Description:
BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLIST • KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR)
A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss
“A transcendent triumph . . . not so much a novel as a marvel.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“A magnificent saga.”—Washington Post
“Lavish, funny, smart, and wise, this is a novel that will last.”—The Boston Globe
“A spectacular literary achievement. I wanted to pack a little suitcase and stay inside this book forever.”—Ann Patchett
“A novel so wonderful, when I got to the last page, I turned to the first and began again.”—Sandra Cisneros
“Devastating, lyrical, and deeply romantic . . . an unmitigated joy to read.”—Khaled Hosseini
“A masterpiece.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“A sweeping page-turner, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a kind of Romeo and Juliet story for a modern, globalized age.”—Publishers Weekly (Top 10 New Fall Books)
One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Fall: The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Time, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, The Associated Press, Economist, Vulture, AARP, Ms. Magazine, Bustle, Book Riot, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Lit Hub, LibbyLife
When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.
Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR)
A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss
“A transcendent triumph . . . not so much a novel as a marvel.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“A magnificent saga.”—Washington Post
“Lavish, funny, smart, and wise, this is a novel that will last.”—The Boston Globe
“A spectacular literary achievement. I wanted to pack a little suitcase and stay inside this book forever.”—Ann Patchett
“A novel so wonderful, when I got to the last page, I turned to the first and began again.”—Sandra Cisneros
“Devastating, lyrical, and deeply romantic . . . an unmitigated joy to read.”—Khaled Hosseini
“A masterpiece.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“A sweeping page-turner, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a kind of Romeo and Juliet story for a modern, globalized age.”—Publishers Weekly (Top 10 New Fall Books)
One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Fall: The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Time, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, The Associated Press, Economist, Vulture, AARP, Ms. Magazine, Bustle, Book Riot, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Lit Hub, LibbyLife
When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.
Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“As entertaining as it is profound.”—The Boston Globe
“A dazzling epic . . . immensely entertaining.”—The Guardian
“A sweeping romance.”—Time
“Brilliant doesn’t begin to describe this novel’s profound illuminative powers.”—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“[A] sweeping and beguiling novel.”—The New Yorker
“[A] luscious love story . . . [a] deeply satisfying read.”—Oprah Daily
“A spectacular novel—nearly ‘as abundant as life itself’—to savor, ruminate over, and, yes, even reread.”—NPR
“The family epic you’ve been waiting for. . . . Funny, tender, and gripping.”—Marie Claire
“A sweeping love story touching class, race and history.”—People
“Stunning . . . an epic, according to some early reviewers, ‘immersive’ with its cast of fascinating characters, shifting locales, and a plot that not only is a love story, but also contains elements of a bildungsroman, thriller, and murder mystery.”—Poets & Writers
“This gorgeously written, multilayered novel is a love story of sorts, but it’s arguably more about seeking identity and belonging while navigating two cultures, and intense family ties that both pull and repel.”—AARP
“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny achieves the ultimate of what a book should do: carry us away into other peoples’ lives, thinking as they think, feeling as they feel, until it comes around and shows us to ourselves. Grand, magnificent, intimate, more than wonderful, this is a novel you will hold close to your heart. I certainly did. I cannot recommend it enough.”—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less
“Beautifully-written, acutely observed, and richly textured, this is a stunning, transformative novel of both epic and intimate proportions.”—Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other, Winner of the Booker Prize
“Kiran Desai reveals the breadth and depth of time, how it weighs on families and nations caught within the drama of history. She captures this with a rare and astute sensitivity that, no matter her subject, casts a light on our present.”—Hisham Matar, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return
“Literary love stories are vanishingly rare these days, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is that even more precious thing: a love story that’s also profound, sparkling, funny, exquisitely written, and that teaches us how to live in full-throated exultation for the astonishments of this world. It has so many urgent things to say—about the costs and consolations of art, about power and class and race and freedom—that reading the book feels like a long conversation at night with your most interesting and ardent friend.”—Lauren Groff
“A powerful novel by a writer strong enough to pull back together worlds that are being pulled apart.”—Mohsin Hamid, New York Times bestselling author of Exit West
“What a magnificent achievement, made all the more rare for its compulsive readability. I could not put this book down.”—Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, finalist for the Booker Prize
“This ambitious yet intimate saga is well worth the wait.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A stunner worth savoring.”—Booklist, starred review
“A dazzling epic . . . immensely entertaining.”—The Guardian
“A sweeping romance.”—Time
“Brilliant doesn’t begin to describe this novel’s profound illuminative powers.”—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“[A] sweeping and beguiling novel.”—The New Yorker
“[A] luscious love story . . . [a] deeply satisfying read.”—Oprah Daily
“A spectacular novel—nearly ‘as abundant as life itself’—to savor, ruminate over, and, yes, even reread.”—NPR
“The family epic you’ve been waiting for. . . . Funny, tender, and gripping.”—Marie Claire
“A sweeping love story touching class, race and history.”—People
“Stunning . . . an epic, according to some early reviewers, ‘immersive’ with its cast of fascinating characters, shifting locales, and a plot that not only is a love story, but also contains elements of a bildungsroman, thriller, and murder mystery.”—Poets & Writers
“This gorgeously written, multilayered novel is a love story of sorts, but it’s arguably more about seeking identity and belonging while navigating two cultures, and intense family ties that both pull and repel.”—AARP
“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny achieves the ultimate of what a book should do: carry us away into other peoples’ lives, thinking as they think, feeling as they feel, until it comes around and shows us to ourselves. Grand, magnificent, intimate, more than wonderful, this is a novel you will hold close to your heart. I certainly did. I cannot recommend it enough.”—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less
“Beautifully-written, acutely observed, and richly textured, this is a stunning, transformative novel of both epic and intimate proportions.”—Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other, Winner of the Booker Prize
“Kiran Desai reveals the breadth and depth of time, how it weighs on families and nations caught within the drama of history. She captures this with a rare and astute sensitivity that, no matter her subject, casts a light on our present.”—Hisham Matar, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return
“Literary love stories are vanishingly rare these days, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is that even more precious thing: a love story that’s also profound, sparkling, funny, exquisitely written, and that teaches us how to live in full-throated exultation for the astonishments of this world. It has so many urgent things to say—about the costs and consolations of art, about power and class and race and freedom—that reading the book feels like a long conversation at night with your most interesting and ardent friend.”—Lauren Groff
“A powerful novel by a writer strong enough to pull back together worlds that are being pulled apart.”—Mohsin Hamid, New York Times bestselling author of Exit West
“What a magnificent achievement, made all the more rare for its compulsive readability. I could not put this book down.”—Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, finalist for the Booker Prize
“This ambitious yet intimate saga is well worth the wait.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A stunner worth savoring.”—Booklist, starred review
About the Author
Kiran Desai is the bestselling author of the novels Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in India, she came to the United States when she was sixteen and now lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
The sun was still submerged in the wintry murk of dawn when Ba, Dadaji, and their daughter, Mina Foi, wrapping shawls closely about themselves, emerged upon the veranda to sip their tea and decide, through vigorous process of elimination, their meals for the rest of the day. Orders must be given to the cook at breakfast so that he could go directly to market. It was Mina’s fifty-fifth birthday, the first of December in the year 1996, and the mutton for the dinner kebabs had been marinating overnight in the kitchen.
“Rice?” Ba shouted. “Roti?” She was growing deaf, but she knew she must raise her voice over the morning traffic thundering past the front gate and the cawing of hundreds of crows—their racket and the sun’s struggle so closely linked, it was as if each morning the crows gave birth to the light. “Pilau?” she suggested. “Paratha?”
Perched above them, at the entrance portico, sat a plaster bust of a portly gentleman in a cravat, perhaps inspired by a drawing made by the bungalow’s original owner, who had toured Europe, sketchbook in hand, in the same manner he’d observed foreigners doing in India. And perhaps it was the fault of the artist’s rendering, or the dissonant surroundings of Allahabad, or a splattering of bird droppings, but the bust resembled less a dignified nobleman than a foolish snob with an interest in the sky overhead, which had not turned vivid for a quarter of a century. Not since the national highway had been widened to accommodate the lorries that trawled cabbages, cement, goats, wheat, and—if one was to believe the newspapers or the gossip—prostitutes and venereal disease.
Unperturbed by the fancy gentleman, or the polluting lorries, or the family upon the veranda, the crows’ kava kaw rose to crescendo.
“Cauliflower?” Ba urged. “Spinach?”
“Potato?” Dadaji said, lifting his feet off the ground. He rubbed them together as lovingly and extravagantly as if they were soft, velvet hands. “The Gujarati loves a potato more than most,” he said, as if explaining themselves to an absent anthropologist. They were a displaced family, Gujaratis marooned in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Years ago Dadaji’s law practice had brought him to the Allahabad court.
Two squat phones—one in the living room corner, one on Dadaji’s desk—rang out like toads in a swamp, trr trr trr, and they knew it would be a birthday call from Mina Foi’s brother, Manav, Dadaji and Ba’s second child. Dadaji picked up the phone on his desk and Mina Foi the extension in the living room. Ba never spoke on the phone for she had not the habit, even if she’d had the hearing.
“Long life, Mina,” Manav wished his sister.
“It’s been too long already,” said Mina Foi. She wanted to tell her brother that she hoped the missionary couple would stop by as they had last year with cookies made with chocolate chips brought from Iowa—but then they may not remember it was her birthday, and she could not remind them. She was forbidden to make telephone calls on her own because they were a useless luxury.
Dadaji discussed the rising value of one of his investments, and then, at the end of the conversation, he inquired about the health of his daughter-in-law, Seher, and his granddaughter, Sonia.
“We are worried about Sonia,” Manav answered. Sonia attended college in Vermont. “She’s fallen into a depression. She weeps on the telephone, then when we call her back a day later, the same.”
“But why?” asked Dadaji. “She’s been there three years already. Why is she suddenly crying?”
“She says she is lonely.” The last time Sonia had traveled home was two years ago.
“Lonely? Lonely?”
In Allahabad they had no patience with loneliness. They might have felt the loneliness of being misunderstood; they might know the sucked-dead feeling of Allahabad afternoons, a tide drawn out perhaps never to return, which was a kind of loneliness; but they had never slept in a house alone, never eaten a meal alone, never lived in a place where they were unknown, never woken without a cook bringing tea or wishing good morning to several individuals:
Namaste, Khansama.
Good morning, Mummy.
Good morning, Daddy.
Mina, good morning.
Ayah, namaste—
Whenever Dadaji thought of the Wordsworth poem he had been taught in school—I wandered lonely as a cloud / that floats on high o’er vales and hills—the line struck him as so ridiculous, it made him throw back his head and guffaw so hard his upper dentures fell down with a smash. But feeling unusually generous because of the growing value of his shares, Dadaji directed Mina Foi to telephone Sonia. Because vision problems afflicted him—a detached retina, glaucoma, cataracts—he put a magnifying glass to his rheumy red eye and bent over so his nose touched the address book as he read out the number for the Hewitt College dormitory in North Hewitt. Mina Foi put her finger into the holes of the telephone dial and tried for nearly an hour to call until her finger numbed. Finally the phone rang distantly, and someone with what she assumed was a cowboy drawl answered.
Luckily Dadaji picked up the extension line. Mina Foi did not trust herself to speak to a cowboy. Her finger remained stuck up in the air with a crick.
“Hallo, hallo, please connect us to Sonia Shah, who is in room number five,” shouted Dadaji. Then when Sonia arrived at the phone booth, “What is the matter? Why is your father saying you are unhappy? Your studies are all right?”
“Yes,” said Sonia in a measly voice.
“Then? What is the problem?”
“What do you get to eat there?” Mina Foi inquired.
“Macaroni!” answered her grandfather on the phone extension.
“No, Dadaji,” answered Sonia, “the menu is very international. We have Chinese night, Mexican night.”
Mina Foi ventured, “Indian night?”
“Lunch is sometimes Tomato Tigers, which are tomatoes and cheese on a toasted English muffin with curry powder on top.”
“Never heard of such a thing!” Outrage.
“Pudding?” Mina Foi whispered.
“Brownies with ice cream, pecan pie, and blueberry pie.”
Just to contemplate such lavish mysteries made Mina Foi faint with heartbreak.
“Pie is a very American food,” Dadaji confirmed. “Well, what are you crying for, you lucky girl?”
Sonia tried to explain. “I’ve ballooned in my own head. I cannot stop thinking about myself and my problems. I’m dreading the winter. In the dark and cold, it will get worse—”
“Do some jumping jacks, get your spirits up, and then pick up your books. You have to persevere through hardship. If I hadn’t left the life I was born to, you would be in Nadiad, married at sixteen, not studying in America.”
Mina Foi’s hands strangled each other in her lap when she remembered her childhood visits to their ancestral home, where the women scrounged what was left after the men had eaten. When the girls menstruated they were banished—even from this marginal existence—to a hut at the bottom of the property, where they ate from clay dishes that were later broken upon the rubbish heap so they would not pollute the world.
Dadaji had single-handedly extracted them from such backwardness. He may be iron-willed and furious-tempered, but these were precisely the qualities that had given Ba a place at the polished mahogany dining table every day of the year. When he had retired, he’d taken her on a round-the-world trip along with his younger brother, Amal Kaka, and Amal Kaka’s wife, because Amal Kaka had not yet stolen the ancestral property and the brothers were still close.
All these years later, Ba and Dadaji could not remember a single sight, not a monument, not a museum, but they never forgot the green muffler lost on the way to Machu Picchu or the machine that promised to deliver a recorded history of the Vatican through headphones, but when they put in the coins, it didn’t, and when they went to complain, the counter was closed for lunch. “Should we return in twenty minutes?” they had asked the guard. “Does lunch happen in twenty minutes?!” the guard had replied angrily. They remembered this, then they remembered how they had suffered constipation in Vienna and spent a day searching for reasonably priced fruit but found none. In London, at a hotel called The Buckingham, where you assumed people would be honest, they had been told breakfast would be included in the rate, but it was not. They’d saved a small fortune in Paris by cooking rice and lentils in the electric kettle for their dinners, Dadaji climbing on a chair and dismantling the hotel room’s fire alarm. They’d been disappointed by French cooking—what was all the fuss about? They found the same three sandwiches and two sauces everywhere they went. With these two sauces, the French had terrorized the world.
Then, in most foreign lands, they’d observed that the denizens had no respect for Indian tourists, whereas they pursued and flattered the white ones. Therefore it was best to reside among your own people and keep to your own meticulous standards. Having made the big world small, Ba and Dadaji returned home satisfied.
The sun was still submerged in the wintry murk of dawn when Ba, Dadaji, and their daughter, Mina Foi, wrapping shawls closely about themselves, emerged upon the veranda to sip their tea and decide, through vigorous process of elimination, their meals for the rest of the day. Orders must be given to the cook at breakfast so that he could go directly to market. It was Mina’s fifty-fifth birthday, the first of December in the year 1996, and the mutton for the dinner kebabs had been marinating overnight in the kitchen.
“Rice?” Ba shouted. “Roti?” She was growing deaf, but she knew she must raise her voice over the morning traffic thundering past the front gate and the cawing of hundreds of crows—their racket and the sun’s struggle so closely linked, it was as if each morning the crows gave birth to the light. “Pilau?” she suggested. “Paratha?”
Perched above them, at the entrance portico, sat a plaster bust of a portly gentleman in a cravat, perhaps inspired by a drawing made by the bungalow’s original owner, who had toured Europe, sketchbook in hand, in the same manner he’d observed foreigners doing in India. And perhaps it was the fault of the artist’s rendering, or the dissonant surroundings of Allahabad, or a splattering of bird droppings, but the bust resembled less a dignified nobleman than a foolish snob with an interest in the sky overhead, which had not turned vivid for a quarter of a century. Not since the national highway had been widened to accommodate the lorries that trawled cabbages, cement, goats, wheat, and—if one was to believe the newspapers or the gossip—prostitutes and venereal disease.
Unperturbed by the fancy gentleman, or the polluting lorries, or the family upon the veranda, the crows’ kava kaw rose to crescendo.
“Cauliflower?” Ba urged. “Spinach?”
“Potato?” Dadaji said, lifting his feet off the ground. He rubbed them together as lovingly and extravagantly as if they were soft, velvet hands. “The Gujarati loves a potato more than most,” he said, as if explaining themselves to an absent anthropologist. They were a displaced family, Gujaratis marooned in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Years ago Dadaji’s law practice had brought him to the Allahabad court.
Two squat phones—one in the living room corner, one on Dadaji’s desk—rang out like toads in a swamp, trr trr trr, and they knew it would be a birthday call from Mina Foi’s brother, Manav, Dadaji and Ba’s second child. Dadaji picked up the phone on his desk and Mina Foi the extension in the living room. Ba never spoke on the phone for she had not the habit, even if she’d had the hearing.
“Long life, Mina,” Manav wished his sister.
“It’s been too long already,” said Mina Foi. She wanted to tell her brother that she hoped the missionary couple would stop by as they had last year with cookies made with chocolate chips brought from Iowa—but then they may not remember it was her birthday, and she could not remind them. She was forbidden to make telephone calls on her own because they were a useless luxury.
Dadaji discussed the rising value of one of his investments, and then, at the end of the conversation, he inquired about the health of his daughter-in-law, Seher, and his granddaughter, Sonia.
“We are worried about Sonia,” Manav answered. Sonia attended college in Vermont. “She’s fallen into a depression. She weeps on the telephone, then when we call her back a day later, the same.”
“But why?” asked Dadaji. “She’s been there three years already. Why is she suddenly crying?”
“She says she is lonely.” The last time Sonia had traveled home was two years ago.
“Lonely? Lonely?”
In Allahabad they had no patience with loneliness. They might have felt the loneliness of being misunderstood; they might know the sucked-dead feeling of Allahabad afternoons, a tide drawn out perhaps never to return, which was a kind of loneliness; but they had never slept in a house alone, never eaten a meal alone, never lived in a place where they were unknown, never woken without a cook bringing tea or wishing good morning to several individuals:
Namaste, Khansama.
Good morning, Mummy.
Good morning, Daddy.
Mina, good morning.
Ayah, namaste—
Whenever Dadaji thought of the Wordsworth poem he had been taught in school—I wandered lonely as a cloud / that floats on high o’er vales and hills—the line struck him as so ridiculous, it made him throw back his head and guffaw so hard his upper dentures fell down with a smash. But feeling unusually generous because of the growing value of his shares, Dadaji directed Mina Foi to telephone Sonia. Because vision problems afflicted him—a detached retina, glaucoma, cataracts—he put a magnifying glass to his rheumy red eye and bent over so his nose touched the address book as he read out the number for the Hewitt College dormitory in North Hewitt. Mina Foi put her finger into the holes of the telephone dial and tried for nearly an hour to call until her finger numbed. Finally the phone rang distantly, and someone with what she assumed was a cowboy drawl answered.
Luckily Dadaji picked up the extension line. Mina Foi did not trust herself to speak to a cowboy. Her finger remained stuck up in the air with a crick.
“Hallo, hallo, please connect us to Sonia Shah, who is in room number five,” shouted Dadaji. Then when Sonia arrived at the phone booth, “What is the matter? Why is your father saying you are unhappy? Your studies are all right?”
“Yes,” said Sonia in a measly voice.
“Then? What is the problem?”
“What do you get to eat there?” Mina Foi inquired.
“Macaroni!” answered her grandfather on the phone extension.
“No, Dadaji,” answered Sonia, “the menu is very international. We have Chinese night, Mexican night.”
Mina Foi ventured, “Indian night?”
“Lunch is sometimes Tomato Tigers, which are tomatoes and cheese on a toasted English muffin with curry powder on top.”
“Never heard of such a thing!” Outrage.
“Pudding?” Mina Foi whispered.
“Brownies with ice cream, pecan pie, and blueberry pie.”
Just to contemplate such lavish mysteries made Mina Foi faint with heartbreak.
“Pie is a very American food,” Dadaji confirmed. “Well, what are you crying for, you lucky girl?”
Sonia tried to explain. “I’ve ballooned in my own head. I cannot stop thinking about myself and my problems. I’m dreading the winter. In the dark and cold, it will get worse—”
“Do some jumping jacks, get your spirits up, and then pick up your books. You have to persevere through hardship. If I hadn’t left the life I was born to, you would be in Nadiad, married at sixteen, not studying in America.”
Mina Foi’s hands strangled each other in her lap when she remembered her childhood visits to their ancestral home, where the women scrounged what was left after the men had eaten. When the girls menstruated they were banished—even from this marginal existence—to a hut at the bottom of the property, where they ate from clay dishes that were later broken upon the rubbish heap so they would not pollute the world.
Dadaji had single-handedly extracted them from such backwardness. He may be iron-willed and furious-tempered, but these were precisely the qualities that had given Ba a place at the polished mahogany dining table every day of the year. When he had retired, he’d taken her on a round-the-world trip along with his younger brother, Amal Kaka, and Amal Kaka’s wife, because Amal Kaka had not yet stolen the ancestral property and the brothers were still close.
All these years later, Ba and Dadaji could not remember a single sight, not a monument, not a museum, but they never forgot the green muffler lost on the way to Machu Picchu or the machine that promised to deliver a recorded history of the Vatican through headphones, but when they put in the coins, it didn’t, and when they went to complain, the counter was closed for lunch. “Should we return in twenty minutes?” they had asked the guard. “Does lunch happen in twenty minutes?!” the guard had replied angrily. They remembered this, then they remembered how they had suffered constipation in Vienna and spent a day searching for reasonably priced fruit but found none. In London, at a hotel called The Buckingham, where you assumed people would be honest, they had been told breakfast would be included in the rate, but it was not. They’d saved a small fortune in Paris by cooking rice and lentils in the electric kettle for their dinners, Dadaji climbing on a chair and dismantling the hotel room’s fire alarm. They’d been disappointed by French cooking—what was all the fuss about? They found the same three sandwiches and two sauces everywhere they went. With these two sauces, the French had terrorized the world.
Then, in most foreign lands, they’d observed that the denizens had no respect for Indian tourists, whereas they pursued and flattered the white ones. Therefore it was best to reside among your own people and keep to your own meticulous standards. Having made the big world small, Ba and Dadaji returned home satisfied.
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The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: A Novel
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Visit the Hogarth Store
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: A Novel
Product ID: U0307700151
|
Imported From: United States
At BOLO, we work hard to ensure the products you receive are new, genuine, and sourced from reputable suppliers.
Every product in the BOLO catalogue is sourced through our Verified Global Supply Network of verified sellers, authorized distributors or directly from the manufacturer.
Each product undergoes thorough inspection and verification at our consolidation and fulfilment centers to ensure it meets our strict authenticity and quality standards before being shipped and delivered to you.
If you ever have concerns regarding the authenticity of a product purchased from us, please contact Bolo Support. We will review your inquiry promptly and, if necessary, provide documentation verifying authenticity or offer a suitable resolution.
Your trust is our top priority, and we are committed to maintaining transparency and integrity in every transaction.
While we strive to display accurate information, variations in packaging, labeling, instructions, or formulation may occasionally occur due to regional differences or supplier updates. For detailed or manufacturer-specific information, please contact the brand directly or reach out to BOLO Support for assistance.
Unless otherwise stated, all prices displayed on the product page include applicable taxes and import duties.
BOLO operates in accordance with the laws and regulations of Bahrain. Any items found to be restricted or prohibited for sale within the Bahrain will be cancelled prior to shipment. We take proactive measures to ensure that only products permitted for sale in Bahrain are listed on our website.
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Description:
BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLIST • KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR)
A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss
“A transcendent triumph . . . not so much a novel as a marvel.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“A magnificent saga.”—Washington Post
“Lavish, funny, smart, and wise, this is a novel that will last.”—The Boston Globe
“A spectacular literary achievement. I wanted to pack a little suitcase and stay inside this book forever.”—Ann Patchett
“A novel so wonderful, when I got to the last page, I turned to the first and began again.”—Sandra Cisneros
“Devastating, lyrical, and deeply romantic . . . an unmitigated joy to read.”—Khaled Hosseini
“A masterpiece.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“A sweeping page-turner, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a kind of Romeo and Juliet story for a modern, globalized age.”—Publishers Weekly (Top 10 New Fall Books)
One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Fall: The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Time, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, The Associated Press, Economist, Vulture, AARP, Ms. Magazine, Bustle, Book Riot, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Lit Hub, LibbyLife
When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.
Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR)
A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss
“A transcendent triumph . . . not so much a novel as a marvel.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“A magnificent saga.”—Washington Post
“Lavish, funny, smart, and wise, this is a novel that will last.”—The Boston Globe
“A spectacular literary achievement. I wanted to pack a little suitcase and stay inside this book forever.”—Ann Patchett
“A novel so wonderful, when I got to the last page, I turned to the first and began again.”—Sandra Cisneros
“Devastating, lyrical, and deeply romantic . . . an unmitigated joy to read.”—Khaled Hosseini
“A masterpiece.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“A sweeping page-turner, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a kind of Romeo and Juliet story for a modern, globalized age.”—Publishers Weekly (Top 10 New Fall Books)
One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Fall: The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Time, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, The Associated Press, Economist, Vulture, AARP, Ms. Magazine, Bustle, Book Riot, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Lit Hub, LibbyLife
When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.
Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“As entertaining as it is profound.”—The Boston Globe
“A dazzling epic . . . immensely entertaining.”—The Guardian
“A sweeping romance.”—Time
“Brilliant doesn’t begin to describe this novel’s profound illuminative powers.”—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“[A] sweeping and beguiling novel.”—The New Yorker
“[A] luscious love story . . . [a] deeply satisfying read.”—Oprah Daily
“A spectacular novel—nearly ‘as abundant as life itself’—to savor, ruminate over, and, yes, even reread.”—NPR
“The family epic you’ve been waiting for. . . . Funny, tender, and gripping.”—Marie Claire
“A sweeping love story touching class, race and history.”—People
“Stunning . . . an epic, according to some early reviewers, ‘immersive’ with its cast of fascinating characters, shifting locales, and a plot that not only is a love story, but also contains elements of a bildungsroman, thriller, and murder mystery.”—Poets & Writers
“This gorgeously written, multilayered novel is a love story of sorts, but it’s arguably more about seeking identity and belonging while navigating two cultures, and intense family ties that both pull and repel.”—AARP
“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny achieves the ultimate of what a book should do: carry us away into other peoples’ lives, thinking as they think, feeling as they feel, until it comes around and shows us to ourselves. Grand, magnificent, intimate, more than wonderful, this is a novel you will hold close to your heart. I certainly did. I cannot recommend it enough.”—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less
“Beautifully-written, acutely observed, and richly textured, this is a stunning, transformative novel of both epic and intimate proportions.”—Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other, Winner of the Booker Prize
“Kiran Desai reveals the breadth and depth of time, how it weighs on families and nations caught within the drama of history. She captures this with a rare and astute sensitivity that, no matter her subject, casts a light on our present.”—Hisham Matar, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return
“Literary love stories are vanishingly rare these days, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is that even more precious thing: a love story that’s also profound, sparkling, funny, exquisitely written, and that teaches us how to live in full-throated exultation for the astonishments of this world. It has so many urgent things to say—about the costs and consolations of art, about power and class and race and freedom—that reading the book feels like a long conversation at night with your most interesting and ardent friend.”—Lauren Groff
“A powerful novel by a writer strong enough to pull back together worlds that are being pulled apart.”—Mohsin Hamid, New York Times bestselling author of Exit West
“What a magnificent achievement, made all the more rare for its compulsive readability. I could not put this book down.”—Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, finalist for the Booker Prize
“This ambitious yet intimate saga is well worth the wait.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A stunner worth savoring.”—Booklist, starred review
“A dazzling epic . . . immensely entertaining.”—The Guardian
“A sweeping romance.”—Time
“Brilliant doesn’t begin to describe this novel’s profound illuminative powers.”—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“[A] sweeping and beguiling novel.”—The New Yorker
“[A] luscious love story . . . [a] deeply satisfying read.”—Oprah Daily
“A spectacular novel—nearly ‘as abundant as life itself’—to savor, ruminate over, and, yes, even reread.”—NPR
“The family epic you’ve been waiting for. . . . Funny, tender, and gripping.”—Marie Claire
“A sweeping love story touching class, race and history.”—People
“Stunning . . . an epic, according to some early reviewers, ‘immersive’ with its cast of fascinating characters, shifting locales, and a plot that not only is a love story, but also contains elements of a bildungsroman, thriller, and murder mystery.”—Poets & Writers
“This gorgeously written, multilayered novel is a love story of sorts, but it’s arguably more about seeking identity and belonging while navigating two cultures, and intense family ties that both pull and repel.”—AARP
“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny achieves the ultimate of what a book should do: carry us away into other peoples’ lives, thinking as they think, feeling as they feel, until it comes around and shows us to ourselves. Grand, magnificent, intimate, more than wonderful, this is a novel you will hold close to your heart. I certainly did. I cannot recommend it enough.”—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less
“Beautifully-written, acutely observed, and richly textured, this is a stunning, transformative novel of both epic and intimate proportions.”—Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other, Winner of the Booker Prize
“Kiran Desai reveals the breadth and depth of time, how it weighs on families and nations caught within the drama of history. She captures this with a rare and astute sensitivity that, no matter her subject, casts a light on our present.”—Hisham Matar, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return
“Literary love stories are vanishingly rare these days, and The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is that even more precious thing: a love story that’s also profound, sparkling, funny, exquisitely written, and that teaches us how to live in full-throated exultation for the astonishments of this world. It has so many urgent things to say—about the costs and consolations of art, about power and class and race and freedom—that reading the book feels like a long conversation at night with your most interesting and ardent friend.”—Lauren Groff
“A powerful novel by a writer strong enough to pull back together worlds that are being pulled apart.”—Mohsin Hamid, New York Times bestselling author of Exit West
“What a magnificent achievement, made all the more rare for its compulsive readability. I could not put this book down.”—Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, finalist for the Booker Prize
“This ambitious yet intimate saga is well worth the wait.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A stunner worth savoring.”—Booklist, starred review
About the Author
Kiran Desai is the bestselling author of the novels Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in India, she came to the United States when she was sixteen and now lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
The sun was still submerged in the wintry murk of dawn when Ba, Dadaji, and their daughter, Mina Foi, wrapping shawls closely about themselves, emerged upon the veranda to sip their tea and decide, through vigorous process of elimination, their meals for the rest of the day. Orders must be given to the cook at breakfast so that he could go directly to market. It was Mina’s fifty-fifth birthday, the first of December in the year 1996, and the mutton for the dinner kebabs had been marinating overnight in the kitchen.
“Rice?” Ba shouted. “Roti?” She was growing deaf, but she knew she must raise her voice over the morning traffic thundering past the front gate and the cawing of hundreds of crows—their racket and the sun’s struggle so closely linked, it was as if each morning the crows gave birth to the light. “Pilau?” she suggested. “Paratha?”
Perched above them, at the entrance portico, sat a plaster bust of a portly gentleman in a cravat, perhaps inspired by a drawing made by the bungalow’s original owner, who had toured Europe, sketchbook in hand, in the same manner he’d observed foreigners doing in India. And perhaps it was the fault of the artist’s rendering, or the dissonant surroundings of Allahabad, or a splattering of bird droppings, but the bust resembled less a dignified nobleman than a foolish snob with an interest in the sky overhead, which had not turned vivid for a quarter of a century. Not since the national highway had been widened to accommodate the lorries that trawled cabbages, cement, goats, wheat, and—if one was to believe the newspapers or the gossip—prostitutes and venereal disease.
Unperturbed by the fancy gentleman, or the polluting lorries, or the family upon the veranda, the crows’ kava kaw rose to crescendo.
“Cauliflower?” Ba urged. “Spinach?”
“Potato?” Dadaji said, lifting his feet off the ground. He rubbed them together as lovingly and extravagantly as if they were soft, velvet hands. “The Gujarati loves a potato more than most,” he said, as if explaining themselves to an absent anthropologist. They were a displaced family, Gujaratis marooned in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Years ago Dadaji’s law practice had brought him to the Allahabad court.
Two squat phones—one in the living room corner, one on Dadaji’s desk—rang out like toads in a swamp, trr trr trr, and they knew it would be a birthday call from Mina Foi’s brother, Manav, Dadaji and Ba’s second child. Dadaji picked up the phone on his desk and Mina Foi the extension in the living room. Ba never spoke on the phone for she had not the habit, even if she’d had the hearing.
“Long life, Mina,” Manav wished his sister.
“It’s been too long already,” said Mina Foi. She wanted to tell her brother that she hoped the missionary couple would stop by as they had last year with cookies made with chocolate chips brought from Iowa—but then they may not remember it was her birthday, and she could not remind them. She was forbidden to make telephone calls on her own because they were a useless luxury.
Dadaji discussed the rising value of one of his investments, and then, at the end of the conversation, he inquired about the health of his daughter-in-law, Seher, and his granddaughter, Sonia.
“We are worried about Sonia,” Manav answered. Sonia attended college in Vermont. “She’s fallen into a depression. She weeps on the telephone, then when we call her back a day later, the same.”
“But why?” asked Dadaji. “She’s been there three years already. Why is she suddenly crying?”
“She says she is lonely.” The last time Sonia had traveled home was two years ago.
“Lonely? Lonely?”
In Allahabad they had no patience with loneliness. They might have felt the loneliness of being misunderstood; they might know the sucked-dead feeling of Allahabad afternoons, a tide drawn out perhaps never to return, which was a kind of loneliness; but they had never slept in a house alone, never eaten a meal alone, never lived in a place where they were unknown, never woken without a cook bringing tea or wishing good morning to several individuals:
Namaste, Khansama.
Good morning, Mummy.
Good morning, Daddy.
Mina, good morning.
Ayah, namaste—
Whenever Dadaji thought of the Wordsworth poem he had been taught in school—I wandered lonely as a cloud / that floats on high o’er vales and hills—the line struck him as so ridiculous, it made him throw back his head and guffaw so hard his upper dentures fell down with a smash. But feeling unusually generous because of the growing value of his shares, Dadaji directed Mina Foi to telephone Sonia. Because vision problems afflicted him—a detached retina, glaucoma, cataracts—he put a magnifying glass to his rheumy red eye and bent over so his nose touched the address book as he read out the number for the Hewitt College dormitory in North Hewitt. Mina Foi put her finger into the holes of the telephone dial and tried for nearly an hour to call until her finger numbed. Finally the phone rang distantly, and someone with what she assumed was a cowboy drawl answered.
Luckily Dadaji picked up the extension line. Mina Foi did not trust herself to speak to a cowboy. Her finger remained stuck up in the air with a crick.
“Hallo, hallo, please connect us to Sonia Shah, who is in room number five,” shouted Dadaji. Then when Sonia arrived at the phone booth, “What is the matter? Why is your father saying you are unhappy? Your studies are all right?”
“Yes,” said Sonia in a measly voice.
“Then? What is the problem?”
“What do you get to eat there?” Mina Foi inquired.
“Macaroni!” answered her grandfather on the phone extension.
“No, Dadaji,” answered Sonia, “the menu is very international. We have Chinese night, Mexican night.”
Mina Foi ventured, “Indian night?”
“Lunch is sometimes Tomato Tigers, which are tomatoes and cheese on a toasted English muffin with curry powder on top.”
“Never heard of such a thing!” Outrage.
“Pudding?” Mina Foi whispered.
“Brownies with ice cream, pecan pie, and blueberry pie.”
Just to contemplate such lavish mysteries made Mina Foi faint with heartbreak.
“Pie is a very American food,” Dadaji confirmed. “Well, what are you crying for, you lucky girl?”
Sonia tried to explain. “I’ve ballooned in my own head. I cannot stop thinking about myself and my problems. I’m dreading the winter. In the dark and cold, it will get worse—”
“Do some jumping jacks, get your spirits up, and then pick up your books. You have to persevere through hardship. If I hadn’t left the life I was born to, you would be in Nadiad, married at sixteen, not studying in America.”
Mina Foi’s hands strangled each other in her lap when she remembered her childhood visits to their ancestral home, where the women scrounged what was left after the men had eaten. When the girls menstruated they were banished—even from this marginal existence—to a hut at the bottom of the property, where they ate from clay dishes that were later broken upon the rubbish heap so they would not pollute the world.
Dadaji had single-handedly extracted them from such backwardness. He may be iron-willed and furious-tempered, but these were precisely the qualities that had given Ba a place at the polished mahogany dining table every day of the year. When he had retired, he’d taken her on a round-the-world trip along with his younger brother, Amal Kaka, and Amal Kaka’s wife, because Amal Kaka had not yet stolen the ancestral property and the brothers were still close.
All these years later, Ba and Dadaji could not remember a single sight, not a monument, not a museum, but they never forgot the green muffler lost on the way to Machu Picchu or the machine that promised to deliver a recorded history of the Vatican through headphones, but when they put in the coins, it didn’t, and when they went to complain, the counter was closed for lunch. “Should we return in twenty minutes?” they had asked the guard. “Does lunch happen in twenty minutes?!” the guard had replied angrily. They remembered this, then they remembered how they had suffered constipation in Vienna and spent a day searching for reasonably priced fruit but found none. In London, at a hotel called The Buckingham, where you assumed people would be honest, they had been told breakfast would be included in the rate, but it was not. They’d saved a small fortune in Paris by cooking rice and lentils in the electric kettle for their dinners, Dadaji climbing on a chair and dismantling the hotel room’s fire alarm. They’d been disappointed by French cooking—what was all the fuss about? They found the same three sandwiches and two sauces everywhere they went. With these two sauces, the French had terrorized the world.
Then, in most foreign lands, they’d observed that the denizens had no respect for Indian tourists, whereas they pursued and flattered the white ones. Therefore it was best to reside among your own people and keep to your own meticulous standards. Having made the big world small, Ba and Dadaji returned home satisfied.
The sun was still submerged in the wintry murk of dawn when Ba, Dadaji, and their daughter, Mina Foi, wrapping shawls closely about themselves, emerged upon the veranda to sip their tea and decide, through vigorous process of elimination, their meals for the rest of the day. Orders must be given to the cook at breakfast so that he could go directly to market. It was Mina’s fifty-fifth birthday, the first of December in the year 1996, and the mutton for the dinner kebabs had been marinating overnight in the kitchen.
“Rice?” Ba shouted. “Roti?” She was growing deaf, but she knew she must raise her voice over the morning traffic thundering past the front gate and the cawing of hundreds of crows—their racket and the sun’s struggle so closely linked, it was as if each morning the crows gave birth to the light. “Pilau?” she suggested. “Paratha?”
Perched above them, at the entrance portico, sat a plaster bust of a portly gentleman in a cravat, perhaps inspired by a drawing made by the bungalow’s original owner, who had toured Europe, sketchbook in hand, in the same manner he’d observed foreigners doing in India. And perhaps it was the fault of the artist’s rendering, or the dissonant surroundings of Allahabad, or a splattering of bird droppings, but the bust resembled less a dignified nobleman than a foolish snob with an interest in the sky overhead, which had not turned vivid for a quarter of a century. Not since the national highway had been widened to accommodate the lorries that trawled cabbages, cement, goats, wheat, and—if one was to believe the newspapers or the gossip—prostitutes and venereal disease.
Unperturbed by the fancy gentleman, or the polluting lorries, or the family upon the veranda, the crows’ kava kaw rose to crescendo.
“Cauliflower?” Ba urged. “Spinach?”
“Potato?” Dadaji said, lifting his feet off the ground. He rubbed them together as lovingly and extravagantly as if they were soft, velvet hands. “The Gujarati loves a potato more than most,” he said, as if explaining themselves to an absent anthropologist. They were a displaced family, Gujaratis marooned in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Years ago Dadaji’s law practice had brought him to the Allahabad court.
Two squat phones—one in the living room corner, one on Dadaji’s desk—rang out like toads in a swamp, trr trr trr, and they knew it would be a birthday call from Mina Foi’s brother, Manav, Dadaji and Ba’s second child. Dadaji picked up the phone on his desk and Mina Foi the extension in the living room. Ba never spoke on the phone for she had not the habit, even if she’d had the hearing.
“Long life, Mina,” Manav wished his sister.
“It’s been too long already,” said Mina Foi. She wanted to tell her brother that she hoped the missionary couple would stop by as they had last year with cookies made with chocolate chips brought from Iowa—but then they may not remember it was her birthday, and she could not remind them. She was forbidden to make telephone calls on her own because they were a useless luxury.
Dadaji discussed the rising value of one of his investments, and then, at the end of the conversation, he inquired about the health of his daughter-in-law, Seher, and his granddaughter, Sonia.
“We are worried about Sonia,” Manav answered. Sonia attended college in Vermont. “She’s fallen into a depression. She weeps on the telephone, then when we call her back a day later, the same.”
“But why?” asked Dadaji. “She’s been there three years already. Why is she suddenly crying?”
“She says she is lonely.” The last time Sonia had traveled home was two years ago.
“Lonely? Lonely?”
In Allahabad they had no patience with loneliness. They might have felt the loneliness of being misunderstood; they might know the sucked-dead feeling of Allahabad afternoons, a tide drawn out perhaps never to return, which was a kind of loneliness; but they had never slept in a house alone, never eaten a meal alone, never lived in a place where they were unknown, never woken without a cook bringing tea or wishing good morning to several individuals:
Namaste, Khansama.
Good morning, Mummy.
Good morning, Daddy.
Mina, good morning.
Ayah, namaste—
Whenever Dadaji thought of the Wordsworth poem he had been taught in school—I wandered lonely as a cloud / that floats on high o’er vales and hills—the line struck him as so ridiculous, it made him throw back his head and guffaw so hard his upper dentures fell down with a smash. But feeling unusually generous because of the growing value of his shares, Dadaji directed Mina Foi to telephone Sonia. Because vision problems afflicted him—a detached retina, glaucoma, cataracts—he put a magnifying glass to his rheumy red eye and bent over so his nose touched the address book as he read out the number for the Hewitt College dormitory in North Hewitt. Mina Foi put her finger into the holes of the telephone dial and tried for nearly an hour to call until her finger numbed. Finally the phone rang distantly, and someone with what she assumed was a cowboy drawl answered.
Luckily Dadaji picked up the extension line. Mina Foi did not trust herself to speak to a cowboy. Her finger remained stuck up in the air with a crick.
“Hallo, hallo, please connect us to Sonia Shah, who is in room number five,” shouted Dadaji. Then when Sonia arrived at the phone booth, “What is the matter? Why is your father saying you are unhappy? Your studies are all right?”
“Yes,” said Sonia in a measly voice.
“Then? What is the problem?”
“What do you get to eat there?” Mina Foi inquired.
“Macaroni!” answered her grandfather on the phone extension.
“No, Dadaji,” answered Sonia, “the menu is very international. We have Chinese night, Mexican night.”
Mina Foi ventured, “Indian night?”
“Lunch is sometimes Tomato Tigers, which are tomatoes and cheese on a toasted English muffin with curry powder on top.”
“Never heard of such a thing!” Outrage.
“Pudding?” Mina Foi whispered.
“Brownies with ice cream, pecan pie, and blueberry pie.”
Just to contemplate such lavish mysteries made Mina Foi faint with heartbreak.
“Pie is a very American food,” Dadaji confirmed. “Well, what are you crying for, you lucky girl?”
Sonia tried to explain. “I’ve ballooned in my own head. I cannot stop thinking about myself and my problems. I’m dreading the winter. In the dark and cold, it will get worse—”
“Do some jumping jacks, get your spirits up, and then pick up your books. You have to persevere through hardship. If I hadn’t left the life I was born to, you would be in Nadiad, married at sixteen, not studying in America.”
Mina Foi’s hands strangled each other in her lap when she remembered her childhood visits to their ancestral home, where the women scrounged what was left after the men had eaten. When the girls menstruated they were banished—even from this marginal existence—to a hut at the bottom of the property, where they ate from clay dishes that were later broken upon the rubbish heap so they would not pollute the world.
Dadaji had single-handedly extracted them from such backwardness. He may be iron-willed and furious-tempered, but these were precisely the qualities that had given Ba a place at the polished mahogany dining table every day of the year. When he had retired, he’d taken her on a round-the-world trip along with his younger brother, Amal Kaka, and Amal Kaka’s wife, because Amal Kaka had not yet stolen the ancestral property and the brothers were still close.
All these years later, Ba and Dadaji could not remember a single sight, not a monument, not a museum, but they never forgot the green muffler lost on the way to Machu Picchu or the machine that promised to deliver a recorded history of the Vatican through headphones, but when they put in the coins, it didn’t, and when they went to complain, the counter was closed for lunch. “Should we return in twenty minutes?” they had asked the guard. “Does lunch happen in twenty minutes?!” the guard had replied angrily. They remembered this, then they remembered how they had suffered constipation in Vienna and spent a day searching for reasonably priced fruit but found none. In London, at a hotel called The Buckingham, where you assumed people would be honest, they had been told breakfast would be included in the rate, but it was not. They’d saved a small fortune in Paris by cooking rice and lentils in the electric kettle for their dinners, Dadaji climbing on a chair and dismantling the hotel room’s fire alarm. They’d been disappointed by French cooking—what was all the fuss about? They found the same three sandwiches and two sauces everywhere they went. With these two sauces, the French had terrorized the world.
Then, in most foreign lands, they’d observed that the denizens had no respect for Indian tourists, whereas they pursued and flattered the white ones. Therefore it was best to reside among your own people and keep to your own meticulous standards. Having made the big world small, Ba and Dadaji returned home satisfied.
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