‘Wanted to write about this idea of rifts between us being a sort of loneliness’

Kiran Desai

, Booker Prize winner for ‘The Inheritance of Loss’ (2006), returns with ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’, a novel nearly twenty years in the making that has already been shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. In this interview with

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose

, she reflects on loneliness and the white spaces that give stories their shape

Can you briefly encapsulate this novel?

I wanted to write about how modernity affects spiritual beings in matters of loneliness and love. So, the very elemental matters of loneliness and love. The initial idea was to discuss all the lonelinesses between us. Not just romantic but great divides between nations, races, classes. I chose to see those rifts as a kind of loneliness. I eventually realised I could perhaps best do this through the lens of a love story. It is centred on Sonia and Sunny, and it’s a long, unresolved romance which takes them to many parts of the world. It’s a real globalised desi romance.

You see from the eyes of a desi and a foreigner. And you did not put emphasis on just the women or men. You made struggles visible.

Thank you. This is the first response from India I’m hearing. I also realised it was perhaps the last time I could really write deeply about India because I wanted to capture that time of my grandparents, before they vanished from my memory. While I still come to India — I have a brother in Hyderabad, relatives in Dehradun and Kolkata — I no longer go back to a family home. I knew I was going to lose the ability to write about India deeply. I can still write about India or the diaspora, but to really write with this degree of intimacy, I sensed, would be more difficult.

How did you show so many shades of love and loneliness?

Well, for example, Sunny meets a woman who grew up under an authoritarian regime who tells him he has no idea what he’s talking about when he’s talking about loneliness. And she’s known the loneliness of constant surveillance, of not being allowed her private thoughts. On a very busy planet, you’re meeting people with all these different backgrounds. Sonia’s mother’s solitude is a choice. It’s the only way she can leave her marriage. At one point, she tells her daughter, there are worse things than loneliness, which seems harsh, but that’s been the lesson of her life. And for Sonia, too, loneliness means the absence of fear because she’s come through a very abusive relationship. There’s also the loneliness that’s necessary for transformation. We want to escape the identity that’s been imposed upon us. I wanted to also talk about loneliness as sustenance, not just as shame.

I made a note that for Kiran, art intersects life in this story as much as in real life. Does it?

It really does. I happen to pick books up, and they seem fated because they affect me so deeply. Or when it’s something that I’m trying to write about, and I go to those very books in the library. It’s almost as if the right book finds you at the right moment. I was reading Kafka’s ‘The Castle’, which Sonia’s mother is reading on her honeymoon. And I was reading (Yasunari Kawabata’s) ‘Snow Country’ again. I was also reading Naipaul’s ‘The Enigma of Arrival’. All these books are constructed out of spaces and distances — more out of the gaps between people rather than the connections. And the white space is what holds the books together. I was learning from them and writing my own version.

There’s also a childlike enthusiasm for mixing a bit of magic.

I miss that in adult fiction. I think I was also trying to write about how people, through various life experiences, fall out of reality. Sometimes I think our nightmares affect our existence. They are so vivid and so primitive, and go back to the same nightmares that our prehistoric ancestors might have had. Because how in the world am I dreaming about serpents and sharks in my New York life? I wanted to include that in a realistic story. To think about these spaces and this unknowingness. We’re all mixed up together and yet we don’t know each other. This idea of different rifts between us being a sort of loneliness. I wanted them to have a psychic presence, but I also wanted them to take form on occasion, because I think they do take form. When you’re talking to certain people, you realise that you would never call their lives reality. Some of the journeys people make to the US, there seems to be nothing realistic about them. And you’re thinking about somebody being sent to a prison called Alligator Alcatraz (in South Florida), imagine the trauma.At first, I thought I was going to write a book that was purely realistic. But I felt as if I couldn’t write this book without including that element also, as we are all connected through a shadow world. You can follow that personally in terms of family stories, how certain things come popping up again and again. They disappear, and yet there’s a trail of darkness that runs through many families.

These fictional characters are in the foreground, but you have this precise timeline happening. It’s like a metronome at the back.

_{Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.}