kirandesai
Dear Diary,
Reading The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia by Kiran Desai has hit uncomfortably close to home. I can't tell you how it's occupied my mind, made me introspect, and shake my view of this very tiny bubble that i inhabit. Is that the aim of good literature? To make you see the world through a different lens, or to unapologetically shine a mirror on your own life? Kiran desai is a gifted author. She writes with the same as AD snips away at paraaortic nodes: he pushes his gloved hand in, intrusively grabbing the aorta, and plucks off the nodes in the shadow of the master pumper, with a scissors. My heart leaps to my mouth when I see that! How can anyone dare traverse so callously around Aorta? Is it stupidity? Or the fact that he can put a clamp across with equal ease, without batting an eyelid?
Now I'm digressing. The loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Yes all the characters are my family members. Dadaji is Dad, parsimonious, has kept us life-long, at the unpredictable frequency of his volatile moods. 107.1. Babita is Mum, a hopeless snob. Delusions of grandeur and wealth which has long disappeared, left carrying fancy bags and nice clothes to the latest hobby that she cannot sustain for longer than 6 months. Ilan and Papa are combinations of Dnyanesh before The Great Reformation. Gas lighting, accusing, victims of their own drama. "The car isn't working, I can't go by taxi, the children will grow by themselves," thirty minutes to get ready, constant vanity. He asked me if I was reminded of his old self. I boldly said "yes." He was ashamed and apologised. I'm glad at least I was able to break away from that, unlike the characters in the book. Sonia reminded me of Aarati in the US, loneliness cutting a core into her, like a tunnel through a mountain. It reaffirmed my belief that kids are too small at the age of 18 to go abroad to study. They are fledgelings, just at the cusp of finding out who their greater selves are, their childhood at the brink of exstinction, their adulthood beckoning them to leave it all behind.
And I have half of it still pending and I'm already so drawn in. If only I could write like her ....I would have churned out a novel of some merit:) If only....