Loneliness, which seems to be a global epidemic in today’s era of independent living and changing family dynamics, seeps into the story through the book’s dual protagonists but its universality is felt in other characters too: in Babita Bhatia, Sunny’s feisty widowed mother, who searches for true connections and a life she feels cheated out of; in Seher, Sonia’s mother, who is on her quest for solitude after years in a marriage she’s fallen out of love with. “For her [Seher], the loneliness is like the peace that comes after war; it’s sustenance, in a way. And Sonia, due to her abusive relationship, realises that her choice too is between loneliness and fear. I tried to focus on chosen loneliness too, and how important solitude is to self-transformation,” explains the author. Far removed from the endless noise of social media today, the descriptions of Sonia finding true solace whenever she’s swimming in the vast waters of the ocean are particularly evocative.
The story also encompasses themes of racial, generational, class-based and nation-based divisions, as well as divides of power in the worlds of art, journalism, and even between men and women; the red flags of Sonia’s relationship with an older narcissistic artist, Ilan de Toorjen Foss, are as hard-hitting as they come. In one of their early encounters, Ilan makes her stand before a mirror and tells her, “Your body has intelligence. You’re like a leopard. You must never grow fat.”
Between the pages, an heirloom amulet becomes the carrier of magical realism and source of the readers’ curiosity. “As a writer, you’re working at a deeper level. You’re tying deeper themes together. I was also looking at these gaps between places where stories and people change into something else—an immigrant morphs into an unknowable creature… When I saw a painting of this eyeless demon, I thought I can use it as a talisman and secretly structure the book according to who is captured by whose gaze,” says Desai about the importance of Sonia’s heirloom, handed down from her German grandfather.
Long but engaging, the novel is the sort of page-turner that evokes humour, compassion, fear, and intrigue at various points. “The reason the book is so big when you have a subject like this is that you can continually expand it back in time and across geographies,” Desai explains.
She uses these pages to fill in vivid descriptions of locales spanning three continents that really bring the story to life—from the idyllic scapes of Italy, where Sonia and Sunny escape for a vacation that ends abruptly, to the Mexican countryside, the streets of Delhi and Allahabad where their families reside, the Goan seaside where Sonia and Sunny share their first moments of companionship, and even Sunny’s neighbourhood of Jackson Heights.
“I wanted to write about Indians out in the world. I think artists need to start writing and talking to each other about their travels. I read Octavio Paz’s poetry when he came to India, and hearing what a Mexican thought of the country was so fascinating. Rahul Bhattacharya’s The Sly Company of People Who Care was a great fictional book about an Indian’s experience in Guyana. It’s important to work in this way,” she says about writing different cultures.
With such a vast canvas of characters, locales, and histories, Desai’s first manuscript was over 2,000 pages; her mother, author Anita Desai, was one of the story’s first readers. “I know that she is going to be reading my work in a very clear-eyed way. But what’s fascinating to me is that she does not react to my work as a harsh editor. She absolutely reacts as a mother,” says Desai about her 88-year-old mom, who is also a three-time Booker Prize-shortlisted author. “She will say a few things that will take up half a page of notes, but I will spend years following those few lines. She knows the landscapes I’m writing from, whether it’s Mexico, Allahabad, Delhi or the hills of Mussoorie.”
For an author with just three books under her name, of which two were Booker nominations, the pressure must be immense. But Desai doesn’t show it. She loves the solitude—or the loneliness, if we may—of being a writer, spending most of her day at home typing away (writing in cafes or libraries is too distracting compared to the quiet of her house). “I was very much alone and did not feel any sort of pressure. The self-consciousness has vanished over the years. I knew that publishers are waiting and that I have a certain responsibility towards them. I was just trying to get the book right,” she explains.
After two decades spent with Sunny and Sonia living in her head, Desai has just started catching up with the world, most recently having read last year’s Booker winner, Orbital, as well as Perumal Murugan’s Pyre. Promising that her next will hopefully take just a couple of years to pen (“I’ll be 74 if I take this long for my next one too!” she laughs), Desai hints at a few ideas she’s been toying with but doesn’t reveal much.
What then, is her hope that readers take away from the story she gave 20 years of her life to? “When talking of loneliness, you sometimes have to decide between individuality and belonging. It’s not necessarily always about seeking a sense of identity. It’s also about losing and escaping it. In fiction, in metaphor, in religion, in love—we seek to lose ourselves in all these different ways. Showcasing that was important to me.” And as you lose yourself in the pages of her fiction—among the early-morning racket of hundreds of crows and the reluctant sun in Allahabad, among house parties in Delhi where all that the men want is some “haha hoho” while the women bemoan the erosion of secularism in their nation—you know she’s done a splendid job of it once again.
The Loneliness of Sonia & Sunny by Kiran Desai is out on Penguin Random House India; ₹999
