Kiran Desai: “There’s an artistic hunger that lends itself to betrayal”
The Booker winner on her new novel, ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny’, a sprawling intergenerational saga that’s on the prize longlist this year
Sonia thinks of how a story about kebabs can end up being something larger: “This was India. You might try to write a slender story, but it inevitably connected to a larger one.” Was the novel imagined differently when you set out to write it?
When I started writing this book, I had no idea it would sprawl into something so large, but I was following the stories as they unfolded, with all the connections between a huge cast of family members.
It always strikes me when I’m reading a novel from Europe or the US, in which writers focus on just one or two people: there is no family. For example, I was reading Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment about a couple who fall apart traumatically. It had no mother, father, aunts, or uncles… no Indian writer could honestly write such a book. Even in the absence of a family, the absence is so present.
The sentiment Sonia shares is based on an article I wrote about kebabs, finding that it was quite an insane task, because I had no idea what a catalogue they could amount to — far too big for a simple article.
From the book: “What happened within a family, what happened between a couple, was no different from that which happened in a nation under dictatorship, running on fear.” With Sunny as a reporter and Sonia as an aspiring novelist, it appears the novel is saying something about the enterprise of truth-telling.
Let me talk about García Márquez, who said [in his memoir Living to Tell the Tale] that fiction and journalism are the two wings of the same bird. It is a fascinating read, because, although it’s a memoir, one is back in his fiction — his childhood experiences, the Banana Massacre, the scenes from his life.
When you read his Chronicle of a Death Foretold, he suggests that even a journalist can’t be trusted. My character, Sunny, finds this comforting. This thought that a journalist is held to the truth by the falcon’s gaze of fiction.
History is always someone’s story. A novelist’s task is to write the story that might contradict the historical narrative, which is why I think books are being banned everywhere.
Megha Majumdar writes in A Burning that words amount to too little eventually, but the first thing an authoritarian decides to do is ban books.
Exactly. What can words do, so little, in the face of a burning.
And people are reading far less, yet the first thing [the establishment does] is remove the books from the shelves. Right across the Hudson River, where my mother lives, there’s the US military academy, West Point, where they have recently purged the library and the curriculum, of many authors, including the great Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou.
Like dictators, individuals tend to calibrate their self-images so that their stories can inspire purchase among others. For example, when Ilan’s wife confronts Sonia, the latter thinks that nobody actually tells “a damning true story” about themselves. Do such personal conflicts create mistrust, causing loneliness?
You mean a sort of self-displacement in the stories we tell about ourselves? It’s true that we are constantly encouraged to present ourselves for success, something that has been accelerated by social media and its fame culture. There is a loneliness to creating that blown-up image, which removes an individual from the consolation of belonging to a community.
One of the things I was trying to bring about was for each of the characters to come up against a sort of unknowingness, a subtraction of self: Ilan, when it comes to fame; Sonia’s father, when his marriage ends; Babita, when the uncles [Ravi-Rana] die, and she realises that she will never know who killed them, or how dangerous things are for her; Sunny, when he creates an almost unknowable creature out of himself in the process of emigration.
I was also thinking about an interesting essay by Jorge Luis Borges, The Nothingness of Personality. Borges recounts coming upon the fear, quite suddenly at one point, of thinking that he does not actually exist. That personality is not something that’s fixed. This relates to the Hindu and Buddhist ideas of malleability, the thought that we change our sense of self depending on where we are, the context of experience.
Sunny theorises about “why Indians would never make good readers of novels” and that a “good novel reader was a toilet cleaner”. But when Babita says to him, who’s stopping you from learning Hindi and telling an authentic story, it unsettles him. Can our incapacity to have vocabularies to express our insufficiencies make us lonely, too, requiring a mediator to close the gap?
Once, I was asked to give a talk at a translation conference. It occurred to me that, growing up in India, I wouldn’t have known my own country were it not for translators. Recently, I was reading Perumal Murugan’s Pyre, thinking the same unsettling thought.
Meanwhile, my character, Babita, realises that in any country with huge class divides, great cultural divides, one never quite knows what a person from a different community is thinking, what their motivations are. There is a story behind the story.
There are several strands in the book where a child parents their parents. These role reversals become sites of conflict, estranging the parent-child relationship and adding another degree to the loneliness.
You’re right about the role reversal.
For example, Sonia’s mother becomes a hermit. But Sonia realises that her mother will need at least one person to become a messenger between her and the world. You cannot survive in complete isolation. If Sonia were to play this role, she would not be free to live her life; she, too, would vanish into the forest. When Sonia’s father falls ill, and Sonia begins looking after him, she experiences great emotional turmoil, not only because her father wrecks his rage and disappointment upon her, but also because she doesn’t feel she’s a proper adult yet, who can provide succour to her father the way a child is expected to.
When my father was dying, and I was in the hospital with him, I felt very much like Sonia during those moments. I was 38, so an adult, yet I worried I wasn’t able to look after him the way other families looked after their parents. I thought: Where are the books that could give me some solace? There weren’t enough, although I remember reading Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters at this time. I appreciated the mundane details, and the book deepened my understanding of my emotions.
There’s a running theme of theft in the novel. With Babita thieving literally, and Ilan stealing like an artist and Mina Foi being denied happiness, among others.
Yes, and there is the stolen ruby from Burma that leaves a hole in Ba’s heart that will never be filled. There are characters who feel unsatisfied at the end of their lives because they feel they have been cheated out of something, out of a deserved destiny. Of course, this entitlement has to do with class privilege. Sonia and Sunny may feel thwarted, but they come to understand that they themselves embody a constraint, an obstacle, for others. The way Sonia thinks about Ilan, other people may think about her, too. That she has, in some way, stolen their happiness.
During all these years of writing this novel, you must have collected several bits of real news, some of which have been used in this book. How did including that in fiction work for you?
Sunny is disconcerted by how the news changes from country to country, and how it is read in completely different ways by different audiences. The audience can make a true story false, or a false story true. His experience includes the attacks in the US on 9/11. I touch on political news in India as well. But always seen through the eyes of the characters in the novel.
I included a wider view of history and politics with the stories of Sonia and Sunny’s grandparents, who were born in British India and made the journey to become secular Indians, deliberately transforming their thinking. How does the mind change? How does the heart change? When a country becomes more nationalistic and authoritarian, how does it alter again? That’s a fascinating subject.
The book deliberates a lot on art, reminding me of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian — the duct-taped banana, which was sold for millions of dollars.
And you know, when the fruit seller learnt about it, he broke down and cried.
Which made me wonder about the ‘stealing like an artist’ concept, like Ilan does.
Yes, he tells Sonia: Be a big thief! A small thief will be thrown in prison. But if you’re a big thief, you’ll own the prison.
I want to place Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma in the context of the Alice Munro exposé and the classic art-versus-the-artist debate.
There was a lot of conversation about how Alice Munro was able to write those dark characters that brought her so much fame and attention, and of course, it was a shock to know about how her own daughter was involved.
Sonia’s mother tells Sonia that art is a slippery endeavour. As an artist, you have control over the narrative, but telling someone else’s story is a huge responsibility. And when it comes to a good story, artists are capable of all kinds of crimes. There’s an artistic hunger and greed that lends itself to betrayal. It’s unavoidable not to draw from people you’ve known, things you’ve witnessed. When it comes to Munro, though, the crime apparently didn’t merely extend to her work. It manifested in real life.
My novel is structured according to who is captured by whose gaze. Who gets to tell a story? When it comes to art, when it comes to nations, when it comes to men and women, parents and children. At the centre of my book, the deity of this story, is a little amulet enclosing a broken-faced creature, without any eyes at all. I called it Badal Baba.
Sonia’s grandfather appears very much like Nicholas Roerich, who’s mentioned in the book, too; his wife, Anjolie Roy, felt like that woman from Mircea Eliade’s novel Bengal Nights.
Absolutely, you’re right. Literary connections made [laughs]. I read that book decades ago, but it stayed in my mind because of its intensity. When you’re writing, you’re drawing on stories you’ve encountered. A lot of my novel is about how reading affects our lives. Eliade’s book is fascinating not only because of how he sees her [Maitreyi Devi] but also how she sees him, with her story being completely different.
My mother is half-German, and her parents didn’t meet like Sonia’s grandparents in the book, but her mother came from Germany in the 1920s to live, at first, within an extended family in an ancestral home, which is now in Bangladesh. My mother remembers her mother telling her what this was like.
Roerich? I am amazed you made that connection. I was thinking about those European artists who came to India, not knowing what they were searching for. He was also on my mind because I spent time in Kalimpong, up in the mountains where, Helena Roerich is buried. I think that’s where I saw my first Roerich paintings. There’s a Roerich museum in New York, too. But the painter who painted the image of Badal Baba in my novel is an Italian painter called Francesco Clemente, who came to India in the 1970s and studied theosophy, spending time at the Madras Theosophical Society.
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
