Indians in America

An excerpt from Kiran Desai's upcoming novel titled 'The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny' (September 2025) is published in The New Yorker on August 3, 2025. This excerpt is titled, 'An Unashamed Proposal'. 

A young Indian man, Sunny Bhatia, is a fresh graduate of Columbia University and employed as a rookie reporter at the Associated Press. He is living with his American girlfriend Ulla (her real name is Mary from Kansas) in Brooklyn in 1997. His family was still living in Delhi, India. His paternal grandfather was a former finance minister, and the family wasn't without means, and a whole lot of politicking.

Ulla was the girlfriend Sunny had never happened to mention to his family, although for more than a year now they had shared a lease, a bed, a Con Ed utility bill, a laundry basket, and, on some absent-minded occasions, a toothbrush.

The story opens with Sunny's mother writing him a letter to inform him that the family has received a marriage proposal for him. It's from the family of someone named Sonia who's lonely and studying a college in America. This Sonia is the one who proposed marriage to Sunny via the official matchmaker and the families. There was also a letter with a customary photo of Sonia.

Ulla doesn't understand this whole Indian matchmaking thing. She was miffed about it, to say the least. Sunny and Ulla had a mild fight over it.

This didn’t cheer Ulla, however. She had first thought Sunny was shy, if a bit childish in his inability to admit openly to a relationship. But now she understood the consequences and perhaps the true purpose of this secrecy: Sunny was keeping his options open. “Surely,” she said, “surely your family in India realizes that it is disrespectful to me?”

Silence.

Ulla yelled, “They don’t realize it is disrespectful to me, because they don’t know I exist!”

Sunny kept his gaze averted. “Look, however progressive my mother is, she is an Indian woman from another generation. Do you really think I can tell her that we sleep in the same bed? If I was taking this proposal seriously, wouldn’t I have hidden the letter instead of saying, ‘Look, Ulla’?”

Ulla sighed. “I should be feeling angry, and I am so angry, yet I also feel bad for this poor girl who is being marketed. It’s a scandal that they treat women like this.”

“Well, they treat men the same way and you’re not showing me sympathy.”

At some point, Sunny would tell his mother about his current American girlfriend. But he himself isn't sure this relationship would go the distance. Cross-cultural differences flare up every now and then. He doesn't know how much it affects daily life, except that they do, especially when people around them do see the differences even as they don't.

Sunny had an internal strife about how Indian he is, versus his newly acquired American values, education and outlook. They don't seem to co-exist, especially when it comes to marriage and family. There's also this whole undercurrent about what it means to be Indian or an Indian-American living in America, and not in India. 1997 angst isn't too much different from 2025 pains of migration and family ties. 

In an interview with the same journal, the author is asked how she sees the mixed-race couple and their interactions.

Sunny and Ulla have a tendency to bicker, and each can resort to brandishing cultural stereotypes as a cudgel when arguing with the other. At the same time, they’re aware of their beauty as a couple. What does this cross-cultural relationship give you as a writer?

The chance to write about thoughts people never articulate, and their hypocrisies, shames, and fears. Sunny loves the image of the two of them that he sees in the mirror of a bar on Lafayette Avenue. It presents an enviable, cosmopolitan, multiracial aesthetic, one that, in turn, promotes an ethical vision of tolerance. Yet he can’t help but be ashamed of his pride, because he knows his pride is rooted in the shame of where he comes from. The power divide between nations is too great for Sunny and Ulla not to experience it. They resort to a primitive vocabulary when they argue and so destroy from within the way they look to each other in the mirror.

The tragedy, of course, is that Ulla does not come from privilege, although she is American, while Sunny does come from vast wealth and privilege, gained at the expense of people who will never have access to such a beautiful multiracial, multicultural image.