review described Sharma's book — suffused with its own beating and brutality — as "hard," it also praised the novel as rich and enthralling.
Not bad for a writer who has no intention of giving up his day job.
Even though he probably could.
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