self-sufficiency → self-care → hyper-individualism → loneliness → resentment of anything that interrupts the self
She says she’s lonely. A phone confession of an Indian college student in Vermont echoes through a phone line to her parents in Delhi before travelling on to Allahabad (now Prayagraj), where it is ceremoniously announced to her paternal grandparents.
So begins the story of Sonia in The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai. This book, which marked one of the most anticipated literary returns of recent years, was for me just another wildly on point recommendation by the owner of my favorite anglophone bookstore in Paris – The Red Wheelbarrow.
Earlier this year, I was right in front of the Luxembourg gardens, indulging in a rather thorough and overdue catch-up session with Pooja – one of my closest university friends whom I hadn’t seen in five years.
Then, once our morning of gossip and brunch had drawn to a close, I dragged Pooja to my most cherished Parisian bookshop. I had just finished my previous novel the morning of and, well, you know me – I allow for very little pauses in my fictional escapism!
I told the shop owner I craved being quickly immersed in a story with a strong feminine energy. Not before long, she confidently handed me The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and with the amount of trust created only between a reader and a bookseller with years of successful shelf-guidance, I took it home. No questions asked.
Loneliness at that point had been looming over my spirit for a while, without fully making itself evident. But just reading the new title I immediately felt something click. I promptly wanted to romanticise my solitude, to underline paragraphs and feel reassured in the beauty of my sadness, because after all, that is one of the things good literature does best – it rewrites an experience we intuitively understand in a way that makes you say “Ah - ha!”
I spend all my time trying to pretend I am not lonely!” If you are lonely, you feel ashamed, and the only relief to your shame is being alone, which is what makes you lonely in the first place.”
Sonia confessed to me, the Reader, and I felt a subtle and uncomfortable “Ah - ha!” moment sneak up on me.
Set between the late 90s and early 2000s, Kiran Desai tells the story (or rather, several intergenerational stories) of an Indian girl – Sonia, and Indian boy – Sunny, who both graduate from university in the U.S. Their paths, albeit largely separate, lead them together, pull them apart and give rise to both of them pondering on some of the same existential questions of individuality, communities, family and love.
Left perpetually insecure in regards to their identities as immigrants, Indians, or simply human beings needing to not feel completely alone, Sonia decides to return back home after a painful love affair ends in New York, while Sunny stays in the States as an entry-level journalist.
Despite both having lived in New York simultaneously, they only meet back in India through their grandparents in Allahabad who, they realize, had tried to set up their arranged marriage during their university years.
Asked by Sunny why she abandoned the possibility of building a life in America and chose to return to India, Sonia’s answer stayed with me (and in a way, is an underlying answer to the entire novel).
“I became mean.” she replies.
“I counted out potatoes, I measured soup by half a can, I went to bed early. I looked after myself carefully as if I were a fragile crone because nobody else was going to look after me. I suffered a sort of vertigo of my soul. I was unsettled by open views and endless vistas, by dawn. My heart grew small. I gave the evil eye to cute toddlers making a nuisance on the subway, […] Finally I thought: What is all this about? Why am I making this selfish life? Why is it supposed to be a good thing to manage on one’s own?”
I recognised this paragraph with the uncomfortable familiarity of something I had already lived in my own way. While a little less melodramatic and outside the New York City grandeur, which might make one feel particularly atomised, small and alone, I have also found myself approaching my own life like a solo project requiring constant supervision. And such careful looking after oneself can, perhaps inevitably, make one increasingly inward-looking and, eventually, a little selfish. Mean even.
Even though I am not necessarily giving the evil eye to cute toddlers – I was even recently proud of myself for developing a sort of kinship of goodwill with a crying baby on a plane whose screams I was entirely accepting of; however, I do feel as if, just like Sonia in New York, I have built my adulthood reality on this same à priori:
nobody else was going to look after me.
Despite being lucky enough to have a supportive group of friends both in town and spread around the world, at the back of my mind there is a persistent aloneness – a firm belief that I and I alone should be religiously taking care of my fragile little self in order to mitigate the impact of the inevitable drenches life will put me through.
I fall into the mimeticism of women I see online, with their routines of waking up early to take care of their skin and muscles, and going to bed early to take care of their sleep and peace. Even hobbies don’t always feel like simple fun, but rather a conscientious labour of self-care and partly suppressing a perceived need for companionship.
Maybe I see and glamorize the image of people so independently happy, self-focused and busy living their lives, that mimicking this has become my version of:
I looked after myself carefully as if I were a fragile crone because nobody else was going to look after me.
And while there is nothing wrong with authentically seeking solitude, I personally often feel as if, it is only because of my “failure” as an extrovert, or because of my “failure” in relationships, I have no choice but to once again fight against the defects of my character and blaze victorious (as in my quest for human dignity) – fight against my desires for company and find peace in doing things alone.
It’s a perpetual push and pull between various “supposed to be’s.”
Am I supposed to crave constant companionship of either friends or romantic partners? Or am I supposed to be enjoying my time alone? Am I not the one who is responsible for my own well-being through self-care? Or is this meticulous self-care the byproduct of some lack?
Something Sunny’s mother also reflects on in The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny:
Why would you have to do anything alone?” asked Babita. “It’s the premise of being American: You are an individual, therefore you are alone. Therefore you must be able to do everything by yourself. Rent a car at an airport, drive yourself cross-country to a job in a place you’ve never heard of, defeat your enemies, trap a rat, make money to pay bills to look after yourself even when you are dying—
Trap a rat? I can’t even assemble my own furniture.And yet I’ve somehow managed to live alone ever since I moved to France at nineteen.
Mind you, if aloneness is a spectrum of a kind, maybe my perceived aloneness surpasses that of another person’s in the equivalent situation (or an even more solitary one). I wasn’t exactly abandoned on arrival.
My older sister had already done the difficult bits first, leaving me more than a trail of breadcrumbs through French bureaucracy and oftentimes even absorbing my responsibilities – thus, I cannot claim I was left to defeat my enemies all on my own.
But still, there is something different about building a life in one country while your emergency contacts live in another, all while being part of a generation whose ability to form deep connections or function communally is at an all time low.
Many of us don’t live in communities any longer, where you are cherished just for your family having been known for generations, where everyone stays in the same place. Then if you are religious, that alters everything because you are part of a people with a history and faith that allows you to belong not only in the present but also in the past and future. But if you have no home, no faith, no community, and a scattered, inattentive, or resentful family, you are alone in the big world.
In particular, Sonia and Babita’s musings did remind me of a staple solo anxiety krisis – buying my first car. Until one year ago, I’d considered myself a driver, but only insofar as my dad had always filled up the tank, dealt with the maintenance, and remained perpetually on standby to parallel park in my name if a particularly unfortunate parking spot presented itself.
Owning a car in Grenoble meant discovering there is, in fact, nobody assigned to adulthood.
It wasn’t that I fully counted on my dad to drive across Bulgaria to rescue me every time something happened (even though he probably would have). It’s that I grew up with the silent assumption that someone could. A parent. A family friend. A cousin. Help was nearly guaranteed… or at least it always felt geographically possible.
I realise how trivial this must sound but even the first time I put gas in my new car by myself I also felt this awkward mix of pride and discomfort – was I not supposed tobe comfortable doing it by myself? I not-so-secretly would have given anything for there to be somebody with me because I was anxious and thought everybody was looking at me – knowing that I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t have anybody to take care of things with me.
Don’t get me wrong – I am no damsel in distress in need of saving (most of the time), nor would I want to perpetuate this narrative of femininity. Same goes for Kiran Desai’s heroine Sonia.
But where the author truly touched me was in this acknowledgement that the individual focus on the self and self-sufficiency can lead to both plain old suffering, but as well to this sentiment that our hearts are growing smaller.
In a way, although the concepts of modern self-care (imagine my morning run and face mask) and things such as more practical self-sufficiency (imagine car maintenance) seem quite different, the accumulation of feeling like you need to excel in both – at least for me – ends up in a sort of Main Character Syndrome.
The deeper I find myself in my pursuit of an individual meditative state of “peace” or “happiness” regardless of my circumstances (through the modern trends I consume online) – the more suspicious and evil-eye-y I find myself becoming. The more strongly I experience any inconvenience to the “perfect” routine I have delusionally invested in constructing, the more impatient I become with anything that disrupts it: a crying baby preventing me from advancing with my solo reading objective on the plane, compromising my Garmin-tracked sleep data, and so on; or a friend having to be picked up from the airport, inconveniencing my individual pursuit of running my weekly kilometres and hitting that Strava goal.
But I don’t want to be like this. Sure, I want to be consistent with my routine, but I don’t want that to come at the cost of being a good human being.
And after earlier this year – having briefly let somebody into my life for an intense few weeks - I have perhaps understood the allure of that selfishness a little better. For a while, did feel I could loosen up the rigidity of such pursuits, and simply enjoy slower mornings, alongside my skis being carried, the car drive being shared, and the dog walks not always being solitary.
But this also meant skipping some gym sessions, reading less, and making other rather natural “sacrifices” to my routine in order to spend time with another human being.
And now, ironically, I find myself drawn back onto the ultra-independence train (and, appropriately enough, into ultra trail running). My highly influenceable brain tells me: maybe if I hadn’t allowed myself to let go of my perfect self-care-gym-and-reading-70-pages-a-day routine in order to be absorbed in a connection, I wouldn’t have had to fall from high when it didn’t work out.
Perhaps that is the allure of a selfish life – nobody can disturb you looking after yourself.
But what is my conclusion? As I wouldn’t want to spoil the ending of Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and I have no definitive answer myself, I admit I have effectively dragged the ending of this article for the entire summer.
There is a part of me that sees the value of being a bit more confident in my independence – aka not getting anxiety attacks at the thought of topping up my car’s windshield washer fluid by myself (which I have procrastinated for about 6 months). Or, for instance, I also see the value of actually enjoying a Sunday long run by myself. It feels almost redemptive.
But I’d like to work on reframing my narrative and be more gentle with myself. Instead of feeling trapped by a notion – “You are an individual, therefore you are alone. Therefore you must be able to do everything by yourself.” – trying to believe that sometimes it can be useful to know how to do things on your own, sometimes it makes just as much sense to ask for help, or simply company.
I can have activities or self-care rituals be important to me, without growing resentful and aggressively protecting them from any form of change whatsoever.
And most of all – feeling lonely is normal. It’s part of the wide range of emotions that constitute the human experience whether we live abroad, at our parents’ house, whether we have a handful of friends, a partner, or have just arrived in a new city.
It’s exhausting to both try to move through life, and judge yourself for occasionally feeling lonely at the same time. Maybe… we should focus on the first.
Maybe… it’s not that deep?