Kebabs Are Consequential

At one point​ in Kiran Desai’s new novel the heroine, Sonia Shah, sets out to write a journalistic sketch of the Indian kebab, ‘massaged, marinated, oiled, spoiled, pampered, pompous, romantic’, but finds the subject expanding relentlessly. She researches the tabak maaz of Kashmir, the Afghani reshmi, the pathar kebab, ‘cooked on a hot stone to absorb the flavour of the minerals’, the dorra kebab, steamed in silk over low coals that have been smoked with sandalwood, and the kakori, named after the village where it was devised to accommodate the toothlessness of the local nawab: ‘It was ground anew with each addition of the fifty-two spices – actually, some said fifteen spices, some eight, but all vowed secrecy.’ The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny starts by providing family trees for its main characters, the Bhatias and the Shahs, but a full genealogy of the kebab, it turns out, would require an entire book, perhaps as large as this one. Since the action of the novel starts in 1996, Sonia’s research is the old-fashioned sort, but even before the age of the internet she realises that any attempt to write ‘a slender story’ on the subject is doomed. This is India, where nothing stays simple. Everything proliferates.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is not and never could have been a slender story, but it has a relentlessness of its own, a refusal or inability to prune, even to homogenise, not just in terms of material but in the way it deploys point of view. Sometimes the author dissolves herself in her characters, then reappears arbitrarily mid-scene; sometimes she rises above them and looks down. Here’s a passage that takes off from its supposed setting, a Delhi dinner party attended by Sonia’s parents, to make a wry general statement that doesn’t correspond to any of the guests’ experiences:

There were no children at the dinner party … because there were no children in India any more in the homes of successful parents of a successful class. The children were in 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.

The last term in both these lists applies to Sonia Shah herself, who lives in Vermont and studies at the fictional Hewitt College. She’s in her fourth year. This is the start of the sentence that introduces her there: ‘While Vermont is small and friendly in summer, with every sweet thing – farmer in the farmers’ market, child in the pond, bee in the foxglove, fox in the chicken coop, bear in the beehive – in its own sweet place …’ It’s a curious way to introduce a character and a setting, with the words between the dashes slashing the tyres of the sentence that contains them. Is the author setting a test or trap for her readers, to see if they can be bothered to read every word? It’s hard to see the virtue of that, and it’s odd to detect signs here of an unreliable narrator, when there isn’t a narrator distinct from the author.

Sonia is studying literature and creative writing at Hewitt, where with a certain amount of discomfort she turns episodes of family history, such as the romantic misadventures of her aunt, Mina Foi, into short stories. Mina Foi was in love with a man whose dying mother exacted a promise from him to break up with her. Her family then arranged a sort of consolation-prize marriage, but it ended six months later in divorce. Mina Foi was left on the shelf, the one marked Returned Goods.

Was Sonia betraying her aunt, someone ‘who couldn’t withstand another betrayal’? She generalises the argument, concentrating on legitimate concerns about ‘how India would be perceived in the larger world, the fear that stories … decorative outside and hollow inside, would reduce the seriousness of the nation, demean its soul’. There’s a hint of parody about such earnestness, which would be more effective if it didn’t come after an almost absurdist account of the way Sonia revises her work to accord with her principles: ‘Careful not to orientalise, Sonia wrote that Mina Foi ate pears, not pink guavas from the guava orchard beyond which the highway thundered.’ This sentence would do a better job at the end of the chapter, where at least it wouldn’t destabilise the tone and interrupt the argument. Placed where it is, it makes Sonia seem foolish, in a way that invalidates her literary aspirations. At the chapter’s end the little kick of self-reference would land more effectively – unless you think it’s coincidental that Desai’s first novel was called Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. (Her second, The Inheritance of Loss, won the Booker Prize in 2006.)

The college is closed over the winter break and almost all the students get internships. Foreign students can only work on campus, so Sonia gets a job in the library, where she is courted by a rich and exotic older man called Ilan de Toorjen Foss. On his first visit he defaces the library books with annotations, pleading forgetfulness when reprimanded; on the second he plays her, unprompted, recordings of owls. Their conversation is reliably preposterous: ‘You’re a painter?’ ‘Is there another way to live?’ They become lovers. He talks endlessly about his process, though he doesn’t show Sonia his work. If you’re a good artist you exist as ‘a magpie, an ant, an earthworm, a bee, collecting and gathering, moving one more crumb of your life into art, one crumb of ordinary life into dream life, one crumb of reality into unreality’.

‘Too much narcissism?’ he asks her at one point. You bet. The problem is not that this relationship is so clearly abusive but that it’s dull. Ilan is a goblin mysteriously able to enchant Sonia despite the thirty-year age gap but likely to leave the reader bored and resentful. Other people in the book have a touch of caricature, sometimes more than a touch, but Ilan’s entire world and history are flimsy. It’s as if Sonia has been punished for her academic interest in magical realism (her thesis explored its overlap with Orientalism) by being made to live for a time according to its conventions.

When Sonia, distressed by Ilan’s unresponsiveness, rings her parents in Delhi, she imagines them in their usual positions: on either side of the drawing-room sofa, her mother reading, her father looking at his wife ‘with a lighthouse sweep every now and again’ as if observing a woman he doesn’t know. In fact, they’re at a dinner party, the one where the nationwide shortage of young adults from the ‘successful class’ was mentioned. It’s an eventful evening. The men at the party make disparaging comments about the physical characteristics of women from various countries. Don’t be taken in by the elegant faces of women in the Middle East – ‘when you see the bulbous quality of what comes below, you want to run for your life.’ Sonia’s mother, trying to change the subject, points to a painting on the wall and says: ‘Terrible what the goons are doing to him.’ This calls for some awkward authorial exposition: ‘Recently, Hindu religious sensibilities had been offended by a delicate sketch by [the artist, Husain] of a bare-breasted goddess Saraswati … He had sketched it out of love, but now it inspired hate.’

The conversation shifts to the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya four years earlier. ‘This country is going to get more intolerant,’ Mama’s best friend says. ‘Anyone might be in the wrong place at the wrong moment.’ Papa doesn’t enjoy ‘the tedious subject of fraying secularism’: he has guilty memories of being too afraid to ignore the curfew during the Hindu-Sikh riots of 1984. ‘There is nothing one man can do against a mob,’ he says. Neil, the Sikh host of the dinner, escaped in 1984 only because he tore from his wrist the kara that would have identified him. If he had been wearing a turban he would have been burned alive. In the car on the way home from the party Papa says that some women are too bloody sensitive for their own good. Mama says that the familiar Indian darkness is revealing itself, stronger with every recurrence. When she gets out of the car to open the gate, he drives straight at her. She leaps aside just in time. ‘She looked at him through the glow of the car headlights, and he looked steadily back at her. Mama learned that despite his mess and muddle, his inebriation, he was clear on one thing: he did wish to hurt his wife.’

That’s a lot to take in, given that this is the first scene in which Sonia’s parents appear. It’s the most dramatic event in the first half of the book, yet the next sentence, from the point of view of nobody in particular, is: ‘Terrible things happen in the heat of an argument between a married couple.’ Desai was under no obligation to describe a murder attempt in her novel, but having done so, she can hardly shrug her shoulders and move on. Mama decides to take a shower in order to calm down, and there follows a jaunty account of a malfunctioning Indian bathroom: ‘The pipes gasped and whooped in a crisis of emptiness, and there was a fruitless borborygmus of water in the geyser.’ Those ramshackle Indian bathrooms! Then the phone rings – it’s Sonia – and neither the assault nor Papa’s guilty conscience is ever referred to again.

A more palatable memory of Papa’s, of throwing out the sweets that were distributed at his workplace to celebrate the destruction of the Babri mosque, does return, though after hundreds of pages. He also shouted out to his colleagues, ‘The British have won!’, meaning that the imperial strategy of pitting religions against one another had survived the departure of the coloniser. And yes, India has become a less tolerant country over the last three decades, though a backdated prediction isn’t the most compelling literary device.

The difference between levels of accomplishment in the novel, sometimes on the same page, is striking. Most of the missteps are concentrated in the first two hundred pages, which may not be much of a consolation to readers hoping to reach cruising speed sooner rather than later. Technical flaws interfere with the mechanisms that allow a book to realise its ambitions. The title of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is itself such a mistake, not because it’s soupy but because it pre-empts the plot. It establishes that Sonia and Sunny will form a couple, though they only meet on page 253 – meaning that any previous relationship has an expiry date. At the beginning of the book Sunny is living in Brooklyn with Ulla, who’s from Kansas. She invites him home to meet her parents, mainly out of pique when she realises he hasn’t told his widowed mother, Babita, about her existence. The visit is both a success and a disaster – a success because Sunny enjoys himself, a disaster because the people he meets, with controversial subjects taken off the table in advance and personal habits edited out, bear no resemblance to Ulla’s actual parents.

The exploration of cultural dissonances as they affect international romances is acute: Sunny thinks that someone like Ulla, coming from a background where relationships need not last, is always eyeing the door. He also realises that those who see themselves as playing for keeps can be lulled into behaving badly, since they discount the possibility of being left. But this analysis has no particular emotional impact, with the relationship’s future foreclosed. Ulla’s life with Sunny is like Tinker Bell – it exists only if people believe in it, and we’ve been told not to. Its enemy wasn’t cultural friction or personal incompatibility, but the words on the cover of the book that announce she will be superseded, long before the caricaturally neat break-up, in which Ulla takes the Kansas City barbecue sauce and leaves the Darjeeling behind.

The connection​ between Sonia and Sunny, which develops with extreme slowness, is neither arranged nor romantically sparked, though elements of both are present. Their grandfathers, who live in Allahabad, have an old if troubled friendship (they play chess every week), and it was Sonia’s Dadaji who made the suggestion that the young people might be a good match, not in an old-fashioned prescriptive way, but on the basis of being ‘two America-educated individuals, two equals, two people who naturally belonged together because of where they came from and where they were going’. He isn’t wrong about their compatibility: Sonia is a writer of stories who is trying to make her name with non-fiction. Sunny has a master’s in journalism, and works for the Associated Press in New York, but his real love is fiction because only fiction can ‘dwell on quirkiness’. When they eventually spend time together, each of them carries a notebook. But in the short term the benighted business of being set up as a couple by their families turns each of them into an unthinkable prospect for the other.

Ilan secures a job for Sonia in New York as an assistant in an art gallery. He continues to exert a baleful influence, on the novel as much as on her. The high life has no texture. ‘The department store had a café on the top floor with a view from so high above Central Park that it became an illustration of the city, not the city. They drank champagne looking down upon the lambent foliage.’ This on a day when the economy has taken a beating, though Ilan is too rich, and Sonia too poor, to care about that.

At pavement level Sonia, walking to work from her apartment, misses nothing.

She took the route by the Good Fortune Trading Company and the mysterious, deserted Buddhist monastery slung with barbed wire. The Farragut Projects were to the left; a low buzz from the Con Ed station emitted from the right. Rats competed with pigeons over stale discarded pitta in the dumpster outside the pitta factory, and a smell of bilge water rose from the Navy Yard, which was overrun by a band of feral cats that suffered from feline leukaemia. She passed by the empty lot where trucks were hosed down, the place that made industrial metal sinks, past Los Papi’s, past the oversize parking lot drenched with chemical waste owned by Jehovah’s Witnesses. She walked down towards the river away from a luxury high-rise, a middle finger to the poor.

Readers are unlikely to be troubled by the presence here of elements that aren’t visible from the street (ownership of a parking lot, diagnoses of cat illnesses). There’s a hum and whiff of the real about these observations.

Later in the book, Sunny’s surroundings, as he rides in a taxi towards a rendezvous in Goa with Sonia, are sketched with comparable deftness: ‘a white church perched on a hillock like an egret receiving the sun, a pink temple by a small offshoot of river lined with coconut palms, a shuttered Mushroom Café Dance Hall, and a giant half-built mouldering Disney-style castle hotel’. But Sunny’s eyes ‘didn’t register these sights’. So who is to take the credit for the scrupulous notations? Divorce the character from the sensations that surround him, as this passage does, and the narrative conventions start to unravel. Replace ‘didn’t register’ with ‘hardly registered’ and they remain intact. Sunny is a journalist, after all, someone whose professional reflexes might be trusted not to shut down even when he’s preoccupied.

If Sonia in her creative writing assignments at Hewitt is writing for a non-Indian audience (successfully enough that her professor ‘fell in love with Mina Foi’), then so to some extent is Desai. Sunny privately decides that Indians will never be engaged consumers of novels, lacking the understanding of individual rights that would break down the artificial divisions required to make their world go round. As he sees it, to read fiction with an open mind is to be free of the ideology of caste. Even so, he’s not sure whether he’s convinced by his own argument or just brainstorming a possible think piece.

Sonia located this as a deep-seated problem, just before the silly sentence about pears and guavas. An element in a story might be ‘true because it happened. False because it was feeding the West what it wanted to consume about the East. The audience made it false.’ If it’s as simple as that – an ideological lens distorting the material when no longer embedded in its cultural context – misrepresentation is inevitable. Even so, there are a number of headings under which India and its people can be served up all too neatly on a plate to a Western audience. One is pathos, particularly the pathos of poverty – and though this isn’t a major currency of the book there is the occasional lapse. Sonia visits Mama in the Himalayan cottage where she lives after leaving Papa (the murder attempt seems to have played no part in the estrangement). There is a servant called Moolchand. ‘He possessed two shirts. One was his ragged gardening kurta, one a bright red shirt he wore to go to the market. When he put on his special shirt, your heart broke.’ But whose heart is under siege here? It can only be the reader’s, since Sonia and Mama are well able to provide Moolchand with a third shirt, if so minded.

Another way of flattering the West is by catering to a hypocritical dismay at indifference to suffering. Deprivation and misery are public in India, while in the West they tend to be tidied away. One remarkable episode in the novel tackles this head on, with the description of the pillaging of a house after the patriarch has died. The furniture has already gone, and then come

the ironing man, the washerman, the electrician, the plumber, the padre, and Dari the secretary, who had put on his only suit, which came from the death of his uncle, who had received it from the death of his employer … They took the medicine bottles in case they might suffer similar illnesses in the future and the last of the Old Spice shaving cream. The padre’s eyes filled with tears at the modesty of the comb with a few teeth missing, the elemental razor, the worn toothbrush. All of us, even the domineering, are human beings.

Again, the strange impulse to slip a toothless sentence among implacable ones.

The shaving brush with its bristles still in the direction of its last lathering seemed to be making a humble plea … In a crescendo of leave-taking … the mourners removed the rusted cooler, pocketed the screwdriver and tweezers, and rushed the beds through the trees. ‘I’ve never slept in a bed,’ said the cook’s wife. She had forgotten to look sad.

Finally come the ragpickers, mysteriously alerted and ‘smelling like ripe potatoes’, who haul away rusted pipes and broken panes of glass. One bed is all that is left, and that only because the patriarch had died in it, and his wife before him. Their daughter and granddaughter lay themselves down to sleep as best they can, one in the ‘shallow grave’ made by the patriarch in the mattress over the years, the other in his wife’s ‘bird indentation’.

The family trees on its first pages lend the book a 19th-century air, but they are unusual in including staff and pets (Pasha the Bhatia dog, Babayaga the Shah cat). This suggests that the basic organising unit of Indian life is the household rather than the family, and this stripping of a carcass by scavengers is the death of a household. In another sense, it is no more than an accelerated house clearance. The dead man was only able to maintain his position thanks to a frozen rent of 250 rupees and 50 paise per month, which was voided in the instant of his death. The landlady points out that she has never threatened the family with ‘goons’. She has behaved well and continues to do so, saying they can take their time packing.

The details of the looted treasures (the dolls in a glass case, the binoculars, the slide projector) add to the power of the scene, but sometimes the book is clogged with particulars, and the reader feels like Mr Creosote in the Monty Python sketch being tempted with the tweezer-borne ‘wafer-thin mint’ that finally makes him explode. Ah, but this is India, and the effect of overload is the whole point – except that it’s not, since it carries over into the American scenes. Does it add anything to the novel to know that the previous tenant of Sunny’s Jackson Heights apartment was a mafioso in the meat business who had a big bed in the middle of the room ‘where he cavorted with a woman from Kyrgyzstan named Varvara’? Even in an Indian setting, self-indulgent detail can provoke mixed feelings: the dog ‘found a piece of last night’s mackerel cutlet under the table, which she ate. Then she licked the essence of the cutlet, then she licked the hope of the cutlet, then, losing hope, she became slightly desperate and licked the memory.’ This is both splendid and entirely out of place. That’s not dogs in Goa – that’s dogs in general.

It’s​ a welcome surprise that the book is often bitterly funny. Sunny’s mother, Babita, for instance, greatly enjoys herself on a trip to Sweden, a country so small that you can establish friendly relations with anyone at all. Her real dream is to be in an entirely white country – when she learned that Sunny had a white girlfriend she was delighted rather than dismayed (while he was ashamed to be proud of Ulla being white). In Sweden she focuses her dislike on the Middle Eastern family staying at the same hotel, five daughters in headscarves, mother swathed in fabric with a flap over her mouth that she has to lift to eat, though she competes with them to make unreasonable demands on the staff at breakfast (little spoons for the tea! A small plate on which to rest the little spoons! Hot water! Hotter water! Toast, fresher toast, fluffier eggs!), knowing that no escalation of fussiness will be called out, for fear of being characterised as racist. There seems to be no limit, either, to the resourcefulness of internalised racism. Raising the hand that holds her teacup, Babita sees her own skin tone as repellent. It’s like a monkey’s paw.

Comedy can mean either the active incitement of laughter or a set of literary conventions. If a fair proportion of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is comedy in the first sense, all of it is comedy as a literary category. Part of this is an extension of a general rule of writing: the greater the distance from the centre, the simpler the clockwork that is required to propel a character. Sunny’s grandparents, the Colonel and his wife, very minor presences in the novel, fall out over the marriage suggestion made by Sonia’s grandfather Dadaji, accompanied as it was by delicious food delivered on a scalloped silver salver. She thinks they are being tricked into ‘exchanging Sunny for kebabs’, which is motivation enough for such minor characters. Dadaji’s motivation is more complex: he was hoping subtly to play on the guilt the old boy ought to feel for having induced him to take part in a business venture that failed.

Sonia and Sunny occupy a heroic and romantic zone of the comedy, more or less secure in their dignity. Further from the hub things are different. For instance, Sunny accompanies his old friend Satya, a medical student working in upstate New York, on a trip back to India to find a wife. When Satya goes to an astrologer for help in choosing a bride, that’s essentially a comic situation, with comic consequences. The astrologer tells him that the daughter of a family that consulted him the day before would be an auspicious match and he should seek them out at the agricultural research institute in Karnal. The only other information given is that the family is travelling with a red suitcase. Satya asks around in Karnal, fruitlessly, for a family with a marriageable daughter and a red suitcase. Then he has a refreshment break at a modest home on the outskirts, and who should be there but a girl whose lips made a perfect heart? She is the one for him, and when her family come to Delhi to discuss the marriage with Satya’s parents they have a red suitcase!

Satya’s superstition is played for laughs, in what seems fairly close to serving the West what it wants to believe about the East. But when Sonia becomes obsessed with an amulet containing a protective spirit, Badal Baba, left behind in New York with Ilan, this is presented without mockery, simply because of her higher ranking in the world of the book: ‘Bad things were happening because she had lost their protective deity. If she did not recover Badal Baba, how would Sonia ever reconcile her internal darkness with the light? There was no rational path.’ Satya, having only the status of Sunny’s friend, occupies a realm closer to the comic, while the book’s title vouches for Sonia.

The ideal distance from the hub, in terms of being compatible with both comedy and sympathy, is represented by Sunny’s mother, Babita, and Sonia’s aunt, Mina Foi, a rich widow and a poor divorcee. Babita wants her son to succeed in the States while also being aware that she is likely to be left behind if he does. She is chic and up-t0-date, while dowdy Mina Foi is drawn to Christianity because its followers open doors for ladies, pull out chairs for ladies to sit on, and serve ladies with food first, while Hindu and Muslim men push past and help themselves to the best bits. She is aware of the long line of trucks parked at all hours at the back of the house, but not the reason they’re there. After hearing raised voices, Papa learns that a lorry driver has fallen in love with the daughter of one of the servants, so that his lovestruck cries are spoiling her business.

‘What business?’

‘Sex business.’

‘Sex business?’

‘Ayah’s daughter’s husband left her, so she entertains the lorry drivers to make a living. They stay here to rest under the fan. They bring the McDowell’s whisky, but we make kebabs for them.’

‘You make kebabs for the lorry drivers?’

The question, ‘Isn’t she quite old, Ayah’s daughter?’ gets a disconcerting reply. ‘Some of the younger men prefer to have sex with aunties. It comforts them.’

Comedy among servants is always much broader than comedy in the world of their masters, where Mina Foi’s unawareness is the meat of the joke. If you’re stuck in the more flatly comic part of the book then even being murdered – the fate of a couple of minor characters – is not enough to make you tragic. Tragicomedy is the most you can hope for, and perhaps not even that. When, very late in the novel, Babita tells Sunny about what her father, the Colonel, experienced during Partition, when all the women in his family disappeared, it gives her character some extra texture, but it can’t make the Colonel into a victim of history.

There’s a strange moment when Sonia’s Papa treats Sunny’s dead father, Ratan, as something of a joke. That’s fine in itself – the Shahs and the Bhatias aren’t close – but the formal framing of the disparagement seems glaringly wrong, the author mis-writing rather than the character mis-speaking. Sunny’s father, generally regarded as a bit of a failure, was according to Babita a hero who refused to be party to corruption despite direct instructions from his employer. As she explains it to Sunny, ‘Mr Khanna was, in fact, gentlemanly about it. He told your father that if he didn’t want to perform a corruption, he was welcome to leave, and so long as he was quiet, he’d face no retribution.’ Again, there is the quietly upsetting suggestion that not resorting to goons is a special concession. Nevertheless, the tension shortened Ratan’s life. What he wanted Sunny to know was that ‘his father, among all the men of his class, is not corrupt. I want him to be free from this family history. I want him to be free to be honourable.’ That was the value of his sacrifice.

Sonia’s Papa isn’t impressed. ‘He once turned in his own wife for stealing cheese at the French embassy. He telephoned the ambassador’s residence and said: “I am honour-bound to tell you that at the reception for the French-Iranian string quartet last Saturday, my wife, Babita Bhatia, filched a round of Camembert. She wrapped it in a napkin and put it in her evening bag.”’ This isn’t a character viewed from more than one angle, but the same scruples presented in irreconcilable registers. In any case there are no repercussions to Papa’s remark, and Sunny doesn’t get to hear of it. There’s no structural or dramatic reason for it to be in the book.

Parallel with the ranking that assigns tragic, romantic, heroic or comic potential to characters of different levels of importance is a structured access to the point of view. First-person narration – not used by Desai – digs a moat, shallow or deep, around the central character. In third-person writing, when it is as multifocal as it is in this book, the terrain can shift, allowing for the possibility of landslides and sinkholes. The authorial voice claims the freedom both to stand apart and to occupy multiple consciousnesses in a single scene. There is jostling, with many hands reaching for the microphone, which might be seen as a supremely appropriate way of representing the multiplicity of India, but it’s hierarchical jostling. Not everyone gets to have an inner life.

Khansama, the cook at 10 Cadell Road, the Allahabad home of Sonia’s grandparents and of Mina Foi, plays a substantial role in the book. It is his kakori kebabs that are sent to Sunny’s grandparents alongside the matchmaking letter. It makes a persuasive offering – the Colonel peeks covetously under the starched napkin – though perhaps not enough to buy Sunny outright. Dadaji recognises Khansama’s virtuosity: ‘The galawati is a damn tricky kebab. It must be as smooth as silk.’ Sonia’s grandmother Ba chips in, noting that ‘Khansama uses no egg or any kind of binding agent, and then it is an exceedingly delicate task to turn the kebab.’ She is described as ‘supervising’ this operation, though her main concern is making sure that Khansama doesn’t line his own stomach. She is possessive of his expertise, refusing requests for recipes even from the Colonel’s wife. Of course no one ever gives out a recipe in full – you subtract an ingredient, jiggle a quantity – but she won’t give the Colonel’s wife even partial satisfaction.

Babita esteems Khansama’s skills enough to want to ‘steal’ him – the distinction between employment and ownership seems notional. Later Babita blames Sunny for refusing to allow ‘superlative kebab Khansama’ to be stolen. It’s true that Khansama has a creative slump at one point because Mina Foi is now giving the orders and he’s not sufficiently afraid of her (‘A cook needs a strong master’). Though one-toothed and ill-treated, ‘he was still their priceless possession, a walking treasure trove of recipes from the lineage of the Kayasths and from the Lucknow begums.’

Kebabs are consequential, their makers less so. What is his history? How did he acquire those recipes? No clue is offered. Does he have a family somewhere? Yes – we know this from an early exchange when Mina Foi notices that the date on the Seven Seas capsules has expired. ‘“You take them then,” Dadaji ordered Khansama. “Don’t waste them. Give them to your children – perfectly fine for another year or two.”’ The Cadell Road household as a whole is played for laughs early in the book. But though Dadaji, Ba and Mina Foi gain in substance, Khansama isn’t allowed to develop beyond cartoon. His single tooth is virtually the only characteristic he is allotted, as when Babita is trying to snare him: ‘Through the crack, Mina Foi could see that the cook’s single brown tooth protruded. Then a flicker of wariness crossed his expression and the tooth retreated, but then the flicker passed, he and his tooth again succumbing to the glisten of being courted.’ Even in retirement, Khansama can be ‘roused’ by one of his ex-employers to make a murgh musallam, cooked whole in a clay pot to give to a sick person.

Khansama’s exclusion from the guest list would be less obvious if so many others weren’t allowed to crash the party. A woman Sunny sees with her husband while they’re queuing in New York for Italian visas broadcasts her thoughts, including secrets she has never mentioned to anyone, though she’s only in the book for a single paragraph: ‘Her skin was pale, of this she was proud, although her husband was dark. This was because as a paler woman, you could marry a man far wealthier if he was far darker than yourself.’ A ‘cheerful chef of pre-Hispanic foods’ who crosses Sunny’s path in Mexico offers his thoughts, showing that food preparation in itself is no bar to interiority.

What would India be without servants? Free, Sunny claims: ‘Gandhi had managed to eject the British from India but had failed in his exhortations to get Indians to scour their own toilets and thereby fathom the basic meaning of human rights.’ There’s an entertaining passage in which Sonia lists all the things you have to learn to do for yourself if you live in America, including renting a car at an airport, driving yourself cross-country to a job in a place you’ve never heard of, defeating your enemies, trapping a rat and making money to pay bills to look after yourself even when you are dying.

It’s not that The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny actively operates a caste system, unless the same can be said of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Certain social divisions are regarded as natural in the world inside and outside these texts. Khansama the cook is not invited to the book’s feast any more than the rude mechanicals will be taking tea at the palace with Theseus and Hippolyta. It’s not their place. The internal realms of literary forms only have so much flexibility. Good luck with turning Khansama into a symbolic figure like Firs in The Cherry Orchard, the old retainer forgotten by his employers and left inside their boarded-up house to die. It’s not easy to argue that Desai is highlighting the plight of the servant classes by neglecting it herself. Though her book has egalitarian aspirations, its genre does not.