Kiran Desai interview: ‘I wanted to write a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty’

The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book  

I wanted to write a story about love and loneliness in the modern world. I wanted to write a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty. In the past of my parents, and certainly my grandparents, an Indian love story would mostly be rooted in one community, one class, one religion, and often also one place. But a love story in today’s globalised world would likely wander in so many different directions. My characters consider: Why this person? Why not as easily someone else? Why here, not there? In the past people were always where they had to be. My indecisive lovers, Sonia and Sunny, meet and part across Europe, India and America, their idea of themselves turning ever more fluid. As I wrote across geographies and generations, I realised that I could widen the scope of my novel, to write about loneliness in a much broader sense. Not just romantic loneliness, but the huge divides of class and race, the distrust between nations, the swift vanishing of a past world – all of which can be seen as forms of loneliness. 

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. This was, after all, an Indian childhood and my bookshelf was full of English children’s books, some that I inherited from my parents’ time. My copy is a 1954 clothbound edition, the pages honeyed, but the illustrations still sharp. I loved this book about the shabby, tender joys of home, contrasting with the lure and gleam of adventure. Which way to go? The story also nurtures a profound love for the natural world. Whenever I think of Toad of Toad Hall poop pooping his automobile horn, of Mole driving out the pesky weasels with the war-cry, ‘A mole! mole!’ I laugh out loud. 

I graduated to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and R.K. Narayan’s books set in the fictional town of Malgudi. I had never seen the wild temperamental moors, but the gentle humour of Narayan was familiar and dear. ‘Conquer taste, and you will have conquered the self,’ said Jagan to his listener, who asked, ‘Why conquer the self?’ Jagan said, ‘I do not know, but all our sages advise us so.’ This is from The Vendor of Sweets. 

The book that made me want to become a writer  

Calvino is an author who carries the playfulness and inventiveness of a child’s world into works for adults. The Baron in the Trees, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, was in my mind when I wrote my first novel in my 20s. I loved the character of Cosimo, who fights with his family over eating snails, and goes off in a huff to live in a tree. I wrote an Indian version of a boy living up in a tree. 

How do I feel about the writer now? Much later I read Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, a work that proffers a code of aesthetics titled: Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Visibility. The last one, unwritten, was to be Consistency, and was likely meant to stress underlying unity to an abundance of images and realised fantasies. I thought these tenets had an eerie parallel in Eastern philosophy, in Hindu and Buddhist thought. I became interested in the consequence – secular, artistic, spiritual – of these ideas. 

The book I read again and again  

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. I read this book when I learned that Gabriel García Márquez knew it by heart (Love in the Time of Cholera was an inspiration for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, as was a Chronicle of a Death Foretold). This is a story about a story that will not be put to rest, one of a brutal history driven by a loveless man, of souls that have transgressed and will never find peace. The first lines still give me goosebumps: ‘I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Paramo, lived there.’ A man makes a promise to his dying mother to journey into the land of the dead to seek the justice she never received during her life.  

Over years of re-reading it, I learned that Mexico had something to say to India, not just to the United States. And Mexico had something to say to me. Emigrant stories are ghost stories and murder stories. I could write a book, I thought, incorporating these ideas, even if in a very different form. I think it is important that artists in countries previously only in communication through a former colonial power, now communicate directly. The poet Octavio Paz and the photographer Graciela Iturbide have held a unique mirror to India.  

The book that changed the way I think about the world  

Salman Rushdie said he wrote The Moor’s Last Sigh feeling fed up with being told that minorities were less Indian than the majority Hindu community. He decided to prove otherwise by writing about characters from two of the smallest communities in India, the Portuguese Catholics and the Black Jews of Cochin. When Aurora da Gama and Abraham Zogoiby meet and marry, in passages of incomparable prose, they produce, as Rushdie put it, a minority of one: Moraes Zogoiby.   

I emerged from the pages of this novel thinking that a citizen’s and a novelist’s life is in devotion to that minority of one, the singular take that provides unique perspective on the whole. When we fight for human rights, for minority rights, for a secular nation, we are, in fact, also fighting for a literary landscape. To be able to write with knowledge and intimacy about people who come from other worlds. I read about the da Gama and Zogoiby families with absolute recognition and a bloom of affection within my heart. It is true: these are Indian Jews and Indian Catholics. They could come from nowhere else.