When Kiran Desai reached the venue at the Jaipur Literature Festival, the crowd had settled into a restless quiet reserved for writers who publish rarely and speak even less. The session had been moved from morning to afternoon, but a waiting crowd still spilled across the vast front lawn.
“It is really wonderful to be back at JLF after, I think…15 years,” she said. Her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, took nearly two decades to complete, but Desai herself seemed uninterested in the mythology of delay. What mattered to her was the “spiritual” discipline.
“Everything in my life is so that I can get up and work in the morning and work through the day for as many hours as I can work,” she said, adding, “I don’t really think of it as writing a book. I think of it as daily work.” Desai described the act of writing as a form of transposition, “taking one molecule of real life and moving it into artistic life,” likening herself to “an ant, or a bee, or an earthworm.”
At one point, Nandini Nair read aloud a passage from the novel describing a woman sweeping dust across a veranda in Allahabad, the dust pushed outward in slow, deliberate arcs, only to return the next morning. Desai visibly brightened at that passage being chosen over all others in the 700-page sprawling novel.
“That image is the heart of the book,” she said. The veranda, she said, belonged to her grandparents, and though she had spent most of her adult life elsewhere, it had remained fixed in her imagination. “It fascinates me that after so long spent abroad and working in New York, I am still returning to that landscape,” she said, adding that both her mother Anita Desai, who was incidentally nominated for the Booker thrice, and herself have written about the verandah — including finding a scorpion with 14 babies on her back.
The conversation inevitably turned to politics, or rather to Desai’s refusal to foreground it. Compared with The Inheritance of Loss, the new novel has been described as less overtly political, more inward, almost romantic.“It’s easier to write an angry political book,” she said. “It’s harder to go into those private spaces between two people.”
What fiction offers instead, she said, was proximity. “We don’t read novels for politics,” she said. “We want to know what two people say.” The intimacy of those exchanges, she argued, is what enlarges the reader’s emotional vocabulary.
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Desai spoke of the stigma of loneliness – the novel’s organising principle – and of the way it resists public language. “No one will say, ‘I’m lonely,’ to a stranger,” she said. And yet, since the book’s publication, that was what readers had begun to do. “People come up to me in signing lines and say, ‘I’m so lonely.’”
The loneliness she was interested in was not limited to romance. It extended outward, into geopolitics and history, into the “divides between nations, between classes, the distrust between races.” The disappearance of older worlds, she suggested, produced its own desolation.
“The past is vanishing very fast,” she said. But she resisted pathologising the condition. “Loneliness can also be sustenance,” she said. “It can be the peace that comes after the war is over.”
The novel’s geography reflects this complexity. Alongside India and the United States, Mexico emerges as a significant setting, a choice, Desai said, surprised even her. Living in New York, she found herself in an immigrant neighbourhood where Spanish shaped the rhythm of daily life.
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“You don’t know the United States until you go to Latin America,” she said. Mexico allowed her to see the United States from the outside, and India without passing through a colonial lens. “It’s wonderful not to have to go through an imperial centre,” she said. “To think of India and Mexico in direct conversation.”
Fame was treated with suspicion. “When you lose those eyes on you is when you can work,” Desai said. Attention, she suggested, was often inimical to thought.
Near the end of the session, the discussion turned briefly to artificial intelligence. Desai described asking ChatGPT to write a story in her style. “It started under a mango tree,” she said. “Then I went to a guava orchard.”
She said she felt a bit embarrassed at the result. “I would never write a book like it today. I was very young when I wrote it, AI doesn’t know that!”
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Deasai felt a great urgency while writing her novel. “I knew this might be my last chance to write a deep book about India,” she said. “I was still going back. My father was still alive. I knew I would lose that closeness.”
As the session ended, readers queued for signings. Desai remained seated, speaking quietly, continuing the work she had described all afternoon.
