The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

Chapter 1

The sun was still submerged in the wintry murk of dawn when Ba, Dadaji, and their daughter, Mina Foi, wrapping shawls closely about themselves, emerged upon the veranda to sip their tea and decide, through vigorous process of elimination, their meals for the rest of the day. Orders must be given to the cook at breakfast so that he could go directly to market. It was Mina’s fifty-fifth birthday, the first of December in the year 1996, and the mutton for the dinner kebabs had been marinating overnight in the kitchen.

“Rice?” Ba shouted. “Roti?” She was growing deaf, but she knew she must raise her voice over the morning traffic thundering past the front gate and the cawing of hundreds of crows—their racket and the sun’s struggle so closely linked, it was as if each morning the crows gave birth to the light. “Pilau?” she suggested. “Paratha?”

Perched above them, at the entrance portico, sat a plaster bust of a portly gentleman in a cravat, perhaps inspired by a drawing made by the bungalow’s original owner, who had toured Europe, sketchbook in hand, in the same manner he’d observed foreigners doing in India. And perhaps it was the fault of the artist’s rendering, or the dissonant surroundings of Allahabad, or a splattering of bird droppings, but the bust resembled less a dignified nobleman than a foolish snob with an interest in the sky overhead, which had not turned vivid for a quarter of a century. Not since the national highway had been widened to accommodate the lorries that trawled cabbages, cement, goats, wheat, and—if one was to believe the newspapers or the gossip—prostitutes and venereal disease.

Unperturbed by the fancy gentleman, or the polluting lorries, or the family upon the veranda, the crows’ kava kaw rose to crescendo.

“Cauliflower?” Ba urged. “Spinach?”

“Potato?” Dadaji said, lifting his feet off the ground. He rubbed them together as lovingly and extravagantly as if they were soft, velvet hands. “The Gujarati loves a potato more than most,” he said, as if explaining themselves to an absent anthropologist. They were a displaced family, Gujaratis marooned in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Years ago Dadaji’s law practice had brought him to the Allahabad court.

Two squat phones—one in the living room corner, one on Dadaji’s desk—rang out like toads in a swamp, trr trr trr, and they knew it would be a birthday call from Mina Foi’s brother, Manav, Dadaji and Ba’s second child. Dadaji picked up the phone on his desk and Mina Foi the extension in the living room. Ba never spoke on the phone for she had not the habit, even if she’d had the hearing.

“Long life, Mina,” Manav wished his sister.

“It’s been too long already,” said Mina Foi. She wanted to tell her brother that she hoped the missionary couple would stop by as they had last year with cookies made with chocolate chips brought from Iowa—but then they may not remember it was her birthday, and she could not remind them. She was forbidden to make telephone calls on her own because they were a useless luxury.

Dadaji discussed the rising value of one of his investments, and then, at the end of the conversation, he inquired about the health of his daughter-in-law, Seher, and his granddaughter, Sonia.

“We are worried about Sonia,” Manav answered. Sonia attended college in Vermont. “She’s fallen into a depression. She weeps on the telephone, then when we call her back a day later, the same.”

“But why?” asked Dadaji. “She’s been there three years already. Why is she suddenly crying?”

“She says she is lonely.” The last time Sonia had traveled home was two years ago.

“Lonely? Lonely?”

In Allahabad they had no patience with loneliness. They might have felt the loneliness of being misunderstood; they might know the sucked-dead feeling of Allahabad 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:

Namaste, Khansama.

Good morning, Mummy.

Good morning, Daddy.

Mina, good morning.

Ayah, namaste—

Whenever Dadaji thought of the Wordsworth poem he had been taught in school—I wandered 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. But feeling unusually generous because of the growing value of his shares, Dadaji directed Mina Foi to telephone Sonia. Because vision problems afflicted him—a detached retina, glaucoma, cataracts—he put a magnifying glass to his rheumy red eye and bent over so his nose touched the address book as he read out the number for the Hewitt College dormitory in North Hewitt. Mina Foi put her finger into the holes of the telephone dial and tried for nearly an hour to call until her finger numbed. Finally the phone rang distantly, and someone with what she assumed was a cowboy drawl answered.

Luckily Dadaji picked up the extension line. Mina Foi did not trust herself to speak to a cowboy. Her finger remained stuck up in the air with a crick.

“Hallo, hallo, please connect us to Sonia Shah, who is in room number five,” shouted Dadaji. Then when Sonia arrived at the phone booth, “What is the matter? Why is your father saying you are unhappy? Your studies are all right?”

“Yes,” said Sonia in a measly voice.

“Then? What is the problem?”

“What do you get to eat there?” Mina Foi inquired.

“Macaroni!” answered her grandfather on the phone extension.

“No, Dadaji,” answered Sonia, “the menu is very international. We have Chinese night, Mexican night.”

Mina Foi ventured, “Indian night?”

“Lunch is sometimes Tomato Tigers, which are tomatoes and cheese on a toasted English muffin with curry powder on top.”

“Never heard of such a thing!” Outrage.

“Pudding?” Mina Foi whispered.

“Brownies with ice cream, pecan pie, and blueberry pie.”

Just to contemplate such lavish mysteries made Mina Foi faint with heartbreak.

“Pie is a very American food,” Dadaji confirmed. “Well, what are you crying for, you lucky girl?”

Sonia tried to explain. “I’ve ballooned in my own head. I cannot stop thinking about myself and my problems. I’m dreading the winter. In the dark and cold, it will get worse—”

“Do some jumping jacks, get your spirits up, and then pick up your books. You have to persevere through hardship. If I hadn’t left the life I was born to, you would be in Nadiad, married at sixteen, not studying in America.”

Mina Foi’s hands strangled each other in her lap when she remembered her childhood visits to their ancestral home, where the women scrounged what was left after the men had eaten. When the girls menstruated they were banished—even from this marginal existence—to a hut at the bottom of the property, where they ate from clay dishes that were later broken upon the rubbish heap so they would not pollute the world.

Dadaji had single-handedly extracted them from such backwardness. He may be iron-willed and furious-tempered, but these were precisely the qualities that had given Ba a place at the polished mahogany dining table every day of the year. When he had retired, he’d taken her on a round-the-world trip along with his younger brother, Amal Kaka, and Amal Kaka’s wife, because Amal Kaka had not yet stolen the ancestral property and the brothers were still close.

All these years later, Ba and Dadaji could not remember a single sight, not a monument, not a museum, but they never forgot the green muffler lost on the way to Machu Picchu or the machine that promised to deliver a recorded history of the Vatican through headphones, but when they put in the coins, it didn’t, and when they went to complain, the counter was closed for lunch. “Should we return in twenty minutes?” they had asked the guard. “Does lunch happen in twenty minutes?!” the guard had replied angrily. They remembered this, then they remembered how they had suffered constipation in Vienna and spent a day searching for reasonably priced fruit but found none. In London, at a hotel called The Buckingham, where you assumed people would be honest, they had been told breakfast would be included in the rate, but it was not. They’d saved a small fortune in Paris by cooking rice and lentils in the electric kettle for their dinners, Dadaji climbing on a chair and dismantling the hotel room’s fire alarm. They’d been disappointed by French cooking—what was all the fuss about? They found the same three sandwiches and two sauces everywhere they went. With these two sauces, the French had terrorized the world.

Then, in most foreign lands, they’d observed that the denizens had no respect for Indian tourists, whereas they pursued and flattered the white ones. Therefore it was best to reside among your own people and keep to your own meticulous standards. Having made the big world small, Ba and Dadaji returned home satisfied.