On a sweltering summer evening in Jackson Heights, Queens, the novelist Kiran Desai was approached on a busy corner by someone promising a glimpse of the future.
Desai politely declined. But she couldn’t resist taking a business card, which advertised the services of a fortune teller whose reputed skills included prophecy, eradicating black magic, bad luck and evil spirits, and curing more mundane problems like divorce, money troubles and reuniting with a lost love.
As she studied the card, a puzzled look crossed her face.
“Now I’m curious,” she said.
Desai and I had met earlier that day at her home in Jackson Heights, which serves as one of the many backdrops for her new novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.” We were visiting some of the neighborhood spots that Desai describes in the book — a busy Uruguayan cafe with colorful cakes and sugar-dusted buns, a bustling commercial strip packed with food trucks, kebab shops and jewelry stores, and Patel Brothers, a South Asian grocery store where Desai picked up a few things for dinner.
The fortune teller’s pitch was not a planned part of the tour, but it felt fitting. Fate, chance, supernatural apparitions and protective talismans are central to Desai’s novel, a sprawling epic love story that has consumed her life for nearly two decades.
“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” which Hogarth will release on Sept. 23, follows the intersecting lives of two young Indians who are far from home and struggling with displacement and loneliness.
Sonia is an aspiring novelist attending college in Vermont; Sunny, a budding journalist in New York City. As they separately pursue writing careers and independence from their families and homeland, Sonia and Sunny’s paths keep colliding — first, when Sonia’s family proposes an arranged marriage, an offer Sunny rejects as ridiculously old-fashioned, and later, when they notice each other on a train to Allahabad, then reunite in Goa and Venice and gradually fall in love.
It’s far and away Desai’s most ambitious novel, and her first since she won the Booker Prize in 2006 for “The Inheritance of Loss.” Nearly 700 pages long, it spans continents and unearths decades of family history, exploring the effects of globalization, the legacy of colonialism and partition in India, and the slippery, transmutable nature of identity.
When she first had the idea for the novel, Desai didn’t realize how thoroughly the story would swallow her life. At times over the years, she feared that she might never finish it. Now that the book is done and due out this month, she’s feeling a bit lonely without it, she said.
“It was so much my entire world that life seems very thin on the other side of this book,” said Desai, 54, who fiddled absent-mindedly with her hair, which is faintly streaked with gray, and spoke so softly it was at times hard to hear her over the air-conditioner blasting in her living room. “I don’t quite know what to do with myself. It was my companion all these years.”
Desai’s long absence from the literary scene has only added to the anticipation for her new novel. On the day we met, Desai learned that she’s a contender for this year’s Booker Prize.
“After all these years, I feel she’s found her own full voice as a writer,” Salman Rushdie, a family friend who has known Desai since she was little, said of her new novel. “It’s been a very hard book for her to write, and I hope it doesn’t take her another 20 years to write the next book.”
During those difficult moments when Desai feared the novel would fall apart, she turned to a trusted writer and mentor: her mother, the novelist Anita Desai.
“I don’t show my early work to anyone except for her,” Desai said. “She understands what I am trying to say, because she understands the landscapes that I am writing from.”
Anita Desai, 88, recalled marveling at the story’s scope when she first read a draft, which then topped 1,000 pages.
“It was a world in itself,” she said.
She was also struck by her daughter’s determination to wrestle the unwieldy story into submission. “It took a lot of courage and it took a lot of stamina,” she said. “Even if others doubted what she was doing, she needed to be stubborn. She knew what she wanted to do.”
Growing up as the youngest of four, mostly in Delhi and briefly in Kalimpong, a town in the Himalayas, Desai witnessed the life of a writer up close, as her mother carved out time to work amid the chaos of a busy household.
After her parents separated when she was a teenager, Desai and her mother moved to England and then to the United States. At Bennington College in Vermont, Desai planned to pursue a science degree, but realized she wanted to become a writer while working at the campus library, where she read Tolstoy, Kawabata and Kundera.
In 1998, Desai published her debut novel, “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,” about a Punjabi villager who lives in a tree with a band of rowdy monkeys and is revered as a saint.
Over the next eight years, she worked on “The Inheritance of Loss,” which is set partly in Kalimpong, in the home of a retired judge who takes in his orphaned granddaughter and finds his tranquil life unsettled by an uprising of Nepali separatists. Desai wrote for stretches at her mother’s home in Cold Spring, N.Y., where mother and daughter worked in parallel on their manuscripts and came together to discuss their work over dinner and glasses of rum.
Over the years, they’ve developed a bond that’s as writerly as it is maternal and filial. They speak every day; Desai fielded a quick call from her mother as we were walking through Jackson Heights, as she nimbly dodged pedestrians on crowded sidewalks. When she won the Booker in 2006, Desai said in an acceptance speech that she felt the novel was her mother’s as much as her own. Anita Desai, who’s been shortlisted for the Booker three times, told interviewers that she felt as ecstatic about her daughter’s achievement as she would have had she won herself.
Soon after finishing “The Inheritance of Loss,” Desai had the idea for “an Indian love story out in the modern world,” which would explore love and loneliness and the ways that romantic ties, which were once dictated by social class, religion and community, have become more a matter of chance.
She began writing Sonia’s and Sunny’s stories in parallel, unsure how they would intersect. She gave Sonia a background much like her own, including a boisterous Delhi family with a beloved household cook who excels at making kebabs. Like Desai, Sonia discovers her love of literature while working in a college library, and has the idea for a fictional work about a boy who lives in a tree and is mistaken for a holy hermit — a plot that echoes Desai’s debut novel.
Sonia struggles with how to portray her homeland, and worries that if she writes about arranged marriages or magical realism, she’ll be trafficking in cultural clichés. It’s a dilemma that Desai has wrestled with, as someone who is celebrated as one of India’s most acclaimed novelists, but hasn’t lived there since she was a child.
“There’s anger in many parts of the world that people who have the power of representation are people like me, who don’t speak Indian languages well, who write in English,” she said. “So that’s what Sunny and Sonia are both grappling with.”
While writing the book, Desai bounced between writing residencies in Europe and the United States and traveled to India, Italy and Mexico, keeping journals that shaped the narrative. She moved around from Manhattan to Dumbo and eventually landed in Jackson Heights, which became part of her novel, the place where Sunny finds some semblance of home in the neighborhood’s immigrant communities.
As the years slipped by, Desai was so immersed in the story that she barely noticed time passing except on her birthday and New Year’s, she said. Desai lives alone and has never married; she’s also kept her distance from the competitive pressures of the literary world.
“She’s not in the thick of the literary scene so to speak, and that has really served her and the book and allowed her to do the deep thinking and the deep living with these characters,” said David Ebershoff, Desai’s editor.
Leading a solitary life — supported by fellowships and grants and a substantial publishing advance in 2010 — allowed Desai to spend nearly two decades of uninterrupted work on the novel. “Artistic loneliness,” she said, “can be exquisite.”
Still, at times, she worried she might never finish the novel, and that she was exhausting her publisher’s patience.
“I’ve been incredibly lucky to have people there who trusted that I would deliver something,” she said, “because it would have been completely fair to think otherwise.”
About seven years into writing, Desai was at a residency in Brussels when she decided to print out the manuscript. She was shocked at what kept spilling out of the printer; she realized she had written 5,000 pages.
“I was horrified,” she said. “I hadn’t understood what a dire situation it was.”
She tried to untangle the web of narratives and cut ruthlessly, but the story had no center.
An unlikely solution arrived in the mail one day, in the form of a small painting. It was sent to Desai by the artist Francesco Clemente as thanks for Desai’s foreword to his book, “Emblems of Transformation.” Desai was mesmerized by the image of a dark deity with outstretched arms and a terrifying blank face.
The haunting figure made its way into the novel in the form of an amulet that Sonia keeps with her as a talisman that bestows creative power.
It played a similar role for Desai, who keeps the painting next to her wherever she’s working. The image provided “a secret structure” for the book, she said. The faceless figure shows up repeatedly in the narrative, practically becoming a character in itself, and gave her a framework to explore ideas from Hindu and Buddhist philosophy about how the feeling of a fixed self is an illusion.
“It was in front of my eyes the whole time I was working and it seeped deeply into the book,” she said.
After working on Sonia and Sunny’s story for so many years, Desai feels a bit unmoored. She said she’s unlikely to take on a narrative of that scope again, and hopes to write something “quick and frivolous.”
“I know that I don’t have another 20 years to give to a book in this way,” she said.
At the same time, she feels fortunate that she could give herself over so completely to the story, even as she’s struggling to untangle herself from it now.
“All these years, wherever I was, the book was with me, so to be without it and to not be intensely involved in the story, is unnerving,” she said. “To leave real life for artistic life felt very lucky.”
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
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