Two young, sexy, intelligent people with an excellent education. They have considerable social privileges and not inconsiderable wealth. They also have feelings of utter worthlessness, along with perpetual sadness. The only apparent cause for this is the people they are attracted to don’t love them back. If this sounds Sally Rooney-ish, it is. Only, this time, these two people have Indian passports and Indian parents. Welcome to Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.
Mercifully, because no one has anointed Kiran Desai ‘the voice of a generation’, we can examine Sonia and Sunny for themselves. My examination mainly had me asking why the (beautifully written) book could not have been more about the previous generation, Sonia and Sunny’s parents who have far more colour, spirit and verve than these two inheritors of loss.
First, the unkind view
Desai’s latest book is set in the 1990s and early 2000s. Sonia and Sunny have been sent to the US for college by their families, parents who live in New Delhi and grandparents who are family friends in Allahabad.
Brought up with money, class privilege, and love, they are now grappling with the possibility that the American dream might actually be a nightmare. Sonia gets into an abusive relationship with a man 30 years older. Sunny can’t shake off the shadow of his tenacious, elegant mother Babita Bhatia, who has ruled his life ever since Sunny’s father died in childhood.
As Sonia and Sunny mope and bemoan and beseech through 600 pages, their anguish is at times difficult to understand. The world is falling apart — the Babri Masjid is demolished, the World Trade Centre is attacked, the Gujarat riots happen, grandparents and uncles die — but our lead characters, in true Rooney fashion, are steadfastly nursing nothing but their heartbreak and loneliness.
Again Like Rooney’s Marian, Connell, Frances, Ivan, and Peter, Sonia and Sunny seem incapable of using their considerable advantages to help their situations.
Sonia’s crisis is still easier to grasp: Ilan destroys her self worth to such an extent she feels ‘murdered’. But Sunny Bhatia’s main problem seems to be an utter inability to look beyond himself. One is tempted to point both towards their mothers for lessons in resilience.
The less-judgemental view
Of course, if you take Rooney’s and Desai’s world at the face value of their internal logic, the characters are not ignoring the political for the personal. It is the political that is rending apart the personal — if you are battling racism, displacement, alienation, and a crisis of identity in a society where old bonds are disintegrating and new walls taking their place, you will seem small, self-centered, helpless. The children of ambition eventually inherit exhaustion.
And the preoccupation with romantic love is not petty. In both Rooney and Desai, there is a recognition that in an unequal, unfair, capitalist society, love is the ultimate radical act. Opening oneself to love, and choosing the beloved through all the trials and degradations modern society can put them through, is revolutionary; it is the reclaiming of humanity and individuality in a world trying to slot us into neat packages of consumable products. The only way, in fact, of becoming Normal People.
Kiran Desai’s inheritance of Anita Desai
Through all their falling down and falling apart and getting up again, Sonia and Sunny remain extremely readable. The book is long but rewarding.
However, for me, the best parts of the book were set in Allahabad and Delhi.
The book opens with Mina Foi, Sonia’s divorced aunt, and Mina’s parents. Mina has the same promise that Kiran’s mother, Anita Desai, made such great use of in her book Fasting, Feasting, where Uma was a similarly older, single woman at the mercy of her parents.
The other single woman, Sunny’s mother Babita, has wobbly morals, but that doesn’t dim her bulbul personality or her occasional bursts of kindness.
Sonia’s mother Seher wanders lonely as a cloud o’er vales and hills, and is most at peace doing so.
Seher’s husband Manav Shah is the Privileged Patriacrh, but his heart is in the right place and his soul is shaken and stirred to the right degree.
If Sonia and Sunny learn that love will save you, their previous generation knows that being saved will not protect you, but that should not hold you back from loving and giving.
It is this contrast — of one generation fasting, the other feasting on life — that bears out the wisdom of an Amir Khusrau couplet Desai quotes several times: “Khusrau dariya prem ka, ulti vaa ki dhaar, jo utra so doob gaya, jo dooba so paar”. It is only through submerging yourself in love that you stay afloat.
See you after 15 days,
Yours Literary,
Yashee
yashee.s@indianexpress.com
P.S: If you love books, write to me with what work I should discuss next. If you are not a reader of novels, follow along, and maybe you will begin to delight in the wonder and wisdom, the practical value, and the sheer joy of fiction.
Kiran Desai Sonia Sunny: Kiran Desai's Sonia and Sunny would be right at home in the anguished Sally Rooney universe. (Photos: Express) 
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