New Delhi | There is a real upside to loss, says celebrated author Kiran Desai who knows only too well what a win can take out of a person and would like to focus on her mother, the renowned Anita Desai.
Kiran Desai was only 35 when she won the Booker for her 2006 novel "The Inheritance of Loss", the youngest woman author to do so at the time. She came close to it again last November when "The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny" was shortlisted for the coveted prize. That second Booker didn't happen. But there are no regrets.
"I've learned over time that, of course, it's an honour to win, but there is a real upside to loss. I remember telling my mother, 'I don't want to win' because I knew how much it takes out of you to have everyone's eyes on you. My mother, she's 88, 89 now, I want to focus on her. She's my priority," Desai told PTI during her recent visit to India.
"And also, when there are no eyes on you, as I was telling my editor, you can go back to scratching in the dirt like a chicken in the yard, which is what writing is all about. You're alone, you're not self-conscious, and you're really free to work. So yes, there's an upside to loss," she added.
Desai recalls how overwhelming the first Booker win was.
The New York-based author, now 54, chuckles at the memory, noting that she barely grew outside the world of her book then.
Her mother Anita Desai, who has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize -- for "Clear Light of Day" (1980), "In Custody" (1984), and "Fasting, Feasting" (1999) -- knows too well about the weight of recognition.
Her words of wisdom after the close-call this time -- Kiran Desai lost out to Hungarian-British author David Szalay who won the Booker 2025 for his book "Flesh" -- landed perfectly for the daughter.
"She told me, 'Now you're free to experiment with your life and your work'," Desai recalled.
"That's exactly what I felt -- it gave me freedom." Her latest work, at nearly 700 pages, spans India, Mexico and the United States, tracing the intertwined lives of Sonia, a literature student wrestling with heartbreak and creative longing, and Sunny, a young journalist navigating cultural expectations and loneliness.
Their paths eventually cross in India, sparking a deep, complex connection that unfolds against themes of family, identity and the global ache for connection and meaning.
Desai, who like her mother writes daily and finds any interruption in her routine "upsetting", said she felt an enormous sense of relief after finally finishing "The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny" which took nearly two decades to complete.
"The sigh of relief was immense because, of course, after 20 years, it is far too long. If I had waited another 20 years, I would be 74. And if I want to write a few more books, there's an urgency to finish them now," she said.
Notwithstanding the anxiety over the passage of time, the joy of creation remained the heart of the process, Desai said.
"I was very happy working on this book. And I still think all the time, I could have done this differently, that could have been better. But that's part of writing," she added. After living with these characters for so long, the questions linger: do they ever truly recede, or do they quietly accompany her as she turns to new stories? As Desai sees it, the characters never fully disappear. Her first novel, "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard", was published in 1998.
"They have a space for themselves. They kind of change you -- you become the characters you write. So in a way they stay with you, because you feel like after all of this time that they have kind of shaped you as well as a writer. Like so much exploring of these different people, that they become you," she explained.
Based in New York for over two decades, Desai left India with her mother at 14. She is conscious that "The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny" may be her "last in-depth" engagement with a country she has visited less often since her father's death in 2008. "During the process of writing this book, my father was still alive. I was keeping notes. I was going home (India). And I knew I would lose the ability to write about India. So I wanted to write one last book in this way," she said.
The Delhi-born author often returns to the question of identity that also runs through the novel.
She points to the protagonist, Sunny, who returns to India and wonders "if India is more familiar to him than he is to himself".
It's a sentiment Kiran recognises, too: in the pull of a place the "body remembers", even as time and distance render her a stranger.
"I sometimes feel that way. I come back and I am in the landscape I grew up in, so somehow my body remembers, even though I am a stranger now... there is something still profoundly familiar," Desai said.
The sense of being "insider-outsider" persists in India as much as in the US, where the current political dispensation has unsettled the "little bit" sense of belonging she had of the place.
