It is 7:30am in New York, and Kiran Desai has been up for hours. She has just finished one interview and will only have time to grab breakfast after this one, before the third begins. For someone who has had to begin her day by facing a barrage of questions, Kiran is remarkably perky. Perhaps because she is no stranger to waking up early. But for nearly two decades, it is she who has been asking the questions: How will her characters Sonia and Sunny respond to such-and-such situation? How can magical realism be incorporated here seamlessly? How to fictionalise this segment of her own life? How to hold together disparate strands of the plot?
For 19 years, ever since her Booker Prize-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss came out in 2006, Kiran, 54, has been working on her latest book, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Spending whole days immersed in writing, she has entered into the loneliness of her characters, breathing the very air they breathe. Some might say that she is not their creator; they are her creators. They have shaped her into their likeness.
“I use my loneliness,” she tells THE WEEK. “I transform it into my work. It may be painful at times, but I also love it. I see the dark side, but I also see the worth of being alone as an artist, a writer and a woman.”
There was a time when Kiran had not yet learnt to churn her loneliness into art, when she first came to the US as a teenager with her mother Anita Desai—a three-time Booker shortlisted writer herself—after her parents separated. She is the youngest of four children, and because Kiran’s sister was still in India, Anita taught in the US only one term a year. The rest of the year, Kiran was alone in a foreign country where she was the only Indian in her class. “I spent many winter and summer breaks alone,” she says. “There was no email or mobile phone. Those were the days of the aerogramme. You would wait at the college dormitory for your parents to call. There was a phone in the hallway. So it was lonely in many ways. But that’s when I first started understanding artistic solitude, because I started writing my first stories then.”
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is about two young people and their quest for love, freedom and identity in a world where they simultaneously struggle to belong and to stand out. But it is not just their individual loneliness that shapes the narrative. Kiran broadens it from the idea of romantic loneliness to the “huge divides of class and race, the distrust between nations, the swift vanishing of a past world”, all of which, she writes in the Booker Prize website, can be seen as forms of loneliness.
One of the things she captures so poignantly in the novel is the immigrant experience, especially that of Sunny, who is a struggling Indian journalist in the US. How do you stop yourself from falling through the crack between two countries if you have made your home in it? In one place, for example, Sunny blames his mother for bringing him up in such a westernised manner that he would always remain a foreigner in his own country. In another place, Sunny feels proud of his American girlfriend, in large part because she is white, and then feels shame at his pride—a uniquely immigrant dilemma.
“I think a lot of us are straddling different worlds and feeling we don’t quite belong in any,” says Kiran. “Or that we are becoming complex creatures carrying many different places within us simultaneously.” She says for Indian-Americans, after Donald Trump became president, the fear has become almost tangible. “Once you inject fear into a country, it becomes difficult to hold on to secular, democratic ideals,” she says. “You are dealing with evil so great.” A writer’s job, she says, is to humanise the struggle. Every person has a story which goes into the composite mosaic of mass migration. It is these stories she wants to tell.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a sprawling megalopolis of a book, and yet crafted with such care that it feels like each word is taken out, polished and placed back in. And just as alluring as the writing is the characterisation. There is something quixotic about the people that roam her book—the son-worshipping Babita, Sunny’s mother; the abusive, narcissistic artist Illan de Toorjen Foss, Sonia’s first boyfriend; the misogynistic Manav, Sonia’s father; the aloof, otherworldly Seher, Sonia’s mother. It is like Kiran has turned them all inside out and their flaws and hidden motives are publicly paraded. But not once do the characters slide into caricatures, because the author has emptied herself into them, lending them authenticity. “There is something of me in many of them,” says Kiran. “Even someone like the awful Illan. His ideas of art, for example, overlap with mine.”
For many years, Kiran couldn’t tame the story into any cohesive form. She had written nearly 5,000 pages before realising that the book lacked a gravitational force, something to pin it down. That’s when she received a painting by the Italian artist Francesco Clemente. She spent long evenings looking at it. In the book, it takes the form of Badal Baba, a demon amulet with mystical powers belonging to Sonia’s grandfather.
“Francesco’s work resembles the thoughts and images that play in our mind during an afternoon nap when we are not deep in sleep, but not quite awake either,” says Kiran. “It also resembles one of those figures we grew up with, found in an old monastery or temple. They are god, demon and magical beasts all rolled into one. It took me back to those dark forests where religion is so old. I started thinking about how we often seek an escape even from our own sense of self. We seek escape from the bounds of ourselves through art, travel, love and religion. All these ideas made their way into the book.”
Badal Baba is a portal into the fantastical for Kiran, opening out into a land of ghost hounds in deserted Goan beaches, Venetian nights filled with the cries of restive gulls, Egyptian museums full of eyes of the past.... But ultimately, the amulet is not the centre of the novel, but the realisation that the novel need have no centre. As Sonia reasons in the book, “If the centre did not hold, maybe it should not hold. Maybe when reality shifted shape, a writer should let it shift. If Sonia scattered her being into an ocean of stories, could they, like waves, bring her to another shore?”
THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY
By Kiran Desai
Published by Penguin
Price Rs999; pages 670