The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

Nineteen years after winning the Booker, Kiran Desai is back with a novel, – one that has once again made it to the Booker shortlist. ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’ at close to seven hundred pages kept me engaged primarily for the vast geographic and cultural landscape it covered.

While we read of the thousands of Indians who migrate to the US and get to see their ‘life’ through social media, their interior lives are often opaque and little discussed. My own friends have described experiences that range from euphoria and excitement to loneliness, depression, alienation, and homesickness. The true value of fiction lies in its ability to illuminate these inner landscapes—those private emotional domains that no work of history can ever fully capture.

On that account TLOSAS’s contribution is immense. From the old moneyed families of Allahabad to the brashly affluent residents of Delhi’s Panchsheel Park, from Jackson Heights in New York to the booming real estate market of Goa, and further to Venice, Landour, and Mexico—Desai takes us to these places with remarkable mastery over their culture, history, and mood.

Paragrraphs that caught my attention….

Indians as readers of novels:

Sunny thought it explained why Indians would never make good readers of novels: a reader of novels comprehends the notion of individual rights by the simple act of identifying with a person’s—any person’s—trials and joys. When you considered another person’s feelings, another person’s dignity, you actually wished to scrub your own toilet. A good novel reader was a toilet cleaner, and so Indians didn’t wish to be readers of novels as this would undo caste hierarchies and divides that made their world go around properly.

On viewing art in museums:

On Friday and Saturday evenings, they went to the museums where Ilan sketched and stalked the paintings as if he wished to occupy the quiet of Vermeer’s kitchen pierced by a letter, Goya’s nightmare of decrepitude and war, Van Gogh’s bed that made a person burst into tears—a grown man with a modest bed like that! They surveyed Kiefer’s forest suffused with Nazi terror—the forest remembers—and Cornell’s velvet box with the story of a dancer dancing upon a panther’s skin laid over the snow, under the stars, for a highwayman. Imagine him living at Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, with his mother; artists who are poor and live with their mummies—again one wants to cry. It’s hard for an artist to grow up; it’s stacked against you. There was Magritte’s dream of a house dreaming of a home and the empty square of de Chirico—after the long journey, when you finally arrive, there is nowhere to put your heart. There was Rembrandt’s lace and Hodgkin’s Malabar rain—he had traveled to India in the same way Ilan had gone to Mexico, and he found emotion so big that it dwarfed form. There was Rothko’s depression greater than any cathedral and O’Keeffe’s Black Place that suggested life was something to be worked out between you and mountains. When you gazed upon these paintings, you wanted no other life. In the Impressionist room—remnants of breakfast upon a sun-splashed cloth, wife in the bath, Sunday in the park—again the voice of someone outside the window, looking in, sounded inside Sonia’s head: Happiness is for other people.

On Anna Karenina:

One day Ilan found her reading Anna Karenina. She saw the ember come alive in his eye. “Every scene of that book is a painting,” he said. “Don’t read that or it may become a mirror to our own fate. You’ll live your life to follow the book—and that book has many victims, by the way.”

Italy for the English colonialists:

To whet his appetite, he read E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, and it occurred to him that Italy was the Englishman’s first India, their first scorching sun, swarthy skin, their first garlic and hot temper, their first people whom they viewed alternately as children and as savages, charming and suddenly cruel—ultimately baffling. Perhaps Italy had allowed them to attempt India. This would suggest Italian charm had some truth to it, or else the English would have returned to their sunless, un-garlicky island and saved the world the ruinous empire

Socialist Sunny being introduced to the Republican parents of his American girlfriend offered me deeper insights into the American Republican base than any journalistic piece ever could:

he was intrigued to be traveling to a part of the country that was unreachable to a foreigner, an America he could never see on his own. A mythic land imbued with memories of Dust Bowl poverty, of fields worked by migrant labor, of proms, sports heroes, and cheerleaders; six hours to the nearest mall; real cowboys swearing genuine curses on cattle farms; a black-sheep uncle covered in tattoos in a trailer park; an ancestor whose diary from the Civil War indicated he didn’t know which side he was fighting for, although he had carefully recorded each time he ate bacon.

Ulla had told Sunny he was not to say anything complimentary about socialism or Jimmy Carter or even Bill Clinton. He should not praise the healthcare system in Cuba or Sweden. He should not express wonder at women voting Republican. He shouldn’t venture—not at all—to the subject of guns. She had warned her parents not to divulge they owned five guns kept locked in the basement. That Ulla herself had hunted wild turkeys when she was a child, that she was a better shot than her father. They must not ask if cows were sacred or whether Indians still lived in mud huts.

She hoped her mother wouldn’t take him to see the Native American artifacts displayed at the Rotary Club. She didn’t want Sunny to find her father’s Consumer Reports in the basket by his reclining chair. She didn’t want her father to tell Sunny that he’d found an excellent deal on his own tombstone. She didn’t want Sunny to see that her father was so overweight he couldn’t bend to cut his toenails and that her mother had to cut them for him. She didn’t want her mother to sing the Betty Boop song while fluttering her lashes. She remembered all the nasty things Sunny had said about Americans being provincial and fat, all the hateful things he’d said about Republicans that he somehow linked to the lack of fresh herbs and spices in cooking, which he linked to having no passports, which he linked to killing innocent civilians in Hiroshima and to the United Fruit Company, which operated rapaciously in Latin America the way the East India Company had in India.

The Liberal Arts craze among the Delhi kids that I get to see so often:

She had studied in a liberal arts college renowned for dispensing an education so sophisticated as to be useless save for the cultivation of an eye divorced from need, and this would be in tune with their target audience.

On the phenomenon of writing recommendation letters and essays to flaunt one’s credentials:

 All you had to do was to relentlessly apply, and he knew from living with Ulla and his days at university, that no nationality excelled at applying more than Americans. They treated applying as a career in itself, they applied and applied the globe over. They cultivated friendships and did favors for people for the sole purpose that they might one day write them a recommendation. They asked for recommendations from people for whom they had written recommendations specifically so they could one day ask for recommendations in turn. And they wrote essays about their commitment to women’s rights, gay rights, minority rights, international human rights, with such vitamin-fueled, gym-healthy, life-coach-coached persistence; printed such crisp resumes on heirloom grade paper, on latest model printers, after they had been checked for grammatical errors and tweaked by professionals trained in the secret language of persuading others — that they quashed the meager unprofessional applications of the minorities themselves. We won we won more than you won!

The drive of New Yorkers:

And out of Americans, New Yorkers were the ones that excelled the most. “We can’t have eight people out of twelve from New York City!” the organizations might feebly protest, but they wouldn’t be able to keep New Yorkers from endlessly excelling at applying, for their ambition never lay down to rest in this city that never slept. And if not overwhelmed by Americans and New Yorkers, then they were overwhelmed by white people in general. Sunny noticed when an exchange catalog of new fellows mentioned a South African, it more often was a white South African; the Kenyan authority on easing wealth inequality turned out to be white as well, with a large black domestic staff; and so was the political artist from Mexico; and the Guatemalan who was given the job was a white Guatemalan, not a brown Guatemalan. Or if a brown one, the brown one happened to be mixed race, or married to a white person, or educated in a white country — the more reassuring at cocktail hour. If any nationality could counter this tide, it was surely Indians with their fierce ambition to run away from India. Soon they would have not only too many New Yorkers, but also too many Indians from the same class as Sunny — and an overwhelming number of Indian New Yorkers who had even more advantages than white New Yorkers in the process of applying because they could convincingly play the minorities card — but how to claim you are a minority if you come from a people that number over a billion?