Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai on Monday said her latest novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, grew out of a long and immersive exploration of modern loneliness.
Speaking at the Kolkata Literary Meet in conversation with the festival’s chief coordinator Shahana Chatterjee, Desai said the 20-year gap since The Inheritance of Loss (2006) was driven largely by the scope of the subject she chose to pursue.
“On the surface it is a simple, unresolved romance, but underneath it is about loneliness across geography and history,” she said, adding that she did not initially realise how expansive the manuscript had become.
Desai said that family lies at the core of the novel, and explored how personal relationships are shaped not only by individuals, but by generations around them. Unlike many Western novels that focus narrowly on two protagonists, she said Indian stories are inevitably influenced by grandparents, extended family and even their absence.
The novel traces these intergenerational influences to examine how earlier migrations and marriages shape the emotional lives of Sonia and Sunny, Desai said.
Desai spoke of her father’s journey from a small town in Gujarat to Britain and back to India as a judge, and of her mother’s mixed Bengali-German heritage. “You think of that enormous arc,” she said, calling such earlier migrations “much more dramatic and enormous than the ones we undertake today”.
Asked whether the novel was autobiographical, Desai responded, “Yes and no.” While India remains “a very precious literary landscape” for her, she said elements from her life are “transformed through the process of imagination”.
A recurring symbol in the book, the talismanic painting known as Badal Baba, was inspired by a real artwork gifted to Desai by Italian painter Francesco Clemente. The faceless, eyeless figure became central to the novel’s themes of appropriation, loss and identity.
Another symbolic presence, the ghostly hound that appears during moments of fear and danger, emerged from Desai’s attempt to capture psychological and political anxieties that realism alone could not fully express.
Although the novel is more personal than overtly political, Desai said it was impossible to ignore global events such as September 11 and the 2002 Gujarat riots. “I could not not put in the politics of the time,” she said. “Politics affect all of us… the rhetoric in drawing rooms, our actual lives, the visas”.
Describing the novel’s emotional core, Desai said it ultimately returns to an “old-fashioned” idea of love. Acts such as Sunny retrieving the lost amulet for Sonia, she said, symbolise “commitment and optimism”. “Somebody really being interested in your welfare, not just in themselves,” the writer said.
