The winter in Vermont is finally melting. But Sonia Shah’s lover of three months has abruptly announced his departure. Ilan de Toorjen Foss, a manic narcissist of mysterious Swiss origins, is 33 years older than her. To soften the shock, he dangles the prospect of a future escapade in Portofino: “Where the film stars go.” But Sonia can’t leave the country on her student visa. When her university studies end in three months, she will have to leave for good. She could have applied to a graduate programme in writing. But Sonia knows that a short story she has written isn’t good enough.
“What is it about?” she is asked.
“A boy who becomes a monkey.”
On cue, Ilan erupts, “Ahhh – don’t write orientalist nonsense!” Later, he adds, “What Westerners did to you, you are doing to yourself.”
Even though Ilan strikes the right pose, his righteousness still appears crooked. His excursions as a globetrotting painter are financed by his family’s colonial legacy. His grandfather made millions shipping fruit from Latin America. Not incidentally, Ilan trades in surrealism. When Sonia asks if he studied it in Mexico, Ilan rejoins: “There is no such thing as surrealism in Mexico.” The natives never needed the affectations of the European avant-garde to conjure a magical reality; their reality was already magical. But, desperate for inspiration, Ilan neglects his own advice to Sonia. He remains blind to the splinter of colonialism in his eye: “I painted a lake fisherman whose feet had actually turned to hyacinth roots; he’d never owned shoes.”
Kiran Desai’s new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, appears after a publication gap of almost 20 years. Yet, instead of insisting on its novelty, the book moves retrospectively. Its themes, for one, appear dated. In these years, tropes of migration and tourism, class and authenticity have saturated the popular discourse of Indian novels so profusely that exchanges, such as the one between Sonia and Ilan, have become a commonplace. This kind of irony no longer moves us. We have already sampled it elsewhere. Just like the takeaway biryani sold by generic food vans, these tropes have gone stale, even if they get periodically reheated.
Desai, though, is more ambitious. It seems she wants to repurpose these stock tropes in order to thematise the fate of the “Indian novel” in the global literary marketplace. Just as globalisation has rewired the flow of labour and commodities, the Indian novel, too, has rewired its generic combinations: oriental fantasy, magical realism, social novel, vernacular realism, and so on.
In fact, her career catalogues some of these key shifts. Desai, daughter of the popular novelist Anita Desai, left India aged 14, first moving to England, and eventually settling in the US. She studied at Bennington College in Vermont, which bears a striking similarity to Sonia’s Hewitt College. Her debut novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1997), is also reminiscent of Sonia’s story, a magical fable about “a man who becomes a monkey”. Unlike Sonia, though, Desai did enrol in a graduate writing programme, at Columbia, where the idea for her Booker Prize-winning social novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), began to take shape.
Novels, in general, have always been omnivorous. They have prospered by consuming tropes and conventions belonging to other genres. But Desai’s third book is a peculiar kind of “Indian novel”. It prospers by consuming itself: not just riffing on Desai’s previous books, but recycling an entire inventory of the Indian novel. It’s only appropriate that The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny should, then, turn out to be not one but three kinds of novels – love story, social novel, magical realism – contained in one.
The two protagonists, Sonia and Sunny, are children of elite families based in New Delhi. Arriving in the US in the mid 1990s, they instantly suffer predictable crises of identity. For the first time, they discover that they are “brown”. But they are not the shade of brown typically found toiling at construction sites or port docks. Their colleagues identify them as Indians. But they understand neither the vernacular languages nor the popular cultures of their country. Stuck in Brooklyn, they fail in love (both have toxic relationships with white partners) and lose all their friends. Their malaise, though, is hardly a mystery. In India, Sonia and Sunny were smothered by the constant solicitude of Papa-Mummy, Dada-Dadi, Nana-Nani, and flocks of servants. Now, they are struggling to cook their own food and wash their clothes.
The novel is set in motion when the grandparents hatch an old-fashioned scheme to arrange a wedding between Sonia and Sunny. Over 688 pages, the novel inflates slowly, rather like a globe, until its successive chapters are dotted with myriad destinations: Goa, Kansas, Italy, Mexico, Rajasthan, New York’s Jackson Heights, and even the Himalayas. Sonia and Sunny – an aspiring novelist and an aspiring journalist – drift across this vastly stratified geography looking for that elusive something: a cure for their loneliness.
But it’s not just Sonia and Sunny who feel lonely. Their families are similarly unmoored. In New Delhi, the tide of Hindu nationalism is rising. Simultaneously, economic reforms allow access to an international global black market. Yet the parents remain ensconced in their bubbles of elite affluence: walking their dogs in Mughal gardens and plotting their vacations to Tokyo. This comes to an end when Sonia’s father is fired for hanging Mughal miniatures in his office, and Sunny’s uncles are murdered while trying to sell their family home on the black market.
Meanwhile, the grandparents live in crumbling colonial-era bungalows in the city of Allahabad. When they are not busy surveilling their cook (lest he steal an extra kebab), they are marooned on their decaying veranda. Out in front, trawlers endlessly ferry cement and cabbages, prostitutes and wheat along a national highway. But the grandparents can’t comprehend these new circulations. Until, one day, they discover their poor servants have turned their backyard into a secret hub of sex work.
The historical scale of the novel – a colonial-era province, a postcolonial capital, and a global metropole – lines up rather neatly. But given its tightly wound sense of confinement, the narrative moves slowly. Or rather, it gives only the illusion of moving. This is because Sonia and Sunny can never properly enter their narrative situations. They can witness the world, but they can’t seem to experience it freely. These failures spawn a range of highly clichéd sequences across the novel.
Sunny works all night for Associated Press, editing stories about Osama bin Laden and Princess Diana, chemical weapons and astronomical comets. By day he worships Ryszard Kapuściński, the Polish writer who reported from Africa. But when it’s time for Sunny to report, he can only muster “The Fingernail Man”, a typically exotic story about an Indian who holds the record for the world’s longest fingernails.
If Sunny is deprived of real experience, Sonia can experience the world only in terms of a tidy, rather stylised, jumble of lists. It doesn’t matter whether she is commuting to her daily shift at an art gallery in New York or researching kebabs in Old Delhi. Her encounters invariably resemble a museum catalogue. In New York, she navigates a procession of derelict warehouses, car parks drenched in chemical waste, junkies, sink factories and cats with leukaemia. In Old Delhi, she traverses a procession of attar shops, bearded men sitting in rickshaws alongside bearded goats, rotis flying overhead, and hennaed feet hiding under black burqas.
Are these clichéd characters meant to serve as foils for the diasporic Indian novelist, who, perhaps, wants to distinguish herself? Or is Desai’s use of tropes more deliberate? Is she deploying them to dramatise the confusions of young cosmopolitans? As the novel progresses, the clichés become chronic. They don’t just colour individual personalities. They start to consume entire societies.
In the novel’s middle sections, both protagonists return to India: Sonia to work at an elite cultural magazine run by the wife of a cabinet minister, Sunny to accompany his friend Satya – who is determined to have an “arranged marriage” – on visits to the families of potential wives. “The home of this prospective bride had a marble driveway, a koi pond with water lilies guarded by a drooly mastiff,” Desai writes of a gated community of townhouses with typical command of detail. The father, we are informed, is sipping a single malt and dressed in a green Lacoste T-shirt. The bride, an Americanised “foodie”, is dressed in a pink Lacoste T-shirt.
On these excursions with Satya, Sunny often has to fight off a touristic urge to click snapshots. Desai’s descriptions, though, are snapshots: flat and ready-made clichés, frequently shading into caricatures. Consider, also, the office of Sonia’s employer:
At the portal to the bungalow, roses floated in a shallow antique brass basin from Kerala filled with water. Two antique temple oil lamps from Orissa stood on either side, and beyond was the drawing room in earthen shades, magnificent with Chola bronzes and sculptures of celestial Khajuraho women…
But this is just so much furniture. Desai’s descriptions lack the vitality of everyday life. Instead of experiencing the real mysteries of political power, her characters are trapped in situations that increasingly look like movie sets. These tropes no longer express the loneliness of her protagonists. They enforce it.
Sometimes, Desai tries to breathe life into these sets by explicitly commenting on them. Exhausted by her husband’s misogynistic gags at a party, Sonia’s mother draws attention to a cubist painting of horses in the room: “Terrible what the goons are doing to him.” Desai duly elaborates on the fate of the artist MF Husain who lived in exile in the later years of his life:
Recently, Hindu religious sensibilities had been offended by a delicate sketch by him of a bare- breasted goddess Saraswati as she sat with her vina, a fish, a river, a lotus flower. He had sketched it out of love, but now it inspired hate. A mob had broken into an art gallery and destroyed his paintings.
Desai’s novel is rife with such historical annotations (her themes, increasingly haphazard, span the Partition and 9/11). It’s because her characters don’t have the freedom to blend with their historical situations that a fattened scrim of metacommentary repeatedly rises to the novel’s surface.
The theme of thwarted creativity also provides the subtext for the novel’s magical realist plot. Sonia loses her creative powers to Ilan when he steals Badal Baba, a supernatural amulet she has inherited from her grandfather, a German theosophist who disappeared while seeking the occult in the Himalayas. This traumatic loss takes on successive spectral forms, including a “ghost hound” that chases Sonia and Sunny on a beach in Goa. But these surrealist twists are mostly formulaic, perhaps even unnecessary.
As for Desai, her creative powers appear restored when she writes without trying to make a point. Her darting observations about masters and servants are especially memorable. Outside Allahabad railway station: “The driver’s glasses were Scotch-taped all around.” Inside Stockholm airport: “Babita tried to align her accent to British when she asked for tea but was almost offended by her own dark hand – like a monkey’s paw – when she lifted her cup.” Unfortunately these stolen moments – when Desai’s sentences escape the clenched design of her “Indian novel” – are only too few.
The vignette of Satya’s winter wedding in Delhi is perhaps most emblematic of Desai’s writerly gifts. Satya, a doctor from upstate New York, is seated on a plywood throne under a tent set up on a neighbourhood rubbish dump. Satya is struggling to strike up a conversation with his shy wife. Despite this awkwardness, the hired videographer is doggedly recording them. Outside, construction workers are setting plastic bags on fire for warmth. Inside, the buffet keeps sliding into chaos. Men are getting drunk. Women are hurling insults at other women’s jewellery. When the band starts playing, the drunks madly descend on the dancefloor: a slick layer of sucked bones and cartilage. This dramatic sequence achieves its true purpose when, unpredictably, stray cows enter the smoggy tent. They are “shy but stubborn”, expecting to find their daily pile of rubbish, but now making do with napkins and paper plates.
Not only does this vignette capture the arbitrary eventfulness of daily life in a post-colonial city, it also quietly reconfigures the novel’s global scope. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a novel in which stray cows are granted the freedom denied to its protagonists.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Kiran Desai
Hamish Hamilton, 688pp, £25
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[Further reading: Andrew O’Hagan’s ode to friendship]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor