Kiran Desai’s ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’ Is A Saga Of Displacement And Remaking on A Global Stage
Booksology Loneliness and yearning shift shape, connoting varying things for different individuals. Desai refracts it through artistic, political, existential and transcendental dimensions. What opens as a question of Sonia’s private loneliness melds into a saga of communities, nations, races and classes, each afflicted by peculiar alienations. Shadowed by spiritual restlessness, Sonia’s German grandfather wandered deep into the Himalayas, vanishing as if consumed by the landscape. His talisman engraved with a faceless demon, Badal Baba, trails Sonia through luck and terror. It unlocks the uncanny lurking within the folds of the novel, calling forth an epic scale, a history in momentum. The grandfather sublimates himself in his paintings, whereas Ilan primes every artwork to fuel his aggrandising ego. Sunny’s long-widowed mother, Babita, initially whets her loneliness in hovering over his life from afar. An Albanian bartender Sunny meets, whose family lived through tyranny and surveillance, extols unwatched solitude as “rich and nourishing”, not loneliness. This also qualifies for Sonia’s mother, Seher, who escapes a long-suffering marriage and builds a new life in Landour. “There are worse things than loneliness; it could mean abiding peace,” Seher assures her daughter trapped in a future-less Delhi life with her father. Sonia’s aunt, Mina Foi, has a fresh lease of life at a convent with newfound purpose.
