After her Booker Prize winning The Inheritance of Loss in 2006, the world had to wait almost 20 years for Kiran Desai’s next novel – also shortlisted for the 2025 Booker. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny are about these two diasporic, first generation Indians in America, both students, one in Vermont and one in New York, whose families are well known to each other in India. Sonia’s grandfather, Dadaji, plays weekly chess games with his friend, the Colonel, who had encouraged Dadaji to some disastrous investments in the past, and therefore to whom the Colonel owes a debt of sorts. Sunny is the Colonel’s grandson.
Desai paints a marvellous picture of Dadaji and Ba’s life in Allahabad, India, lived with their married-and-returned-after 6-months daughter, Mina Foi, who is now 55. They live in a house rented for only two hundred and fifty rupees and fifty paise a month, and refuse to spend money on a leased property. Desai is masterly at the tragi-comedy:
“He refused his family electric generators, inverters, and stabilizers, let alone air conditioners. […] Savings led to triumphant savings. Savings had impoverished their existence” (p69)
Desai’s wit is very sharp and while she is tender with her characters, she is also scathing at the same time:
“And succumbing to the pleasure and responsibility of this unusual task, Ba forgot her skinflint budget, Mina Foi her oppression, Dadaji his shares, and Dari his biscuits” (p71)
Desai is wonderfully sly and succinct about each person’s obsessions and angst. There are some marvellous insights, humorous but sharp-edged, about class and caste, for instance when Dadaji finds the vitamins have expired, he instructs his servant to take it, because it is still good for a year or two, so clearly, good enough for servants. Or about how Babita in Delhi has two servants for free but imagines she is doing their mother and the girls a favour by housing and feeding them. It is Desai’s whiplash conclusions that are breathtaking in their devastating accuracy and nuance; when watching labourers’ children out of her window, Babita is surprised they have songs to sing, and “dismayed at her own thinking”; followed by Desai’s comment, “they were too young to know their lives offended” (p99) – which in a nutshell, is the unsaid and unsayable attitude of the haves to the have-nots.
The chapters set in India resonate so robustly, colourfully, and authentically, that the chapters set in America rather pale in comparison. What is of interest is how the first generation migrants navigate their host country and home sickness. Sonia, an aspiring writer, has been told by lover, Ilan, not to write exotica like arranged marriages which are orientalist, and Sonia ponders this as she tries to write her stories:
“An arranged-marriage story, even one that ended six months later in divorce, felt true and false. True because it happened. False because it was feeding the West what it wanted to consume about the East. The audience made it false. Lifting this one story out of all the others made it false” (p65)
Desai expresses so beautifully and originally the conundrum oriental writers feel as they try to be authentic and not orientalise, given that they are already in a very particular context of Western consumption of Eastern products. She expresses how they may have to overcompensate, in absurd ways sometimes:
“Careful not to orientalize, Sonia wrote that Mina Foi ate pears, not pink guavas from the guava orchard beyond which the highway thundered” (p65).
Sonia’s grandfather’s letter – with proposal – is forwarded to Sunny’s grandfather and to his daughter, Babita in Delhi, Sunny’s mother, and finally to Sunny himself. And read by Ulla, Sunny’s American girlfriend from Prairie Hill, Kansas. Who realises that Sunny has not told his family about her.
Desai tells us it has become the fad for Indian children with an American life to treat their parents to an Alaskan cruise
to allow them to experience for a week what they’d bequeathed their children for a lifetime – the bliss of being able to pretend they were not Indians and that India didn’t exist. […] What was so odd, Babita reflected, was that this striving to escape India felt patriotic: If you were a worthy Indian, you became an American” (p103).
Through Sunny and Ulla, Desai is able to articulate many different positions of racism and stereotypes. When Sunny is at dinner with Ulla’s friends, who are exoticising their experience in India to him, he feels responsible as a long series of associations for their experiences, but
then also insulted and guilty and then annoyed at having to feel guilty or insulted” (p89)
and tries by his good manners to distance himself
to place himself at a far civility from his nation” (ibid)
to demonstrate his correct sympathies and non-misogynism, and disassociation from men found on every street corner in India. Desai flags up how some Indians in America seem to carry the weight of all the undesirable parts of India on their shoulders, and feel shamed. But Sunny also gets annoyed with Ulla’s cluelessness about his culture, the different value systems they come from – hers which valorise openness in walking around naked but damning eavesdropping, at the same time while cohabiting with Ulla is “central to his self respect” (92). Sunny also realises the irony of the blond American woman who has gone to India to
tell women in India to cook their rice in a cardboard box covered with silver reflective paper so as to prevent deforestation and climate change” (p90)
while she lives in her New York apartment
no doubt equipped with a stove, microwave, toaster, fridge, blender, coffee maker, hair dryer, vacuum cleaner, television, computer, music system, heater, fan, air conditioner, boiler, furnace” (p90).
Desai flags up that Sunny knows he is hypocritical, an Indian trying to make it in America by avoiding other Indians, and trying to be the only Indian around. While at the same time registering that his colour is a pass in the once black and rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood he lives in. The intersectionality muddies the waters, not wishing to apologise for their presence, he and Ulla “In conversation with others like themselves, make certain to mention the well-off African Americans buying homes here, to shift the conversation from race to class” (p92). Sunny struggles with his own value system: Upon returning to India,
Sunny felt his American privacy stripped away. This was love and curiosity so observant, nothing would be too inconsequential for its notice. They would anticipate a freckle appearing on his earlobe. Again, he missed Ulla, who never examined him this closely. Why didn’t she? Because to examine someone closely didn’t allow that person thewier dignity – or was it that she didn’t care?” (p211).
The book also has a lot of mentions of colonial hangovers, the inferiority complex of Indians and their self-hatred of this plus resentment that they do subscribe to it. There is also a hierarchy of desirability:
If you ever deigned to visit Britain with an American passport, you’d visit looking amusedly down upon them from a more powerful nation. Through a different lens, Britain would be rendered quaint” (p181)
The novel contains many good observations about how Indians empower themselves, what means and strategies they deploy, consciously and subconsciously, in America and India, and across different generations.
Sunny remembered his pride when he was first together with Ulla – it was in great part because she was a white American, but he was ashamed to be proud that she was white” (p294)
Likewise Sunny’s mother, Babita, was mortified to see Punjabi women cleaners in Heathrow airport, because she felt lowered by their presence, maybe in case people identified her with them. Arriving in Stockholm, she felt outrage when burka clad women rushed to the citizens’ passport line. At the hotel at breakfast, she despaired at the Middle Eastern family in very traditional dress next to her.
[…] she ate restrainedly because the Middle Eastern family was eating unrestrainedly” (p256)
– again, not wanting to be identified with such people. But the self-loathing persists:
Babita tried to align her accent to British when she asked for tea but was almost offended by her own dark hand – like a monkey’s paw – when she lifted her cup” (p256)
Babita and Sunny are quite alike in feeling they are ambassadors of India when they go abroad, and representatives of their countries, even as they resent this role they have self-cast into.
I will admit I did not much enjoy Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard – too whimsical for me, even if it did have some glimmerings of real originality. Nor did I especially love The Inheritance of Loss, though there were some splendid bits in it. The 3rd novel from Kiran Desai is her best so far, for me at least. I found it far more coherent, far slyer and wittier too, and more immediately accessible, having put whimsy aside, or better yet, transformed whimsy to wit. This novel contains sharp insights, cutting but nonjudgemental observations about Indians, both in India and in America, and even in Mexico, pointing out their foibles and more serious failings, as well as redeeming qualities.
However, it is a 670 paged novel, and I would say it is at least 300 pages too long. The 2nd half was nowhere near as strong as the first. The plot was ridiculously simple – boy and girl meet, they like each other, estrangement for situational reasons, then they get over the issues and finally get together – same as gazillion romance plots. The novel felt like it just twisted and turned through an additional few hundred pages, while the protagonists, Sunny and Sonia, painfully found themselves. The 2nd half also stopped being as sharply witty and observational as the first half. It seemed to go on forever for the sake of just going on, and I was glad when the end was in sight. A good editor would have halved the length, or less. It would have been so much stronger in impact, if unnecessary length had not diluted it. I confess I have limited patience with all that surrealism to do with the Badal Baba amulet. For me, that detracted from rather than enriched the story.
But the first half was so good, that overall, it was a good reading experience. Desai’s take is fresh and refreshing, and devastatingly honest, daring to say what so many would not.
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