this week with rooh

Listen To 🎧: Zulf (seriously, listen to it.)

There are moments when you come across a book, or a voice, that helps you understand an emotion differently. Sometimes it is not the story itself, but the way it allows you to feel something you did not know you were ready to feel. At rooh, we believe that the inner world can be expanded by voices that help us feel and think differently. Last month, that voice happened to be Kiran Desai.

I have been a long-time admirer of her work. The first book of hers I read, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, came to me when I was very young, and it remains one of the funniest books I have ever read. It held a gentle satire of Indian society that I did not fully appreciate until years later. Meeting her in December felt like something I had been quietly hoping for without even realizing it. She carried herself with a grace that felt almost luminous, a quiet attentiveness to every question, and a humility that filled the room without ever announcing itself.

She spoke about her latest book, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a project she lived with for twenty years and wrote across more than five thousand pages before distilling it into the story I now hold. I loved reading this novel, not only for the narrative, but for the depth of her investigation into loneliness. Listening to her speak brought a clarity to the emotional layers I had sensed while reading.

The characters in the story, the two protagonists and their families who form a constellation of side characters, all face tremendous depths of loneliness, but each in completely different ways. One character is lonely in their self-pity, another in their wealth. Someone in Vermont is lonely inside the harsh quiet of winter, while someone in India is lonely not because they are alone, but because they cannot find a single quiet corner in the crowds to be with their own thoughts. Walking alongside these characters, I began to see that loneliness can exist in every corner of the human experience, not because of where we are, but because of what lives quietly within us. Reading their stories, I recognized a familiar thread from my own life, such as the loneliness of being misunderstood or of holding a minority opinion in a majority world.

What struck me most is that loneliness, as she explores it, is not something broken or something to escape. It is not even inherently dark. It feels more like a perspective, a presence that moves with us in different forms. It shifts shape as we shift. It appears in joy, in restlessness, in certainty, in longing, in the most ordinary rhythms of daily living. It does not always ask to be solved. Sometimes it simply wants to be recognized.

I feel like that’s the quiet gift of stories like The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. They remind us that our inner world is incredibly vast, that our emotions contain entire landscapes, and that even in loneliness, there is a kind of connection waiting to be seen.

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