The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

December 16, 2025.   2:30PM

Acording to the meter on the bottom of my Kindle reader,  I'm at  80% of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.  Which is a good point for me to play guess how this book will finish.   As I was reading the book up until now there was a fair amount of self reflection.  The book after all centers on the two main characters Sonia and Sunny who are both of Indian origin.  Sunny, being the same gender, provided several especially nostalgic moments.  Sparing you of those, at this point in the story Sunny and Sonia are literally a world apart.  Sunny is in the Pacific Coast of Mexico in some part due to his mother's fear of him being killed by corrupt black marketers should he ever go back to India.  Sonia meanwhile is in India caring for her father who has terminal cancer.  

At the start of the book Sunny was living in New York City and ended up moving to Jackson Heights Queens, a place quite familiar to me.  He was a reporter for the AP - quite a leap from being an immigrant.  Sunny had a white Kansas bred girlfriend Ulla who he was in love with.   A relationship that was destined to end as Sunny kept getting pulled back to his Indian mom and Indian ways.   

Sonia met a tortured much older artist, Ilan, in her liberal arts college and he set her up also in NY working in an art gallery for one of his friends. Much of  Sonia's over story to this point has involved being tortured by Ilan.  A relationship which ends when Ilan's wife comes back and kicks her out of her place.  Ilan has kept the mystical amulet given to Sonia which has supernatural powers to keep bad fortune away.

 In a remarkable coincidence Sunny and Sonia were offered a chance many years earlier to be set up by their parents however their initial circumstances of being in other relationships made that connection far-fetched at that time.  

Later when they are both in India, having both been recently dumped, they connect and sparks fly and the two of them have a passionate affair.  The climax of their relationship is a trip they take to Italy, as Sonia can't get a visa back to the US.  In another remarkable coincidence while in Italy they go to a minor museum and that museum is featuring the work of Sonia's former abusive artist lover.  She tells Sunny of the relationship at which point their relationship ends as Sonia freaks out and they go off in separate ways to their respective flights.  

So the reader is left with the overhanging question of how and when will these two star crossed lovers who are clearly meant for each other get back together....    

December 17 2:48PM

And so with the final passage of the book Sunny swims out to Sonia in the Arabian Sea off Goa having retrieved the amulet from Ilan.  Turns out like Sunny Ilan too has decided to take residence on Mexico's Pacific coast.  So it is convenient for Sunny to steal back the Amulet.  Meanwhile after Sonia's father passes away from his cancer, Sonia moves to Goa, which is described as a welcoming place for single women (relative to other places in India).  Sunny's mom also has re-located to Goa to escape from the killers of her brothers.  So it is convenient for Sonia to go over to Babita's mom who tells Sunny that Sonia is over at her place.  This set of massive coincidences sets the stage for our two lovers to live happily ever after.  The End as predicted.  

One other note - as I am reading this long sweeping book, across many continents and in the same time period as my life, I can't help notice the anti-West / woke ideology that is at times just bubbling over.  Everything from heaping lavish unearned praise on immigrants, pronouncing gentrification as an evil, and also making the hero, Sunny appear to be the "mature' one for fantasizing that the victims of 9/11 were the Sikhs, Dominicans and Jewish people who were facing some vaguely labelled horrific backlash.  She somehow manages to turn the US airlifting relatives of Osama Bin Laden out of the country as some bribery scheme instead of the US taking great strides to avoid retribution.  That the author is a woman who went to the most liberal schools of the East Coast is hardly a surprise.   Towards the endof the book she dismisses the 1000 strong Muslim mob that burned a train full of Hindus - with the passive voice "The train had caught fire".  Muslims had been blamed for setting the fire or was it the ;ilgrims cooking inside?   Nice try.  As witht the US she has no problem throwing her Hindu under the bus to elevate the Muslim minority.  The Western ideology of making minorities victims who can do nothing wrong is strong in this author and it passes for indoctrination for unsuspecting readers.    

I would have let this part of the book pass until I came across the following:  "Most men it was a good thing they were dead.  You could resurect them as Ideal Father or Ideal Husband".  What is the opposite of mysogeny?  MISANDRY - its telling that word is scarcely known - I had to look it up. 

While I wasn't a fan of the overt indoctrination, the relatability and nostalgia to my own life coupled with the magical supernatural elements of the book kept me invested in the book and had me turning the pages to the end.  Overall a good read - with a warning to readers to not take the over the top passages seriously.  AND IN A MAGICAL COINCIDENTAL MOMENT OF MY OWN - MY GOOD FRIEND - VIJAY UNCLE - SPENDS THE WINTER IN GOA AND SENT ME THE FOLLOWING VIDEO OF HIS BEACH HUT - EXACTLY WHERE SUNNY WAS SWIMMING OUT TO MEET SONIA