I never read past the second chapter of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. So when I stumbled upon her story “An Unashamed Proposal” in New Yorker magazine, I was a little hesitant to read it. But by the end of it, I only wished to read more about the characters of Sonia, Sunny, Ulla, and Babita. This short story was an excerpt from her then forthcoming novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. This month, I picked up this book. 

The novel is aptly titled. It is about the loneliness of Sonia and Sunny as they navigate their lives in the snow-laden regions of the West. But it is not just the loneliness of Sonia and Sunny but also of others like Babita Bhatia, Mama, Papa, Mina Foi, and Satya. Loneliness seeps into moments of love, religion, and traditions. Its presence is like that of the “ghost hound” that haunts Sonia throughout the novel. The depth of the characters is so well-characterized that this book requires one to linger. The narrative could get a little crowded in between. For instance, like Ulla, Sunny’s girlfriend, exits from the novel early on. Perhaps, Ilan, Sonia’s boyfriend, too, could have left halfway through the book. But as the story unfolds, we understand that Ilan is an important character for our protagonists to overcome a sense of haunting of the past and an escape from the West. Ilan’s voice consistently rings inside Sonia’s head, warning her not to write “orientalist nonsense” and “magical realism”.

One particular aspect I loved about this novel is Desai’s way of constructing moments upon coincidences and chance encounters. In one of the interviews, the author mentions that the intersections of the characters of Sonia and Sunny weren’t intentional. She says, “I wrote the stories of many of my characters separately, including Sonia and Sunny, until I could see how their stories might intersect”. The first glimpse between them on an overnight train from Delhi to Allahabad is pure magic. Sunny does not recognize Sonia from the photograph enclosed in the letter of proposal sent by his mother. But immediately gets drawn into her “face planed like a leopard, long lips, and watchful eyes”. Or the accidental intersection of Sunny’s mother moving to Goa, and following which, Sonia, too, moves to Goa. These coincidences make it more enthralling for the reader. 

This book has given me a lot to ponder on about writing itself. As Sonia mentions, “When you became a real artist, all roads led to your art: the people, the landscape, the news, the gossip, the suppressed shame, the dream, the flutter in the night of a pelican who should have flown north. A writer itched and itched to put everything into a book, or it became unbearable, the tingling”. Perhaps I will go back and read The Inheritance of Loss. 

About the Reviewer