Kiran Desai was getting ready for a photo shoot and couldn’t decide what to wear. For the Indian-American novelist, the dilemma was fraught because of the cultural symbolism involved. “Should I wear my kurta because the photographer is coming? Or my dress? In the end I wore my kurta, but I took off my pyjamas and wore my kurta like a dress.” Over a video call from her home in the Jackson Heights neighbourhood of Queens in New York, Desai laughs at her makeshift solution. “That’s the absurdity that happens.”
The choice of a hybrid look – western and Indian – offers a portrait in miniature of what the 54-year-old has been doing for most of her working life: striving to present her authentic self as a writer who inhabits an in-between space, belonging to two countries and neither. Desai was just 14 when she moved first to England and then to the United States with her mother, and fellow novelist, Anita Desai. She studied creative writing at Bennington College in Vermont. She felt homesick for her father and family back in India. She assimilated over time. And she channelled her energies into fiction.
Desai became a roaring success. When her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published, in 1998, Salman Rushdie declared himself a fan. In 2006, at 35, Desai won the Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss, making her the youngest author to ever do so. (Eleanor Catton would beat her record in 2013.) Her mother had been nominated for the Booker three times; Kiran’s nomination was the first time a mother and daughter had both got the Booker Prize nod.
And then, for almost 20 years, there was nothing, just artistic silence and a hope from publishers of what might come.
RM Block
Now Desai is back with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which has also been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A kaleidoscopic epic, the novel tackles family dynamics, multiculturalism, postcolonialism and immigration. A deeply rewarding, quotable and surprisingly energising read, it is enormous: 688 pages in its published form.
“It’s a big book, but it was so much bigger at one point,” Desai says. “It was thousands of pages, and I whittled it down. I felt as if I was just swimming in the novel, trying to see where it was coming alive, trying to see which strands I would use.”
In the novel, Desai tracks the journey of Sonia and Sunny, who leave their home place in India to fashion lives for themselves in the US. Fated to meet by their meddling, matchmaking families, both struggle in their adopted lands. The novel poses questions to which they don’t know the answer. Are US live-your-dream-style values better than community-valorising Indian ideals? Does embracing western ways necessitate shunning your old life? Can you simply shrug off your previous self, like a salamander stepping out of its skin?
“Immigration can be a process of creating an unknowable creature of oneself,” Desai says, noting that in India there’s a sense that it’s a privilege to take those journeys: it’s the preserve of the wealthy. “In that landscape, all the children are brought up to leave,” Desai says. “There is enormous heartbreak involved in these journeys, and yet it almost seems inevitable. I remember my father saying to his friends, ‘What we have done in our lives is [to have] brought up perfect foreigners.’ I remember him saying to me, ‘Don’t be emotional when the time comes. Take the opportunity, because life is going to be easier for you.’ But when it actually happened, and I returned to India to go to the US consulate to get my final citizenship papers, he was very upset and emotional.”
If emigration has brought tremendous pain, it has also given Desai her greatest subject. “It’s a fantastic place to write from, this place of the in-between,” she says. “That was the thing that terrified me: that I wouldn’t have a subject. I felt that I’d lost India but would never be able to write about the United States. I didn’t have the historical knowledge. My grandparents didn’t come from here. But then I learned it is possible to write from this diaspora. And it may not have a firm geographical location, but it does have a very defined emotional location.”
Skin colour dictates so much in the book, even as Desai’s characters endeavour to leave racial stereotypes behind. Sunny is in a relationship with Ulla, an American. “He realises he’s very proud to be with a white woman, and yet he is so ashamed of his pride,” Desai says. “Nobody would ever speak about this. There’s a desire towards whiteness. At the same time, he knows he resents Ulla, the way he is resented in India because he comes from a privileged class.”
Shame and confusion are hallmarks of Sunny’s assimilation into the US. Sunny, the narrator tells us, was “unsure whether he was playing a part, taking his cues from the people, the weather, the food, even the objects around him.” When he is introduced to Ulla’s family, no one can relax. Their differences are glaring, even as everyone pretends to ignore them. “That is the place of writing,” Desai says. “You’re talking about emotions no one would ever say.”
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Living in Trump’s United States, Desai can see how racism has surged in recent years, affecting people in their day-to-day lives. “In this country, with Trump, there’s a huge swing against what they call diversity and an enormous anger against immigrants and migration,” she says.
In Ireland, too, I tell her: there has been a terrible surge in racist attacks on the Indian community. “It’s happening everywhere,” she says. “This is also a huge problem in India. India is also a country which receives immigrants and people who are fleeing across the border, and the racism against them is unbelievable.
“It’s cruel and awful. When you think of refugees from the Rohingya Muslims coming to India, it’s just shocking. I think we have to open up the discussions across borders.”
Desai is acutely conscious that she operates like a literary magpie for her novels, taking real-life stories – of pain, subjugation and dislocation – and spinning them into prose. Sometimes she has qualms about the ethics of it.
I think often fame is something that is made, not something that happens
— Kiran Desai
“You are using the family story, albeit altered and fictionalised. My grandfather was a judge. He was not the character in The Inheritance of Loss, my last book, exactly, but the journey was his journey. I remember my father saying – and I can speak about him because he’s gone – he would say, ‘I feel as if I’m losing my own identity with a mother and daughter who are writing.’
“People feel they’re being subtracted. Yet as an artist you eat it all up. You’re living your life in order to write a book. You’re living your life to know certain emotions so you can use them in your art.”
Kiran is extremely close to her mother, who is 88 and lives in the village of Cold Spring, an hour and a half up the Hudson River from New York City. “She’s not well and I’m quite worried because my book is coming out, so I have to travel and do things.”
Stress is etched on her face as she speaks. Desai lives alone; her mother is her mentor and her inspiration – when she won the Booker Prize, she said the win was as much her mother’s as her own. She is in awe of how she managed to produce her work against the traditions of the time. The daughter of a German mother and Bengali father, Anita Desai, who was raised in Delhi, was, Kiran says, “not part of any artistic or literary circle”.
“She was married with four children by the time she was 35,” Desai adds. “She read so much Virginia Woolf, all the diaries, and perhaps she was learning how to become a writer by reading them.”
When Anita moved from Delhi to England with Kiran, her youngest daughter, separating from her husband, she was already in her 40s. Then they moved to the US so Anita could teach writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Decision after decision was made by Anita, plunging them into new worlds: exciting ones, but discombobulating too.
Kiran by contrast leads an intentionally quiet life. Being celebrated as a public figure, like a Rushdie or a Tóibín, is not for her.
“I saw the hell of fame,” she says of her Booker win, when the spotlight was turned in her direction. “I actually think it’s a kind of hell. I have seen the dark side of this culture of fame. There’s a sort of darkness in becoming famous – the old line that you make a pact with the devil in order to become famous, which can be quite true.
“I think often fame is something that is made, not something that happens. It’s a choice to appear for an interview every single day or to show up for these things.”
It’s a pact Desai is willing to endure for a time for her 20-years-in-the-making novel. Does she care what readers will think of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny?
“Yes, I do,” she says, with a laugh. “I do care what people think and I try not to care what people think. A book gets all kinds of reactions and you have to centre yourself in your work and move on. I’m envious of writers who write many books more frequently. They can move on quickly. If you’ve taken 20 years, it does feel like a lot more rests on it. It’s more scary.”
Perhaps scariest of all is letting go. There are repercussions to a life like Desai’s. Writing is her comfort, her manuscript her joy. Handing it over to her publisher was hard; being without it is anxiety-inducing.
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“While I have lived a solitary life for the last very many years, I’ve used that solitude to write and writing gives me enormous pleasure,” she says. “I will not go out in the evenings. I would see people once or twice a week. It’s a choice. I realise other writers don’t feel the need to do this. They are able to live lives and write books.
“Coming out of writing the book, I feel a bit disconcerted when I look at my life now that I’m not writing all day. Now that I’m leading an ordinary life again, it’s very strange. I don’t know what to do with myself, that’s the truth of the matter, because I worked so hard for so long.”
It’s no surprise to hear that Desai is already forging plans for a new novel. “All I want to do is disappear back into another book,” she says wistfully. “And vanish.”
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai is published by Hamish Hamilton
