'The Muppets' turn 50

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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WBUR Podcast, Boston.

Kiran Desai (0:20)

Lonely? In Allahabad, they had no patience with loneliness.

Kalyani Saxena (0:26)

Kiran Desai tackles solitude in her second novel about family, love and class.

It's Friday, October 16th, and this is Here & Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR Boston. I'm Kalyani Saxena. Today on the show, The Muppets Show turns 50

Dave Goelz (0:54)

What did you do to my frog?

Scott Tong (0:57)

I'll show you. Hi.

Kalyani Saxena (1:01)

But first, we're going to spend a little time with Kiran Desai. She's the author of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a 2025 novel that follows two young Indian writers struggling with isolation and social dislocation. The story is a sprawling multi-generational family saga that plays out across four continents starting in the late 1990s. Our two writers are drawn back together again and again, even as family and geography conspire to pull them apart.

In her work, Desai explores themes of alienation, class and cultural hierarchy. Indira Lakshmanan spoke with her about her second novel and the lives we inherit versus those we make for ourselves.

Indira Lakshmanan (1:49)

Before we dive into the larger ideas of the book, I'd love for you to read a short passage from early in the novel. We discover that Sonia is an Indian student at college far from home in Vermont. Her grandparents in Alabad, India get a phone call from her father, New Delhi. He says, Sonia is struggling with loneliness and depression.

Kiran Desai (2:11)

Lonely? In Alabad, they had no patience with loneliness. They might have felt the loneliness of being misunderstood. They might know the sucked dead feeling of Alabad 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 they were unknown, never woken without a cook bringing tea or wishing good morning to several individuals.

Whenever Dadaji thought of the Wordsworth poem he had been taught in school, I wondered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills. The line struck him as so ridiculous, it made him throw back his head and guffaw so hard his upper dentures fell down with a smash.

Indira Lakshmanan (3:02)

I love this description and this contrast. We have Sonia off in New England, where she's so far from family and the cold isolation is just overwhelming. But back in India in a multi-generational household with live-in servants, solitude is a notion comical enough to make you spit out your dentures because solitude simply doesn't exist.

Kiran Desai (3:23)

Yes, that's the big difference, I think. The biggest difference between life in India and life in the Western world is that in India, you are never physically alone. You might feel loneliness of one kind or another, but you are never without someone to the right of you, to the left of you, in front of you, behind you.

Indira Lakshmanan (3:48)

Maybe that can feel claustrophobic or stifling, but at the same time, I would say, you never feel that deep sense of loneliness that we can have in the West, of living in an apartment by yourself, in a dorm by yourself, no one there when you just want someone to talk to.

Kiran Desai (4:05)

Yes, and also your own thoughts loom so large, and your idea of yourself, I think, completely changes. And one thing I just said earlier, I think that you can feel loneliness in either setting.

And in India, you know, culture where belonging, you could say, is more important than being an individual. You could feel that a sense of identity is so imposed that you really can't find a way to become your own person. But on the other hand, the Western world can be profoundly lonely. And I always felt myself, because I was a foreign student in Vermont, just like Sonia, experiencing the snow. Because you know how it is as a foreign student, you are often alone during winter vacations and summer vacations. Everyone goes home and the foreign student, you stay back and you work on the library. And you learn very important lessons of how important it is to discover sort of just the privacy and dignity of your individual being. It was also my first experience of really beautiful artistic loneliness. It was where I began reading deeply. I read Anakara Nina, Snow Country by Kawabata, Kafka's The Castle, Love in the Time of Cholera.

And it was where I began writing my first short stories.