Edinburgh Book Festival: Kiran Desai Talks Writing Process, Solitude, And Kebabs
Photo by Ainhoa Aron
August 29th, 2026: McEwan Hall, Edinburgh.
Kiran Desai had not published a book in 20 years. Of the 5000 pages which sputtered out of the printer in a first draft, the nearly 700 pages of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny which careened out in stealth were worth the wait. Desai was looking, hunting, for some ‘sign of life’.
‘You’re waiting for a mystical fish to leap out of the water, like a hermit,’ she explained, laughing along with everyone in McEwan Hall at her own joke. In the loveliest way, with the loveliest laugh. If ever an author sparkled, Kiran Desai lit up McEwan Hall and all of Edinburgh on that gloomy day. The joke was in reference to the story that titular Sonia writes, about a boy living like a monkey and being mistaken for a hermit.
This talk of hermits, however, unearthed a critical concern for the author: Desai was wary in writing this book of falling into the ‘trap-category’ of magic realism, uneasy with what some might label a ‘fantastical’ strain in her novel. Much like Sonia’s story of a hermit, Desai feared The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny might be castigated for a magical ‘strain’ which has too often been criticized as a feature of stereotypical ‘orientalism’ by both West and East alike. Desai had been ashamed to hear in an interview between Salman Rushdie and Marlon James that the number-one offense in Eastern-originating books was to mention an ‘exotic’ fruit in the title, reflecting on her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998). But who gets to decide what fruits are ‘exotic’ and which are ‘ordinary’? Desai wanted to talk about the sort of magic, the nonsensical yet not ineffable phenomenon, that is prehistoric fear and its manifestation in our nightmares. Why is it that humans still dream of sharks and serpents even when living in a New York City apartment devoid of either? Why is a story about a boy living as a monkey in Allahabad, where monkeys are very much a thing, or the story of a girl far away from home, being set up with a boy from her home town by their families, when both are afflicted with the Western disease of isolation, treated as strange and exotic (but also ‘tired’ and ‘expected’) by Sonia’s lover, and allegorically the Western reader, despite the breadth of Anglophone South Asian fiction and the breadth of this book’s topical imaginations? Desai’s discussion of her book suggested that The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was a sort of ode to ‘doing it anyway’- because how better to defy the power divide which has historically censured South Asian fiction for the Western market, than to write as authentically, wholly, and beautifully, as Kiran Desai does, on what may be ‘exotic’ to some, but is just as ordinary to others.
This is thereby a central concern of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: who is trapped by whose gaze? East and West to whom, North and South from what…? Who controls whom in family, love, nation, gender, art, news…? Specifically in terms of the latter, who gets to write about what? Our other titular character, Sunny, is most tangibly involved in investigating this in his journalistic work at AP News. But Desai steers away from the political novel this time around (though all novels are, of course, political), to write about what she deems most vulnerable. Indeed, Desai admits that she was working on this book ‘like an earthworm’, transposing bits of real life into artistic life and, as real life slowly receded from view, retreating into a writerly, solitary life. She had learned from the best.
Anita Desai had always had an unusual stillness, begot, according to her daughter, from a lifetime of reading and writing– even breathing according to the rhythm of pages turning. Much like Sonia’s mother, whose husband became increasingly affected by the way she got wrapped up in her books and forgot about him, Kiran notes her mother really flourished when in her own artistic space. A room of her own: with a distinct ‘writerly light’, Kiran describes, different in quality to any other house. Kiran spent a good chunk of the 20 years that have passed since The Inheritance of Loss was published, scribbling away in unnumbered journals in her mother’s ‘writerly’ house. Working, like Sonia and most international students in Vermont did, at her college library during harsh, desolate winters, Kiran admits having been aureoled the ‘slowest shelver of books in the library’. A nod to the cadence at which she was accustomed to writing. A nod, also, to the turn to Western isolation she’d experienced as an Indian student in the United States.
In the US, Kiran Desai found her culture’s failure, solitude, being rewarded. In Allahabad, she spent nights batting away mosquitoes in her aunt’s bed, and mornings on the terrace with her grandparents, discussing the neighbours’ dinner recipes. In Vermont, company was to be sought out. In Vermont, where individuality was prized over belonging, there was no one to rely on but yourself. You had to catch the mouse in your house, Desai concluded. But if solitude is not prized in Indian culture as it is in Western, specifically American, society, Desai has since come to realize isolation as simultaneously, unequivocally important in a woman’s life. To echo American-Scot writer Douglas Stuart, who would explore similar ideas in the same McEwan Hall on the day following Desai’s interview: women bloom in widowhood. Women bloom in isolation. Because in isolation, Desai noted to raucous applause, her sense of gender completely fell away. There was an incredible freedom to this reality, which prompted one to reflect on the nature of gender: if one’s gendered experience depended on whose gaze fell upon oneself, in whose society one lived, then the gendered self was in the control of that society and those who beheld. In this Butlerian sense, solitude could manifest in not only painful but beautiful, necessary forms.
Of course, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, as the title suggests, is replete with the pain of solitude from its very first pages. Whether it be Sonia’s auntie, fated to remain husbandless on the family’s terrace in Allahabad till the end of her days, Sonia’s entitled and abusive partner, Sunny’s alienation from his American girlfriend, or, as a result of said relationship, the gulf Sunny’s mother feels festering between them, Desai explores the ties between Western and Eastern solitude across generational and geographical divides.
This is where kebabs come in. If one’s sense of gender falls away in isolation, so does one’s sense of self. You can be ‘subtracted’ in migration, your sense of self and belonging not static but in constant flux. To Sonia, whose sense of cultural belonging begins to fade as she hibernates at her artist lover’s family mansion, feeling the tight, perfect fit of the family jewels in Allahabad reminds her of the cultural ties which affix her to a distinct tradition of community living. Desai’s family jewels were her father’s recipe for kebabs. Answering a young Allahabadian reader’s request for this very recipe, Desai actually compares the Indian kebab to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: a Hindu/Buddhist love story for the ages.
With my flatmates and friends gone for the summer, I’ve been living on my own for the past couple of weeks. And with only my landlord down at the falafel shop below our flat for company, I firmly side with Desai in all that concerns kebabs: gender can be a prison, but it’s not half bad having someone around to catch the mice.
Edited by Lara Walsh, Editor in Chief
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