A memory of the future

{ KIRAN DESAI'S FIRST NOVEL IN 20 YEARS } ON THE BOOKER SHORTLIST

- Saurabh Sharma

Sonia Sunny

Towards the end of Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Babita, mother of one of the titular characters, Sunny Bhatia, says to Sonia Shah: “It’s a huge subject; you can't keep a huge subject neat.” Babita is referring to Sonia's article on kebabs in Kala magazine but, of course, there is a subliminal connotation.

It is as though the novelist is asking: When you set out to properly tell a story, doesn’t it become an all-encompassing one? The 670-page novel begins in a rented bungalow in Allahabad, where Sonia's grandparents, Ba and Dadaji, live with her paternal aunt, Mina Foi, whose 55th birthday is about to be celebrated. Foi, whose marriage lasted just six months, wants Sonia to “go and be lucky” unlike herself. However, Sonia isn’t doing well at all.

Over a call, her father, Manav, after wishing his sister a “long life”, announces that Sonia, who is at college in Vermont, is lonely. “In Allahabad they had no patience with loneliness,” Desai writes. This sort of malaise was not part of everyday vocabulary in India in the 1980s and ‘90s; anyone battling depression or any other form of mental illness was simply declared “mental”. The grandparents, part of the generation that freed itself from the chains of colonialism and had much practical work to do in building the country, don't have much empathy for Sonia.