IT IS possible, by a certain sleight of the imagination, to think of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Penguin Hamish Hamilton, Rs 999) as a house with many rooms, some sun-dappled, some latticed by shadows. In one room there is Sunny Bhatia, Columbia University alumnus and aspiring journalist at the Associated Press, citizen of two worlds, forever trying to translate his rootlessness into meaning. In another, there is Sonia Shah, vulnerable and unspooling, clutching to herself novels she is yet to write, distant Vermont winters in her bones, hearing the echo of Russian classics in her ear, but also the sting of exoticising a homeland she has never quite understood, the pressure to perform a country she never fully owns. Between them, in other rooms are other people — family and friends, neighbours and strangers, lovers, acquaintances, even animals — in a chiaroscuro that, a character describes in a different context, makes “the whole world home — present, past, and future connected”.Kiran Desai, 54, had set out to write a modern-day Indian diasporic romance in a globalised world. What she came up against was the tentativeness born not merely of the first flush of attraction but of the uncertainties of being adrift in a world sundered by the serrated edges of class, race and gender anxieties. In this landscape, love becomes less a sweeping force of destiny and more a fragile negotiation — a reaching across borders, both internal and external.“It’s an artist’s job, a writer’s job to root the politics in a personal story — how little we know of each other and the divides that we have to overcome. The writer Sandra Cisneros once told me that we live in a world full of global orphans, their head in one place and their feet in another. It’s true of Sonia and Sunny and I realised that I could extend the story to look at many different kinds of loneliness, not just the romantic kind,” she says, over a mid-week Zoom conversation from her home in Jackson Heights in New York City’s Queens. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.The loneliness she explores makes islands of men and women, nations and cultures. Desai says her idea was to treat it “like a form of water, morphing from one state to the other”. She understands that like water, this loneliness is not always still or sad — it has momentum and consequences. As a woman and an immigrant, she has felt it in her life. As a writer, she has been nourished by it. “I was reading some Edna O’Brien stories. They were so fascinating that I went on to watch some of her interviews.She said, a writer must be lonely, because why else would you displace real life for an artistic life if your life were full or happy? So maybe there’s some truth to that, at least there must be something missing or some mystery in your life that you want to follow. I always had the privilege and the curse, perhaps, of some degree of emptiness, because I have lived outside India, away from family since I was 16 or 17. I’ve lived alone for many years, I live alone now. So, I experienced all those different kinds of loneliness, the more difficult kinds, but also the solitude that I see as a kind of sustenance. I see the value of being alone as an opportunity for self-reinvention,” she says.The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny took Desai 20 years to write, an extraordinary feat of focus in an era of attention spans the duration of a reel or a viral tweet. “In some ways, it was a time warp, to live within the world of your book so intensely. It was a shock to me that it was New Year’s Day again, or that it was my birthday again. I remember when I turned 50, I thought, what’s happening? Am I just still working on my book?” she says. The passage of time freed her from the demands of celebrityhood that came with having won the Booker Prize with her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), from being the youngest of acclaimed novelist Anita Desai’s four children, from belonging, by association, to literature’s most cosseted jet set of Nobel laureates and glamourous intellectuals.Strands of that time shore up in the novel in the form of Sonia’s anxiety over her writing, in the character of the wealthy, aristocratic Ilan de Toorjen Foss, an artist 32 years Sonia’s senior, who becomes her lover and mentor, who introduces her to high art and gaslights her into self-doubt: “Don’t write orientalist nonsense! Don’t cheapen your country or people will think this is actually India… What Westerners did to you, you are doing to yourself”, and, most vitally, “In this world you are famous or you are nobody.” “Fame is another kind of loneliness, a kind of self-displacement. Ilan in the book,” says Desai, “is very famous. He’s mainly made of the image rather than the person but he is also quite wicked, certainly difficult. Thinking of different kinds of artists, the kind who seeks fame, and the kind who wants to vanish into his or her or their work, centred me,” says Desai.Story continues below this adIt is Ilan who catalyses the collision of Sonia’s and Sunny’s worlds through Sonia’s grandfather’s clumsy effort at fixing her melancholia with an arranged marriage. This loneliness that splinters, that is often liminal, that comes from being invisibilised or too easily typecast is what ties Sonia and Sunny, and, eventually the sprawl of the nearly 700-pages of the book, together. In Sunny’s case, it is the foreigner’s alienation masked by the fluency of class privileges back home. For Sonia, it’s the disintegration that follows desire, ambition, and migration, what it means to carry a self too fractured to recognise. It is in this tension — between longing and disappointment, between what’s visible and what’s rendered exotic, between the relentlessness of identity and the unpredictable arcs of love and work — that the novel seems most alive.Like her previous novels, the insider-outsider dilemma forms the leitmotif of this multi-stranded book as well. Desai probes a phenomenon that took shape after the economic liberalisation in the early ’90s, a few years after she had moved to study in Vermont’s Bennington College. “It’s not just that they have left India, moved, travelled, but also the class they come from in India — Sunny thinks at one point, I grew up not knowing my country at all, He is creating a new version of himself in New York, someone he doesn’t know, and can’t quite have faith in — it’s a very Westernised class that’s almost become like figures of fun in some way now and I wanted to write about that class of people,” she says. Desai’s way of mapping this is not to settle but to slip — restlessly, even mischievously — between tonal registers and modes of narration, a stylistic agility that lends the book both its wit and its quiet, accumulating power.In the days preceding the interview, London witnesses an anti-immigrant Unite the Kingdom rally led by far-Right leader Tommy Robinson. In the US, President Donald Trump’s promise of the “largest deportation programme in American history” has been playing out in ways that have far-reaching implications. Desai’s novel is set between the mid-Nineties and the early 2000s but in the time that it took her to finish the book, she saw change come to her neighbourhood. Kiran Desai in Mexico, where she wrote a portion of the novel (Photo courtesy: the author)“I live in an immigrant neighbourhood in NYC. There are Mexicans and Indians, people from Venezuela and Uruguay. I’m seeing the results of Trump’s immigration policy play out right here. I talk about fear in the book, in the personal sphere but also in the political sphere. The hallucinatory fear that I mostly explore through Sonia — how one can fall out of real life, because the terror of the forces we come up against is so great, displaced from a normal existence into something parallel — the people I’m observing here, they were on my mind when I was writing those scenes. When you’re being hunted like an animal and being thrown into a prison that is called Alligator Alcatraz, can you imagine the atrocity and fear of that?” she says.Story continues below this adThe peripatetic sweep of the novel — Vermont, Allahabad, New Delhi, Goa, Rajasthan, New York, Mexico and Italy, and the lives of Sonia and Sunny — draws succour from Desai’s own cosmopolitan life: her paternal grandparents in Allahabad where the family would go every year; the German grandmother she never knew, who had met her Bengali grandfather in Germany in the 1920s and moved to India to marry and raise their daughter, Anita; her own life measured between India, US, Mexico and elsewhere; the immigrant’s peculiar inheritance of being at home and at a remove everywhere. “My mother is a product of two very different cultures. She’s a real mix of Europe and Bengal. So I have always had the great fortune of her vision of this duality and of her bookshelves. And I had the gift of my father staying on in India — although my mother left to teach — so I didn’t lose India. He was a big reader, passionate about music, art and literature and taught himself to read Urdu,” says Desai, who has dedicated the book to her father Ashvin, a Delhi-based businessman, who died in 2008.Her mother remains her first reader, her literary anchor. “I trust her the most and she knows the landscapes I’m writing from. Often, I get my books from her. She’ll read something and say, I’ve read this extraordinary new writer you have to read. I’m still being informed by her, by her reading,” she says.Now that the book is out in the world, awaiting a shot at this year’s Booker Prize (the shortlist was yet to be announced at the time of going to Press), Desai says she is slowly getting used to the demands of being out again in the world. “My mother wrote in a world where there was not this opportunity to publicise your work. It was a quiet world, a quiet life. She’s had a whole lifetime of reading, writing. Even now — she’s 88 — all day, she’s at her desk with the newspaper, following the news, reading a new book, reading contemporary authors, writing.She’s shocked to see what has happened. Celebrity culture being extended to writers, to her, is an absurd idea. As for me, it’s taken me 20 years to finish this, and that has been very helpful in rooting myself in my work. It is strange to be in the public eye and I have to remember the skills that I learned after The Inheritance of Loss, I have to remember how to do this again,” she says.