The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
About this book
Sonia is a writer trying to build a life in the United States; Sunny is a journalist whose work and family obligations pull him between New York and India. Before they properly know one another, mothers and grandparents have already imagined the usefulness of a match.
Their relationship develops through distance, other partners, ambition, prejudice, and the emotional weather of extended families. Both want a modern freedom that is never as separate from money, caste, migration, and parental desire as it first appears.
The novel ranges widely in place and time, giving servants, relatives, friends, and strangers enough presence to resist becoming background to one couple. Loneliness appears not as solitude alone but as the gap between the self a person lives and the one others have prepared.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is Kiran Desai’s expansive novel of love, migration, and family design. Its comic social eye and long chronology make romance a way of examining who gets to call a life independent.
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CHAPTER
The sun was submerged deep in the wintry murk of dawn. Ba, Dadaji and their daughter Mina Foi wrapped their shawls closely about themselves when they emerged upon the veranda to sip their tea and to decide, through a vigorous process of elimination, their meals for the rest of the day. Orders must be given to the cook at breakfast so that he might go directly to market. It was Mina’s fifty-fifth birthday, the first of December in the year 1998, and the mutton for her birthday kebabs had been marinating overnight in the kitchen.
“Rice? Roti?" Ba 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? Paratha?" she suggested.
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 — the bust resembled less a dignified nobleman than a foolish snob with an interest in the sky overhead that had not turned vivid or blue 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 -- prostitution 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 shouted. "Spinach?"
“Potato?” Dadaji lifted 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 might 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 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, had never eaten a meal alone, never lived in a place where they were unknown, never woken without a cook bringing tea, or without wishing Good Morning to several individuals: Namaste, Khansama.
Good Morning, Mummy.
Good Morning, Daddy.
Mina, Good Morning.
Ayah, Namaste —
Whenever he thought of the Wordsworth poem he had been taught in school, I wandered lonely as a cloud that wanders far over hill and vale — the line struck Dadaji as so ridiculous, it made him throw back his head and guffaw so 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. Eye problems afflicted him, a detached retina, glaucoma, cataracts -- he put a magnifying glass to his wooden orb and bent over so his nose touched the address book, as he read out the number they had for the dormitory in Hewitt College in Hewitt, while Mina Foi put her finger into the holes of the digits 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, unable to bend for the crick.
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“Hallo, hallo, please connect us to Sonia Shah who is in room number 5,” shouted Dadadji. Then when Sonia arrived at the phone booth, “What is the matter? Why is your father saying you are unhappy? Your studies are alright?”
“Yes,” said Sonia in a tiny voice.
“Then? What is the problem?”
“What do you get to eat there?” Mina Foi inquired of her niece. “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 16, 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, and ate from clay dishes that were later broken upon the rubbish heap so they might not pollute the world.
Dadaji had single-handedly extracted them from such backwardness. He might be iron-willed and furious-tempered, but it was precisely these 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 close.
All these years later, Ba and Dadaji could not remember a single sight, not a monument, not a museum, but they never forgot a green muffler lost on the way to Machhu Picchu; or the machine which 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 asked the guard. “Does lunch happen in twenty minutes?!” the man had been angered. 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 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.
“Why lonely?" said Dadaji to Sonia. “We found Americans most friendly. When we went to the Grand Canyon we left our bananas on the bus, and a lady got off and chased us down to give them to us. She had to wait for the next bus.”
“They are friendly,” agreed Sonia’s tiny voice. “And a beautiful country,” said Dadaji.
“It is,” said Sonia.
“And so much empty space!”
“Yes.” They heard Sonia begin to weep, and then the line went dead.
They reemerged upon the verandah, it would be too extravagant to call again. The sun was now blazing above the haze, the crows had quietened, the hunchbacked ayah had arrived to sweep, lugging a twig broom several times her size. With her head and her face covered with a shawl which was the color of dust, she swept the highway dust from the house to the verandah, then down each wide shallow step out into the guava orchards to the right and left — which in season produced the famous pink guavas of Allahabad — fanning the dust into the dust upon the dust, to make a final pattern of dust scallops all the way to the outskirts of the compound. By evening, the dust would have flown back and clogged the little wire squares in the insect screens, covered the philodendrons, shadowed the name on the gate that read M.L. Shah, Advocate, High Court, sanded the papers and files, imparted a crunch to the typewriter keys. When Sonia had been a little girl, Mina Foi had shown Sonia with a certain pride in her misfortune, that when she spat into the sink, she spat out lorry dust beige.
Ba and Dadaji hadn’t taken Mina Foi on their round the world tour, for by then she had proved herself unlucky, and when someone is born unlucky, you don’t have to make an effort with them. Dadaji had greeted his daughter’s return from a six month marriage with silence suffused with blame although he was the one who had brokered the engagement. It had felt like Mina Foi’s fault because she was unfortunate.
“Nothing ever works for Mina,” Ba announced, and it was as if her tragedy had been washed, folded, snapped into one of those black tin trunks filled with trousseau saris and mothball layered woolens that outlasted generations. On her birthday each year though, by way of a treat to make it an occasion, the Ambassador was soaped at the back of the bungalow by the driver in as intimate and friendly a manner as if the car were a buffalo, then driven around to the front entrance for mother and daughter to visit Mina Foi's patrimony, the ancestral jewelry secured in the State Bank of Baroda locker. On the way, they dropped Dadaji off at the Colonel’s home on Thornton Lane to keep his chess-playing appointment. Clad in a navy blazer and red tie, for he always dressed formally when he left the house, Dadaji joined the Colonel waiting with the chess board on his front lawn, also clad in jacket and tie, and he reminded the women to return for him in two hours time.
Mina Foi was wearing her new birthday sari of flowery purple. Her mother wore one in a green wavy pattern. Both women had switched from cotton to polyester which they found more durable, glamorous and easier to care for. Mina Foi wore her usual blue Hawaii chappals. The soles of her feet were chapped. She had a wart on her nose, a slight mustache and soft, hairy legs which she lavished against each other under her sari when she was pleased, or sometimes in bed, in the predawn when she was peaceful, holding onto her sleeping breasts. When she held her breasts and caressed her legs in this predawn hour, it was for a little gentleness and kindness at the beginning of the day.
Mina Foi and her mother arrived at the bank and descended from the sunshine into the morgue-like basement where a security guard with a curly mustache and a rifle that belonged to the past age of weaponry, guarded the metal lockers holding sleeping treasures. A clerk recorded the time of their arrival, and held the shaky ladder so Mina Foi might clamber to the topmost row where their family safe was located, from which she handed down faded boxes and plastic bags, noticing meanwhile the clerk’s bobby pinned henna toupee and feeling a pang for his vanity. The boxes and bags bore the names of establishments long shuttered, names that came from a past age of grandeur: Jewellers Gopaldas Chandraprakash & Sons, Bhagatram Jainarain Jewellers, Haji Rafique Jewellers, KG Sultania Calcutta Walla Jewellers. The plastic bags were discolored and crispy with age, secured with rubber bands that had melted in the summer heat and hardened into wormy encrustations. The cotton wool that wrapped the jewels was also gray, but inside the gleam of the gems had been concentrated by age. They admired the cloudy rubies and emeralds, the knobby pearls with a clotted buttermilk sheen that were mixed with glass and simple beads in the gay Gujarati style. There were kundun diamonds in large, clumsy chandeliers, part of Mina Foi’s dowry that Ba had worried Mina Foi’s in-laws would keep after Mina Foi's divorce. When they didn’t, the better to establish they were the blameless party, Ba experienced -- not happiness, of course, given the circumstance -- but a resettling of her gut. The State Bank locker had been decimated, then it was restored. Her spirit had been assaulted, now it was sanguine. There was, however, a deeper sense of loss that haunted her, one she had inherited from her mother who lamented, over and over, a precious Burmese ruby the size of a pigeon’s egg that had vanished when the family was forced to leave their business in Rangoon in 1942 and return to Nadiad. The loss of the ruby and the downfall of family wealth meant that never again were they a proud, respected family. Something had shifted in Ba's sense of self then, and in her marriage.
When Sonia had last visited her grandparents in Allahabad, the summer before she left for college in the States, Ba and Mina Foi had taken her to the bank to visit the family gems. After reciting the story of the lost ruby from Burma, Ba had dutifully said, “The most beautiful set of all will be for you, Sonia, when you marry.” She’d masked the pain of uttering this sentence by looking serious as if discussing illness, and she turned away in case Sonia brazenly accepted, “Thank you, Ba.” Mina Foi had helped Sonia try on a pearl bracelet with a tricky emerald clasp, remembering how she’d worn it on her wedding day with – and this is what still wrung Mina Foi -- a giddy hope. She had been so innocent, and when her innocence was destroyed, she felt so ashamed. It had suddenly occurred to her that she was fastening her ill luck upon Sonia: “Take it off!“
Ba, unable to stand her plummeting heart, said, “Come on, now, put it carefully back!“ But the clasp would not unclasp, and Mina Foi had to wrest the bracelet off Sonia’s hand, scraping her skin.
"They don't wear jewelry in America, just small trinkets," said Ba.
Now, on Mina Foi’s fifty-fifth birthday, Ba made sure that the gems were not frivolously tried on, only admired and counted to make sure no piece was missing. She mopped the sweat from her upper lip with her hankie, “Fortunately you’ve never been one for dressing up!”
Did Ba mean that had Mina a taste for dressing up, her divorce at age 22 and the fact she no longer had an occasion to adorn herself, would have been intolerable? That she was fortunate in this regard? Or did her mother mean it was fortunate she’d been divorced and that her wedding jewelry had been returned to her mother’s bank locker? She felt an unusual stab of hate for Ba. If indeed her life had been different, Mina Foi might have been a different person as well; one who might have enjoyed sitting before her reflection at a dressing table mirror, to dab perfume behind her ears, to don earrings, necklace, rings, bracelets. She said, “But how would I know if I’m one for dressing up or not?” Her mother did not answer, not seeing how this question might be answered, and they bundled the pearls, emeralds, rubies, the diamonds and gold back into the dingy cotton wool, back into their secret boxes, back into the crispy disintegrating plastic bags. They swept away the broken wormy rubber bands, asked the clerk for new ones.
“I don’t have any,” he said, grumpily. “Why did you not bring your own?” Then he opened a drawer and gave them two, glaring.
Mina Foi locked the safe again and handed back the spindly key. "Why don't you make a stronger key?" she asked. Mother and daughter climbed back up into the late afternoon, unsettled by how this excursion hadn’t reiterated and deepened their bond, which they considered unassailable, but had instead taught them that it might be vanquished by a pearl.
“Do you think Betsy and Brett will come by with chocolate chip cookies the way they did last year?” asked Mina Foi.
“I don’t know. They may not remember.”
“Should we stop by their house?”
“Stop by their house? But it is far out of the way.” Betsy and Brett lived in a poor neighborhood at the outskirts to emphasize their missionary devotion. “And we are already late collecting Daddy.“
Exactly on time, Ba and Mina Foi retrieved Dadaji who was waiting amidst the Colonel's petunias in a deflated mood because he had lost the game, and they returned home feeling the relief of approaching sundown, anticipating the dinner which would bring their deliberations at the hour of dawn to a culmination.
“The galawat is a damn tricky kebab,” reminded Dadaji. “Habiba gave us the recipe. She was Daddy’s client,” Ba never addressed her husband directly, disrespectfully.
“When I asked her how her galawat was textured so smooth, she replied, ‘The trick is that I use no egg or any kind of binding agent, and then I’m always personally there for the turning of the kebab. I never leave it to the staff. It is an exceedingly delicate task.’ But she had gout – uric acid builds up if you eat such rich food. Even the young men in that family walked with canes.”
Ba checked on the cook and counted the number of kebabs so no piece went missing before it was served. She inserted her nose deep into every dish to sniff closely and suspiciously, making sure all was as it should be. She checked the storeroom and the fridge to be certain every jar and canister was depleted only in exact proportion to their meal. The cockroaches that lived inside the warm laboring fridge didn’t bother her, in fact she couldn’t see them, the voltage was so low. Neither did she notice that atop the greasy jars, daddy-long-legs had got their long legs stuck and died. Nor that at the top of the door almost as tall as the wall, a lizard had been squashed and the squashed leather of its torso and its empty face still dangled from the high doorframe. Then she bathed. In Allahabad they took their baths before dinner and dined formally about the table in their pajamas, nightgowns and robes.
“It’s Daddy’s, it’s Daddy’s,” shouted Ba when Mina Foi reached for the last potato, and she rescued it to deposit on her husband ’s plate. This delivery of a potato to her husband led back to the loss of the ruby somehow. Dadaji ate it with a spoon and a fork and a disgruntled expression of having to be the person dealing with a problem as usual. “Everyone likes a potato,” he said, “except for our daughter-in-law Seher. She is the only person I have ever met who does not like a potato.” Mina Foi zipped out with her finger, collected a stray sliver of fried onion that lay upon the tablecloth and put the sliver in her mouth with an absentminded expression, not glancing about to see if anyone had spotted her because if nobody sees you, you didn’t do what you did. She was brimful of sadness for no particular reason, just a poignancy, a melancholy that comes from eating such royal food when your life is so very empty, when there is austerity in all matters save dinner. Or was it the phone call to Sonia that had unsettled her, bringing in the big world and the knowledge that other people out there lived lives in fresh snow hills eating blueberry pie? Or she was brimful of sadness because the missionaries had indeed forgotten her birthday. Her niece, too, she remembered, had not thought of wishing her aunt.
Ba licked the last dal off the dal ladle with housewifely efficiency, her flower-shaped diamond earrings which she never removed, not even when she slept, caught the glum light in the dining room. She began to count the number of kebabs to make sure that no kebab disappeared before the leftovers were served at another meal.
“But Khansama may not have served all the pieces in the first place,” Dadaji said. “Or even cooked them.”
Here Mina Foi said loyally, “Mummy knows exactly what a kilo of mutton looks like.” There was no point harboring anger against the only person who tried to give you a birthday treat.
When the knives and spoons had been licked, the size of leftovers memorized and melamine dishes removed, Dadaji held up his hand.
When he held up his hand, Ba upturned her surprisingly small palm, the paleness of which had indicated caste superiority, so it was considered at the time Ba and Dadaji’s marriage was arranged. Caste superiority and a Rangoon ruby had delivered Ba to an enviable match with a lawyer. When Ba upturned her palm, Mina Foi repeated the gesture with her large brown hand that resembled her father’s. Khansama came out with a tray laden with bottles of pills and handed the bottles to Mina Foi who counted the pills into Ba ’s palm, then Ba passed them one by one to her husband who conceded to lift his own water glass to his mouth. Vitamins, papaya enzyme, cod liver oil, Dabur Chyawanprash.
“The date has gone on the Seven Seas garlic capsules,” Mina Foi scrutinized one of the bottles. “You take them then,” Dadaji ordered the cook, “don’t waste them. Give them to your children, perfectly fine for another year or two.”
Mina Foi noticed the yellowed newspaper that lined the tray read: “Boy Brought up by Wolves is Found in Tribal Area.”
After all the practical matters had been taken care of, Dadaji said, “Look here!” They looked at him.
“When I was playing chess with the Colonel, he happened to mention his grandson in America – I’d completely forgotten about the boy. I asked if he was married -- he has completed his Masters degree -- and they said he was not. I asked what he was waiting for. They said he had his own ideas and those ideas did not amount to anything. Meanwhile the Colonel’s wife told me she could smell our dinner cooking when she drove past our house. She said, ‘I thought if they didn’t send us any kebabs, then there must be some reason. At least give us the recipe, I've been begging for years.’ "Why should we hand over the secrets of our kitchen just like that?" asked Ba. "Habiba was so grateful for Daddy's legal advice, she didn't make the smallest alteration." Everyone knew a person must always render a sly omission when parting with a recipe, jiggle a quantity if flattered, "Will you share your delicious dish?" to leave the recipient tormented: "Something isn't right!"
Dadaji said, “Let's take the remaining galawati over tomorrow." “But why?” asked Mina Foi. "We could eat them for lunch." “Let us make an introduction between Sonia and their grandson. If she is lonely, the problem is easily solved. ”
Dadaji, Ba and Mina Foi each privately recalled an incident from a decade ago that nobody had forgotten, when the Colonel had encouraged Dadaji to invest in a military woolen mills started by an army colleague to whom the Colonel believed he owed his life -- they had fought in Kargil together. The business failed and the considerable investment in khaki blankets, socks, balaclavas and sweaters, had resulted in a financial loss to Dadaji, who had been as upset, naturally, as the Colonel had been apologetic. While the incident had interjected a new undertow of regret and falsity into their former neighborliness, by the magnanimity of continuing to dispense free legal advice on the subject of the Colonel's court case seeking compensation for the family land in Lahore that was lost during Partition; by continuing to send across kebabs and other dishes from their kitchen as unstintingly as always; by continuing their games of chess, Dadaji had been unconsciously biding time until he might call the debt home.
It was essential to remain close to those who had caused you harm, so that the ghost of guilt might breathe through their dreams, that their guilt might slowly mature to its fullest potential. Not that Dadaji had thought it through, it never worked to consciously plot, to crudely calculate, and he himself was astonished at the possibility of what was unfolding. Even now it would never do to name this liability. The Colonel would not allow his grandson to bear the burden of his grandfather’s mistake. Dadaji and Ba might simply suggest a desirable match between the grandchildren, two America educated individuals, two equals, two people who naturally belonged together because of where they came from and of where they were going. Without either of them mentioning it, the debt might be beautifully unraveled.
Ba and Mina Foi were once again witness to the brilliance of Dadaji. He might have lost the afternoon game, but he’d played a consummate match of chess. Said Ba, "And they will not have the face to ask for a dowry!" She thought of the jewels, save for the ruby from Burma, in the Bank of Baroda locker.
Again the driver soaped and washed the rotundity of the Ambassador and drove the family to the colonel's residence. They carried a ceremonial scalloped silver platter of kebabs. Dadaji said, “We recently heard from our granddaughter. It seems loneliness is a big problem over there in America.”
Mina Foi noticed on the side table of inlaid ivory, along with the Colonel ’s wife’s ikebana arrangement, there was a photograph of their grandson. Haughty with the nose of a nawab, but the lips of a cherub, he was reading a newspaper. She found him handsome. “Lonely? Lonely? ” said the Colonel’s wife.
“Without people one is nothing,” said Mina Foi. “Especially in wintertime. It snows non stop over there.” Betsy and Brett had lent her Little House on the Prairie which had become Mina Foi’s favorite book, she must have read it a hundred times, although her parents considered novels as much useless luxury as telephone calls to missionaries.
PART II
Winter Vast and Forlorn
CHAPTER
Vermont might be small and friendly in summer, every sweet thing-- farmer in the farmer s market, child in the pond, bee in the foxglove, fox in the chicken coop, bear in the bee hive -- in its own sweet place, but in winter distances expanded, the sky loomed with weather, the hills turned to mountains, became vast and forlorn. For two months the students of Hewitt College were expected to scatter like migratory birds to intern in establishments that represented their future professions, a puppet theater, a lesbian magazine, the Numismatic Society, a Rainforest Institute. But foreign students were on a visa that did not allow them such employment, and those who couldn t afford to return home, or labor for free, took up jobs on campus, and were tutored in the assorted moods of being solitary in the wintertime.
Sonia was employed in the library, and this last year of her degree, she walked uphill every weekday morning from the Gerstein Chen House, a dormitory at the foot of a hill in the hamlet of North Hewitt that stayed open for students who had nowhere to go. Entering through a gap in the stone wall that ringed the college property, Sonia walked past the music mansion patterned all over with the caterpillar feet of ivy, and from a window just below the chimneys, she would almost always glimpse a greenish lamp glowing and know that Lazlo had been working all night. She walked past the red barns that housed the Alumni Office where Armando was employed. He didn’t live in the Gerstein Chen house, he was pug-sitting for the drama teacher on the other side of North Hewitt. She unlocked the door to the modern white cube of the library where she spent the day mostly alone, the only other person there over the winter term was Marie, who came in during the mornings and supervised Sonia. Too often she found Sonia reading the books she was supposed to be transferring from the Dewey system of cataloging to the Library of Congress. But who could resist a whole library to oneself? Sonia read Eurdora Welty and Katherine Mansfield. She read Isak Dinesan and Jean Rhys. Each book, while she was reading it, seemed to her the most beautiful book in the world. When it was already dark, Sonia returned to the Gerstein Chen House and boiled ramen noodles atop an electric coil in the kitchen perpetually lit by fluorescence. For a treat she dipped into a carton of ChaChaRoni that her friend Audrey Hong had left her. Audrey’s original name was Jung-hee, but when her family immigrated from Seoul, her father had renamed her in honor of Audrey Hepburn; her sisters were Greta and Marilyn. After ramen, she settled to writing stories for her senior thesis in literature and creative writing. Missing her family made her strongly conjure India. She was writing a childhood fable about a boy who climbed into a tree and lived like a monkey until he became one, a process complicated by his being mistaken for a holy hermit.