Review of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

 

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

 

During Christmas in the USA, my son gave me a Kindle with Kiran Desai’s new book already loaded onto it. I was ecstatic. I had read reviews of the book in The Guardian and The New York Times and had tried to get a copy back in India but had not been able to. Moreover, I was busy with a flurry of shopping and packing, trying to rebook tickets due to some personal issues, and rushing to reach the US in time for Christmas, as Nikhil, our son, had said he could take a few days off.

Reflecting on the book, it is ironic how its title, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, led me to consider the distinction between being alone and being lonely. I also suppose that my Indian philosophical bent makes me think that I enter the world alone and return alone. All ties are only illusions. Yet, in material, day-to-day life, there are times when I wish people around me would simply leave me alone. Strangers you barely know feel entitled to talk to you—on buses, trains, in queues, waiting rooms, lounges, parties, and social gatherings—eager to enquire. They want to pick at the juicy details: where you’re from, how you manage to live here if you don’t speak a certain language, why your husband doesn’t live with you, and how you can possibly live alone. The questions spiral on and on. I want to be alone, and sorry, I am not lonely. I enjoy my beautiful home, my garden, and my pets. Oh yes, I have house help too, who ensures that I am not alone by popping in now and then with silly queries or statements, such as: “Shall I bathe the dog today?” “It looks as if it may rain. Can I get the clothes inside?”  “The electricity man says the meter isn’t working.”  “The neighbour thinks our bougainvillea has crept into his garden.” Oh, to be really alone for a moment.

So yes—being alone and being lonely are entirely different states. “Alone” can be positive, a physical condition of being without others. In India, I’m not sure anyone can claim they have had ‘true alone time.’ Loneliness, on the other hand, is an emotional disconnection, a sense of being removed even when surrounded by people. I’m not convinced this distinction is widely acknowledged in many Asian contexts.

But back to the book. Desai spends nearly 700 pages exploring the disconnection that Sonia and Sunny experience. Early on, when Sonia’s loneliness is explained to her grandparents, they reflect: “In Allahabad, loneliness was not something they had patience for. They might have known the loneliness of being misunderstood, or the sucked-dry feeling of an Allahabad afternoon, but they had never slept in a house alone, never eaten a meal alone, never lived in a place where they were unknown, never woken without a cook bringing tea or greeting several people in the morning” (Chapter 1). Once again, I am not sure if the novel is able to draw the line between loneliness and being alone convincingly.

The novel, using the young characters Sonia and Sunny, explores not just personal loneliness but loneliness that is more widespread. Sunny is a journalist attempting to juggle between an Indian and an American identity and is in a relationship with Ulla, an American. Sonia is a college graduate caught in an abusive relationship with an elderly artist, Ilan de Toorjen Foss. Over time, both relationships fail, and due to both families muddled attempts at matchmaking, the love story does not move in a linear or tangible way. Sonia and Sunny, while trying to find meaning in their own lives, also attempt to comprehend marital relationships. Sonia tries to understand the rift between her father, Manav and mother, Seher  while Sunny struggles with his bossy, over-possessive mother, Babita.

The storyline takes you through Vermont, New York, Delhi, Goa, Allahabad, Italy, and Mexico. There is a series of characters: jaded aunts, cunning and scheming uncles, miserly grandparents, loyal and disloyal cooks, drivers, servants, and pets. A key idea of the novel is that Indian family relationships are in a state of disjuncture and dysfunction. There seems to be a lack of love all around. Kiran Desai also appears to suggest that elderly Indians live in a miserly, impoverished fashion. What really rattled me was her description of the fridge in the Allahabad home: “The cockroaches that lived inside the warm laboring fridge didn’t bother her— in fact, she couldn’t see them, the voltage was so low. Neither did she notice that atop the greasy jars, daddy longlegs had got their long legs stuck and died. Nor that at the top of the door almost as tall as the wall, a lizard had been squashed, and the squashed leather of its torso and empty face still dangled from the high doorframe" (Chapter 1). I don’t think Indians live in such dingy circumstances as the author is portraying.

The story seems to harp on a kind of magical realism and folklore using the idea of an amulet named ‘Badal Baba’ while blending bits of personal histories, such as the German grandfather, the man with the long nails, and the man who sat in a tree (a reference to Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard). Desai does not conceal the fact that Indians eat beef or have sexual relationships. One gets the feeling that Indians living abroad to cure their loneliness end up wandering around, having strange relationships, becoming psychotic, and yet clinging to their parents. The idea of Sunny’s friend entering an arranged marriage feels like a sarcastic swipe at the Indian marriage system.

By the time I finished the book, I had recovered from a bout of flu, and I felt as though the novel itself had been caught in a similar fever. The ending—Sunny and Sonia swimming in the sea—felt equally enigmatic. The larger problem, for me, was that Desai seemed to be mixing observations about Indians in the US with imagined statements about Indians in India. Her characters remained suspended between families and individualism, love and sex, relationships and mere interactions, maladies and health, help and servitude, emotional blackmail and possessiveness, life, and death. The characters in the novel do not linger with you once you finish nor can you read much into them as you read the novel.

At a personal level, I found the novel boring and insipid, tinged with sarcasm toward both Indian and American values. Every culture has its good and bad; it is up to individuals to locate the good and accept it. But when stories are written in dense, ambivalent ways with no linear connections—and when readers struggle to understand them—that often seems to be the very moment they are acclaimed and deemed worthy of awards.

 

*****

 Few quotes from the book: 

 

Perched above them, at the entrance portico, sat a plaster bust of a portly gentleman in a cravat, perhaps inspired by a drawing made by the bungalow’s original owner, who had toured Europe, sketchbook in hand, in the same manner he’d observed foreigners doing in India. And perhaps it was the fault of the artist’s rendering, or the dissonant surroundings of Allahabad, or a splattering of bird droppings, but the bust resembled less a dignified nobleman than a foolish snob with an interest in the sky overhead, which had not turned vivid for a quarter of a century. Not since the national highway had been widened to accommodate the lorries that trawled cabbages, cement, goats, wheat, and – if one was to believe the newspapers or the gossip – prostitutes and venereal disease. (Chapter 1) 

 If India existed, then America could not, for they were too drastically different not to cancel each other out. Yet despite this fact, they refused to remain apart. India invaded his life all the way from the other side of the world, and then life here became instantly artificial,..

In the moment of the water rushing over her, she became a river. The bathroom’s window looked into the drenched, mossy world, and she watched the steam trickle and vanish through the trees. She thought of Tanizaki writing about shadowy old bathrooms being gateways to the past.