The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

A lonely granddaughter triggers a chess player's grandest gambit

In Allahabad, 1996, the retired lawyer Dadaji receives word from his son Manav in Delhi: his granddaughter Sonia, studying in Vermont, is weeping with loneliness on the phone.

A lonely granddaughter triggers a chess player's grandest gambit

In Allahabad, 1996, the retired lawyer Dadaji receives word from his son Manav in Delhi: his granddaughter Sonia, studying in Vermont, is weeping with loneliness on the phone. Dadaji senses an opportunity. Years earlier, his chess partner the Colonel had encouraged a disastrous investment in a military woolen mill. Rather than name this old debt, Dadaji proposes matching Sonia with the Colonel's America-based grandson, Sunny. He dispatches his secretary to compose a formal letter cataloging Sonia's shortcomings as virtues, delivered alongside a ceremonial platter of kakori kebabs on a scalloped silver salver. His unmarried daughter Mina Foi—denied phone calls, independence, a life—secretly slips Sonia's photograph into the envelope. Two families are now on a collision course lubricated by mutton.

An older painter seduces Sonia with owl calls and clementines

During the long Vermont winter, Sonia shelves books in the near-empty college library and writes a fable about a boy who becomes a monkey. One snowy afternoon, a tall stranger in a brindled fur coat and karakul hat climbs the steps. He shovels the path, sketches in art books, plays recorded owl calls through headphones he places over Sonia's ears. His name is Ilan de Toorjen Foss—a painter, thirty-two years her senior, with a greyhound face and a gray streak in his dark hair. He shares clementine segments while asking disarming questions about her happiest memories, her grandfather who vanished in the Himalayas. He invites her to a Japanese restaurant, where he places a hand inside her shirt. Their reflections in the window beside the snow feel like a second, possible life.

Sunny's hidden girlfriend discovers a marriage proposal from India

In Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the proposal almost gets tossed with the takeout menus. Sunny Bhatia, a night-shift editor at the Associated Press, shares a brownstone apartment with Ulla, his girlfriend from Kansas—whom his family doesn't know exists. When Sunny opens the absurd letter and shows it to Ulla thinking she'll laugh, she doesn't. The enclosed photograph reveals a fierce-faced girl in a curry-colored coat against snow-laden firs. Ulla recognizes the real threat: not this particular woman but the entire hidden architecture of Sunny's Indian life, the family that won't acknowledge her, the options he's quietly preserving. Sunny's mother, Babita—a sharp-tongued widow in Delhi—had forwarded the letter mockingly, but she too is privately disturbed by that face planed like a panther.