Book: THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY
Author: Kiran Desai
Published by: Hamish Hamilton
Price: Rs 999
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai’s second ticket to the Booker Prize shortlist, resembles a cavernous structure filled with the darkness required to justify its title. Almost two decades have gone into its composition and its almost decade-long timeline serves as an intricate map tracing the lives of the several characters Desai conjures to populate it. The first pages house the family trees of each of the two titular characters and before we are introduced to either of them, we are offered the loneliness of Sonia. It becomes the defining line that allows us to progress, with trepidation, into the depths of the story. Sonia, a young student at Vermont, is ailed by her solitude. Her depression and spells of weeping over the telephone encourage her grandparents, Dadaji and Ba, and her aunt, Mina Foi, to conceive a marriage proposal for her with Sunny — the grandson of their neighbour, the Colonel, with whom Dadaji has an old score to settle. Sunny, also living in America and struggling to earn recognition as a journalist at The Associated Press, seems to be the logical match for Sonia, both of them being young, unmarried Indians in a foreign country and, therefore, lonely.
It is clear, of course, that the story isn’t quite that simple, else Desai wouldn’t have required a daunting 670 pages to try and contain its sprawl. While Sunny has managed to secure an American girlfriend, Sonia, in her haste to “relieve her solitude”, succumbs to the devilish charms of the painter, Ilan de Toorjen Foss. As Desai carefully chronicles the tales of the other characters from the family trees — Sonia’s parents and their declining marriage, Sunny’s widowed mother, Babita, who is bitter about the negligible inheritance her dead husband was bequeathed, Mina Foi and her short-lived marriage to a cheating man that left her permanently alone — Sonia also keeps spiralling down a dangerous path where Ilan’s megalomania consumes her till she completely loses herself. Reduced to a bestial state, she wastes away and becomes a shadow denigrated to keep Ilan’s bathroom clean, his refrigerator stocked, and his bed warm as he rages and rants and ravages her. He even robs her of her only solace, an amulet named “Badal Baba” by her German grandfather, who was also a painter, that she kept as a talisman to ward off the evil of her loneliness. When her relationship with Ilan meets its forced and abrupt end, she is turned out like last evening’s trash. Unable to sustain herself, she flees back to India to seek solace in the familiarity of her home.
Sunny, in the meantime, has also travelled to India, mainly to assist his friend, Satya, in the latter’s hunt for a suitable match among the few his parents have arranged. As fate and about 250 pages would have it, Sunny meets cute Sonia on a train to Allahabad, home to the very same grandparents who had once sought to arrange a marriage between them. After two weeks of silently exchanged glances, during which Sunny strikes up a rapport with Sonia’s father, they part, only to arrange, over exchanged emails, a second meeting in Goa. By this time, Sonia too has written an article in a posh magazine, and two aspiring artists and lovers have an intimate and engaging romantic escapade. Another set of pages (with the news of Sunny’s green card secretly sandwiched in them) later, they meet again, this time in Italy. These three meetings sum up the entirety of the time they spend physically together.
The novel focuses principally on the time they spend apart. Their individual lonelinesses, along with the lonelinesses of the other characters, are what the story is all about. While Desai attempts to infuse her work with flashes of magic realism in the form of monstrous and ghoulish animals that haunt the characters, along with real beasts and pests in the form of lizards, bandicoots, moths and rats, it is the disturbing reality of solitary existence in the urban jungle of the modern world that screams at us from the pages. Behind the comical expressions of Babita’s class-consciousness lies the heart-wrenching truth of her lonely existence where even her son avoids her. Behind Mina Foi’s locker full of her dowry jewels is the sad realisation that after the deaths of Ba and Dadaji, the only option for her is to be sent to a nunnery.
Unfortunately, the coming-of-age of Sonia as she manages to emerge victorious from her despair remains elusive. Even though Desai’s book tries to pose as a novel that shows independent women of different ages learning to live alone, it cannot quite establish it. Babita is haunted by nightmares of her home, sold to her illegally, being seized by squatters. Sonia is relentlessly hounded by the ghastly ghosts of Ilan’s paintings. It is only in the facade of a happy ending that she manages to rediscover a bit of herself, once again.
While Desai’s masterful handling of the language lends a poetic flow to her words, her magnum opus, cluttered by too many people, becomes uncontainable, leaving readers wondering if indeed “the center did not hold”.