Jaipur: Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai returned to the Jaipur Literature Festival Thursday after more than a decade away and said race becomes unavoidable in the United States, framing “every single aspect of life” there.“As soon as you go to the United States, life becomes all about race,” Desai said, responding to a question about “dark, perhaps a lot of racist things” that people think but “seldom say” in public.Desai, whose latest novel, ‘The Lonliness of Sonia and Sunny’, was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, said the conversation permeates institutions and daily life. “Every single thing, every single aspect of life in the United States comes down to that conversation,” she said, citing “the universities, the courts, the homeless situation, life expectancy, every single thing comes down to that discussion.”She described an immigrant’s gradual reckoning with the issue. “As an immigrant, when you go to the United States, …you’re not aware of it at first, and then you gradually come to understand,” she said. “It feels like a transgression to enter that conversation because it’s not your history, you don’t know anything about it.”Desai said immigrants are nonetheless drawn into the racial framework immediately. “On the other hand, it’s now your country. So you had better enter the conversation,” she said. “And also, as soon as you arrive, you’re designated a person of colour, which means you are part of the conversation, like it or not.”She also pointed to “a completely bizarre hierarchy of race” within immigrant communities, including “Koreans, Japanese, Chinese… Indians, Hispanics,” adding, “in India, we have it too.”Desai said her novel addresses this directly. “We all know the unbelievably racist things Indians say and think,” she said, describing a scene in which “Sunny’s mother… starts saying these things out loud and Sunny has to shush her.” “I wanted to write about that,” Desai said, “both the ugliness of it, but also the humour and absurdity of it.”Desai also suggested the book may be the last “in depth” work she writes about India, noting that her visits have declined since the death of her father, Ashvin Desai, in Delhi in 2008. “I’ve now lived in the States a very long time. And I knew that this was perhaps my last chance to really write a deep book about India because I was still coming back. During the process of writing this book, my father was still alive. I was keeping notes. I was going home. And I knew that I would lose the ability to write about India. So I wanted to write one last book in this way, in this depth,” she said.
