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The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
And the road back to Manhattan included a bleak stretch of Northern Boulevard that looked to Babita like no-man’s-land. She was unsettled—the way she was when she glimpsed the outskirts of Delhi—to see how precarious her world was. The more blocks of identical apartments she observed, the more forlorn she felt. The more people, the more alone.
Kiran Desai • The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
If she were a human with her personality,” said Mama proudly, “she would be unbearable. But because she is a cat, we love her.”
Kiran Desai • The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Dadaji may have died, but he hadn’t vanished; he had simply changed form. He came through every unoccupied chink in Papa’s mind, even more present now that he did not reside within his own body.
Kiran Desai • The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Said Satya, “You don’t have to know swimming to enjoy the sea.” You could wade in the shallows and watch the sun set into the ocean, becoming a little runny at the last moment when its belly rested on the water. You could feel aroused by bare sand and naked water, the scary but exciting fact that there was nowhere to hide.
Kiran Desai • The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
In Allahabad they had no patience with loneliness. They might have felt the loneliness of being misunderstood; they might know the sucked-dead feeling of Allahabad afternoons, a tide drawn out perhaps never to return, which was a kind of loneliness; but they had never slept in a house alone, never eaten a meal alone, never lived in a place where
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War was never noble; it turned on itself
Kiran Desai • The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Sunny gulped a bitter, blue sleeping pill and remembered the slightly flat, slightly old taste of Delhi water and the slightly flat, slightly stale odor of the Delhi night that smelled as if it had been shut away in a cupboard. Sunny may have left India, but despite this he didn’t want his mother to sell his childhood home; he wanted it to remain,
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He missed India, for although he understood nothing, he felt at home in the story; he enjoyed the arguments presented, the conundrum that might conspire to be threatening or merely silly.
Kiran Desai • The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
There is no worse fright than to know the vulnerability of the man who employs you, whom you need to remain strong because you yourself are powerless.