The Booker Review

“‘It must be scary to be here on your own.’ ‘It’s scary to age alone.’ ‘It’s scary to be young alone.’ ‘We are all ultimately alone.’”

When a book begins with a whole-ass family tree, you know it’s going to be something of an epic. And this epic took me so long to wade through that I’ve been listening to Christmas carols on Classic FM whilst reading it. I’m not sure if that added much to the atmospherics of an Indian summer or not, but I do think my main complaint here is the length, as it is my personal policy that no story should run over 600 pages unless it is literally Anna Karenina. (And I only ever managed to read the first 400 pages of Anna Karenina. 🤷‍♀️)

Set at the turn of the millennium, the narrative follows… what, exactly? The story has the feeling of a slow-moving serial (not unlike Anna Karenina, in fact!) as the characters convene and diverge, taking us on a tour of India and the USA, Italy and Mexico.

Sunny and Sonia, separately, are sent to study in America as young adults. Both are writers and both, we are told, are lonely. We hear much about their families at home in India – the feuds, the corruption scandals, the lives of servants. The delicious kebabs. Sonia becomes involved with an older artist in the US, who treats her poorly. Sunny accompanies a childhood friend (Satya) on a trip home to seek a wife, and attends their honeymoon as a sort of chaperone.

It is sometimes difficult to specifically identify the thread holding such a meandering story together, or where we are going with it, but motifs appear and reappear in a somehow reassuring way. The ‘ghost hound’ chasing Sonia around the world, Sunny’s mother’s last exhortation to her husband. (“Ratty, don’t die. If you live, I will love you – after all!) The tricks we employ like a talisman against the inevitable.

I found the character of Sonia probably the most interesting; and her eventual relationship with Bhatia (Sunny’s mother). Sharing a house in a place neither of them come from, plagued by bandicoots, through a completely inexplicable series of events, they finally find openness with each other. The things you can only say in the dark.

The story of Sonia and Sunny meanders very gently: the dance of choosing a mate is interesting. “Why here exactly?” wonders Satya’s wife on the eve of their wedding, “Why am I married to this man exactly?” Everything is a series of chance encounters; but in another way, we have a sense that fate is at work. That it doesn’t matter if they sometimes feel lonely or lost, because everything that is going to happen will happen. A reassuring thought indeed.