Award-winning author Kiran Desai explores love, loss, and the shimmering quiet that binds modern lives

When I speak to Kiran Desai, she is at her mother’s house,resting for a brief moment between continents. The tour for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (TLOSAS) has taken her from city after city, and tomorrow she leaves for Pittsburgh, followed by a brief spell in Ashland City, Tennessee, before coming to India in January 2026.Though her voice carries the warmth of familiarity, it also carries fatigue: the kind that comes from stepping back into a world of attention after years of solitude. “It’s difficult,” she admits softly,her black locks lining her face in the warm glow of her room. “Publishing a book after so long, I forgot how public the act of publishing actually is. It’s just constant exposure.”

Despite this paradox of solitude and exposure, there is a stirring interiority that characterises her new novel, which is a sprawling,generations and continents spanning meditation on love, class, and the aching loneliness of quiet contemporary life in metropolises. In TLOSAS, Desai turns her gaze towards the global Indian upper class: the itinerant, educated, cosmopolitan men and women negotiating identity, intimacy, and inheritances across continents. The landscape—both interior and exterior—that Desai paints through her words is glittering and bruised, a rich cocktail where privilege coexists with exile, and the most unwalkable distances are those of the human heart.

Desai tells me the book began as a kind of playful experiment (“a globalised desi romance,”she calls it with a laugh) but it grew, over two decades of writing, into something larger and lonelier.“I realised I could structure it around loneliness,” she says. “It became a way to write about divisions and rifts, about people negotiating their history in India and their lives abroad.” The word she returns to most often is ‘negotiation’. Between worlds, between selves, between what one inherits and what one becomes.

Desai is, as always, deeply attuned to the invisible architectures of belonging and the borders of class, race, and memory. After her second, Booker-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss’ focus on domestic helps and illegal immigrants, Desai wanted to turn her lens towards a more mobile section of people who move through airports and embassy dinners, who think of themselves as worldly, and yet remain largely estranged from the worlds they inhabit. “I wanted to write a satirical portrait of the upper class,”she says,“their hypocrisies, their distance from poorer lives, and their refusal to know.”

It’s a sharp and fearless terrain,but also one that is marked with tenderness: even the most flawed characters in Desai’s world are rendered with empathy.She tells me about Babita, the protagonist Sunny’s boisterous mother, stepping off a plane in NewYork City in her sari and shoes, trying to be an “ambassador of her country.” And when she describes her characters, and the world she has built around them, Desai speaks with words that are rooted in a visuality, which is almost cinematic in its sentient quality. “I do think visually,” she explains. “When I look back at my journals, they’re filled with images—the colour of the ocean, the look of old houses, the smell of kitchens.” All these footnotes, including a pair of worm-eaten Japanese screens she saw in a Brooklyn basement, and a Krishna statue with an invisible flute (a gift from her late father) she adds, worked their way back into her book.

Through our conversation, what strikes me most, however, is her reverence for patience—a quality she fears the modern world is fast losing. “People don’t cultivate patience anymore. When I grew up in India, the afternoons were long.We read, we waited,” she recalls. “The Italian painter [Francesco] Clemente once said he learned patience because his afternoons were long. It taught him how to wait, and how to develop the mind and the story. I think of that often.” Her own long afternoons became decades; 20 years spent chiselling one book, waiting for the story to reveal itself. “You’re working towards something you cannot see,” she says.“It’s over the horizon.You just have to keep writing until it comes.”

There is a poignant mix of tenderness and awe when Desai speaks of her mother, the Booker-winning 88-year-old author Anita Desai. Mother, colleague, inspiration, Anita is also the first to read Desai’s works. “That’s the greatest fortune of my life,”she says.“She intuits what I’m trying to say before I’ve said it. She knows the landscapes I’m writing out of.” When I ask whether that dynamic ever turns difficult—mother and daughter, writer and writer—Desai smiles. “She’s very maternal. The mother always comes before the editor.” I finally bring myself to address the question hanging in the room. With just a few weeks to go for the announcement of the 2025 Booker awardee (TLOSAS has landed Desai her second nomination), I wonder how Desai is dealing with the pressure. She once again turns to her mother, who lived through a quieter era of publishing, away from today’s age of perpetual scrutiny.“The other day we were in the kitchen, and she told me about remembering a world where none of these pressures existed,” she says. “It might have been lonely, but it was free.”

It’s impossible not to think about that loneliness again: the loneliness of creation, of migration, of being visible yet unseen.When I finally ask her about the figures closest to her heart, her response brings a smile to my face: the little dog in Goa, Mina Foi (“the bad luck daughter” with a jaded romantic past) sitting wistfully on the veranda. “The peripheral characters hold my heart,” she confesses. “They’re the afterthoughts in everyone’s lives, but in fiction, they can take centre stage.”

Lead image: M Sharkey 

Inside image: Courtesy Penguin Random House

This article was originally published in the November 2025 print edition of Harper's Bazaar India
 

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