“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” by Kiran Desai

Desai’s epic novel is a story about love’s triumphs and failures, a story cloaked in mystery, a story of rigid class divisions, a story of how ethnic stereotypes and rivalries destroy, a tale about the travails of immigration, and a tale of generational traumas and heartbreaks. It is a story of not knowing quite where one is from or where one is going in the modern globalized world. It takes place at the turn of the 21st century and flits back and forth primarily between India and America, with stops to Italy and Mexico in between. “One thing seemed certain: If India existed, then America could not, for they were too drastically different not to cancel each other out.”

At the crux of the novel’s plot is that feeling immigrants have of being a part of two different worlds, but belonging to neither. “Sunny registered himself hypocritical, too, when he looked away from other Indians he saw on the street—Indians who were also avidly ignoring him, trying to make it in America by avoiding one another, better to be two Indians than three Indians. And better an Indian in New York than an Indian in India.” India, despite everything, however, always felt like one’s first home. “After a day when everything was at odds—full of obstacles and irritations—dusk in India felt always settled, ancient, a civilization that had come to fullness.”

Even the older generation, the ones who were children raised in the shadow of Partition, felt the tug and pull on their lives as well. “All of us Indians who are educated to be Westernized are fated to make the same journey. If we have any intelligence or any heart, we have to search for ourselves backward.” But for the youth straddling the 21st century, globalization had allowed for so much, yet also allowed for the  confusion only to grow. “Seeing her in her grandfather’s bungalow—with her eccentric father lecturing me on mystic poetry and her divorced aunt in a nightgown up to her neck and down to her toes, the bad-tempered cook chopping onions on the floor of a black kitchen lit by a candle—it was like walking into a book from the past. I don’t want to live in the present anymore, and I certainly don’t want to live in the future—it hurts my eyes just to look at what the world is becoming. So that only leaves the past, no matter its obscenities.” However, every coin has two sides. "Western psychology is no match for an Indian family. We are too slippery, we change shape, we don’t distinguish truth from lies. Lies are truth and truth are lies—you can’t pin us down.”

In the end, Desai’s novel is a story about searching for companionship in the modern world and the particular struggles for immigrants in navigating their path to love. “Maybe all you needed was to be loved once. It was too much to ask to be loved all the way through life, and you could return to the memory for sustenance.” Finding oneself, first, and then finding another becomes life’s impossible task. “The universe tries everything it can to prevent love. If one thing doesn’t work to keep two people apart, then it tries another. Darkness follows darkness, across geographies, across centuries. It has its own life, unspooling.”