Among the attendees were actors Rasika Dugal and Sayani Gupta, designer Payal Singhal, actor and musician Kavya Trehan, and chef Heena Punwani, among others. The book, was of course, at the heart of the event, but discussions veered from the inheritance of trauma to the two speakers trading stories on their lives as immigrants in the UK and USA, respectively. There were a few laughs, including a light moment when Desai spoke about her celebrated author mum, Anita Desai: “I come from a mother who is a writer, and she is turning 89 this year. She didn’t read the entire book but read about 1,000 pages, probably three times. Then last year, she published a novella, Rosarita, that’s 100 pages, maybe. And she said to me ‘You can actually do it all in a few pages.’”
The intimate gathering encouraged free-flowing questions. One guest spoke about how she was infuriated by the characters (except Babita, of course) and it was only the beauty of the writing that kept her going, another gushed at how magnificent the book was and how Kiran was masterful in not overusing magic realism, while a third expressed curiosity over the author keeping journals to capture the physical and mental landscapes she built in the book.
If you made it to our guestlist, you probably returned home with a black-and-white Nod Book Club tote (your new everything bag of course) filled with goodies—a water bottle by Ellementry, a can of Subko Jaago coffee for those late-night reading binges, Caudalie Vinotherapist hand cream, a mini perfume from Naso Profumi, a bag tag with your favourite tome, and most importantly, a big, fat, hardbound copy of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which most attendees got signed by the author. Like her words, even her signature seemed poetic—an all-encompassing squiggle that glided across the page with her signature Faber-Castell green pen.
