The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

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.

There was so much life in this country that Sunny needn’t bother to create one. His life could be simply looking upon life.

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.

too weighted by sadness, too light from emptiness.

Mama got up, went into her bedroom, and shut the door. A woman must stay alone for a long while until the hate men have for women has left her, and even longer until the jealousy women have for other women has left her, and longer still until the anger her children have for her has left her—until she is no longer a woman altered by the resentment of men, women, and children, no longer what others have forced her to be, but empty as a skull or a shell, filled only by whatever she pleases, forest air perhaps.

because hell hath no fury like a man who is not the center of attention.

It was too much to ask to be loved all the way through life, and you could return to the memory for sustenance. Being loved all the time might be a curtailment, a redundancy. It

What was so odd, Babita reflected, was that this striving to escape India felt patriotic: If you were a worthy Indian, you became an American.

IF YOU DON’T HAVE love, you don’t properly exist. If you don’t properly exist, you don’t have love.

An ordinary evening in a house full of people is what a child loves best.

Mama read David Copperfield again. She had become one of those characters in the novels that she loved, the people who read Dickens in the jungle over and over. Why? Because when Dickens is better than your life, then why live your life? It would be foolishness not to read Dickens instead.

It was all the things I’d have to do alone.” “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—

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.

Laziness in India is infuriating and equals animosity. In Italy it indicates an enjoyment of life’s pleasures. “Candlelight in a trattoria is romance. In India it equals power failure and a testing of romance.

To be a citizen of a troubled postcolonial nation gave a person gravitas. To be holding out against the crass new world gave a man gravitas. To be wounded yet fighting on against the barbarians gave one gravitas. To be exiled, abandoned by love and luck, gave them gravitas. What happened within a family, what happened between a couple, was no different from that which happened in a nation under dictatorship, running on fear.

until she is no longer a woman altered by the resentment of men, women, and children, no longer what others have forced her to be, but empty as a skull or a shell, filled only by whatever she pleases, forest air perhaps.

a reader of novels comprehends the notion of individual rights by the simple act of identifying with a person’s—any person’s—trials and joys.

After you’ve cheated someone, you have no option but to turn that person into an ogre so as to justify your own misdeeds

Geneva, Hong Kong, Sydney, London, New York, and Vermont. They were at Harvard, Oxford, Siemens, the United Nations, Microsoft, Amnesty, Seagram, McKinsey, the World Bank, Sloan Kettering, and Hewitt College.

Without people one is nothing,

It is exhausting to be near such greed.

If India existed, then America could not, for they were too drastically different not to cancel each other out. Yet despite this fact, they refused to remain apart. India invaded his life all the way from the other side of the world, and then life here became instantly artificial, a taunt. He became an impostor, a spy, a liar, and a ghost.

Something about arriving in America, he’d observed, made one want to grab enough for past, present, and future all at once. He wanted to protect America from those like himself, but then, if others were gobbling and grabbing, he should, too, or he’d be left behind. Then the next instant he felt sickened by self-disgust.

He read Frida Kahlo’s diary in Spanish. The words were simple and strange because they came straight from the soul. He examined his fingers instinctively to make sure they hadn’t been bloodied by her bloody paintings of hearts, wombs, and accidents.

The love is in the sauce,” which had always irritated Sunny. He wanted only sauce in his sauce.

At the moment the plane parted from the runway, she felt the relief of escaping the endless waiting for a person who has abandoned you.

Is it that difficult to manage alone?” Mama asked. “Terribly difficult,” said Ferooza, “but if it is necessary, then how hard it is or isn’t is beside the point. And—this is interesting—when you come through, without any of what others expected of you or you expected of yourself, you find yourself magically afloat. You don’t fall! One day you are simply yourself.