The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

December 16, 2025.   2:30PM

Acording to the meter on the bottom of my Kindle ready I'm at  80% of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.  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 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 his wife comes back and kicks her out of her place.  

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

Later when they are both in India they connect and sparks fly and the two of them have a passionate affair.  The climax is a trip they take to Italy, as Sonia cant 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 abusive artist lover.  She tells Sunny of the relationship at which point their relationship ends as 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....    

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 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 horrific backlash.  She somehow manages to turn the US airlifting relatives of Osama Bin Ladenn 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 and woke schools of the East Coast is hardly a surprise.  And of course its no accdent the the other hero, Sonia is abused by her male lover and later sexually assualted by another man in India.   The belief that women are victims of men is loud and clear.