This week’s story, “An Unashamed Proposal,” is about a young Indian man named Sunny, who is living with his American girlfriend, Ulla, in Brooklyn. It is excerpted from your forthcoming novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” which will be published in September. We learn that Sunny and Ulla first met in the cafeteria line of a student hostel near Columbia University. Was it happenstance or fate that brought them together?
Various characters in my book ponder the role of chance, fate, and free will in their lives. If there is such a thing as fate, will they be strong enough to overturn it and forge their own destinies? These questions, of course, intersect with modern notions of individuality as they might be understood in a country like the United States, in contrast to societies where belonging and acceptance are more important.
Sunny and Ulla have a tendency to bicker, and each can resort to brandishing cultural stereotypes as a cudgel when arguing with the other. At the same time, they’re aware of their beauty as a couple. What does this cross-cultural relationship give you as a writer?
The chance to write about thoughts people never articulate, and their hypocrisies, shames, and fears. Sunny loves the image of the two of them that he sees in the mirror of a bar on Lafayette Avenue. It presents an enviable, cosmopolitan, multiracial aesthetic, one that, in turn, promotes an ethical vision of tolerance. Yet he can’t help but be ashamed of his pride, because he knows his pride is rooted in the shame of where he comes from. The power divide between nations is too great for Sunny and Ulla not to experience it. They resort to a primitive vocabulary when they argue and so destroy from within the way they look to each other in the mirror.
The tragedy, of course, is that Ulla does not come from privilege, although she is American, while Sunny does come from vast wealth and privilege, gained at the expense of people who will never have access to such a beautiful multiracial, multicultural image.
Sonia, the subject of an “unashamed” marriage proposal in the story, is seen only in a photograph in these pages. As the title of your novel suggests, she will become the most significant woman in Sunny’s life, although they are often separated by circumstances. How long did you spend on the novel? Did you plot out the way Sunny and Sonia’s lives would intersect?
I have spent almost two decades on this novel. If your writing and your life become the same thing, then you are not so aware of writing a book as much as you are simply spending your day as any creature would spend its day, doing what it is supposed to do. No, I did not plot out the way Sunny and Sonia’s lives would intersect. I wrote the stories of many of my characters separately, including Sonia and Sunny, until I could see how their stories might intersect. I plotted out the novel only at the last stage of writing.
At one point in the novel, Sonia, who wrote short stories as a student, but has struggled to continue doing so, thinks, “When you became a real artist, all roads led to your art: the people, the landscape, the news, the gossip, the suppressed shame, the dream, the flutter in the night of a pelican who should have flown north. A writer itched and itched to put everything into a book, or it became unbearable, the tingling.” Do you share Sonia’s feelings about novel writing?
Yes. I wonder if I am living for real life, or simply to put everything in a book.
The novel, like “An Unashamed Proposal,” can cast a sometimes humorous, sometimes coruscating eye on social mores and assumptions. Do you think any readers will object to that degree of clarity?
Perhaps there will be some squirming. Perhaps some readers will disagree.
Are you ready to send Sunny and Sonia—and Ulla, Satya, Babita, and others—into the world? What is the period just before a novel’s publication like?
Finishing a novel means entering the real world, real life, for all of us, myself and my characters. I worry because we have been living a magic-island existence for two decades. ♦
