Avert loneliness by being an armchair traveller this winter. Whizz from snowy Vermont to where three holy rivers merge in Allahabad; from New York through Delhi smog to the foothills of the Himalayas; from riptides in Goa through sinister Venetian canals to the Mexican desert.
On your travels you will experience the gorgeous, multicoloured, many-textured tapestry that is the The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Central to the warp of Kiran Desai’s novel are two themes: loneliness and love. Across these, she has woven a weft of many stories – of predatory affairs, of hauntings, of magic, of missing persons, of murders, of epic family sagas of intergenerational trauma – at the centre of which are Sonia and Sunny, two young Indians whom we first encounter at university in Vermont and New York. One of these stories shows how Sonia, drowning in loneliness in the Vermont winter, falls easy prey to a seducer whose malign shadow haunts the novel until Sunny breaks the spell.
While Sonia and Sunny’s loneliness and the hurdles that they must overcome to consolidate their love is central to the structure of Desai’s novel, Desai’s narrator does not give the pair a monopoly on the novel’s themes. One of the stories woven into the tapestry tells of the loneliness of Sonia’s aunt, Mina Foi, whose youthful love for a Catholic man is thwarted by a society steeped in religious bigotry. In middle age, she finds happiness and love in a convent. Another story concerns Sunny’s friend Satya who tries to overcome his loneliness by importing a wife, and the love that blossoms slowly between them. We see, too, the loneliness of Sunny’s widowed mother, Babita, when he rejects her love. In Sonia’s parents’ marriage, we discover the loneliness that arises when love goes sour.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny tells how, even when surrounded by millions of people in a crowded city like New York, a person may be lonely: if they have no job, or no home, or no one to care about them. The novel also highlights the difference between loneliness, which one does not seek out, and solitude, which one might welcome: Sonia’s mother escapes from the patriarchal constraints of Delhi society and her marriage to the solitude of an old cottage in the Himalayan foothills; Sunny escapes New York for the solitude of a Mexican backwater.
Desai sends the reader hopping between the heads of a diverse cast of characters drawn from across the globe, to try to fathom their thoughts and interactions. Many of her characters are Indian, some live in India, others abroad. Writing about Indians from various social strata, she shows how Indians are an extremely heterogenous group of people: some rich, some poor; some living in mansions filled with servants, some barely subsisting in hovels where rubbish dumps are their children’s only playground; some with no home save the pavement. Her Indian characters reflect the legacy of Empire: Sunny speaks English more fluently than any Indian language, others speak English laced with Indian idioms, others are fluent in English and an Indian language, still others speak no English at all.
Desai’s dissections of her non-Indian characters are equally unsparing, laying bare the personalities, strengths, habits, and idiosyncrasies of people from the USA, Mexico, Italy, Britain, Germany, including Sonia’s German grandfather. Underpinning the novel, the reader senses the lingering influences of past colonisation and present day globalisation that complicate interactions between different nationalities. Sunny, caught up in a quarrel with a close American friend, recalls Satya’s words:
Should you live with an American to beat the American over the head for being one? Should you find an Indian to complain about Indians?
To counterbalance all the loneliness and misery, Desai uncovers an embarrassment of riches that bring a sense of positivity and hope. This is due, in no small part, to the scrumptious menus on offer. The book opens with a choice of Allahabadi dishes (Rice? Roti? Pilau? Paratha?), and eats its way through brownies and pecan pie in Vermont, lentils cooked in an electric kettle in Paris, gourmet cuisine in New York (caviar and oysters, artichokes dismantled and reconstructed for delicate eating, salmon bathed in chanterelles and cream), and corn bread, beans and tortillas a la Indian in Kansas. As the book draws to a close, the sharing of treasured secret family recipes between protagonists signals the banishment of loneliness.
At nearly 700 pages, this is not a short novel. But Desai’s delightfully lyrical English prose, flavoured with words from Indian and European languages, holds her reader spellbound from start to finish.