The Music of SOLITUDE

They are solitary-they live all by themselves.  They have met at a juncture in their lives where special friendships like theirs are unheard of in a city like Delhi. Aranya and Ishan are neighbours.  She is impulsive, anarchic and fiercely feminist while he is gentle, Asensitive, orderly and believes in the institution of family, even though he has no one to call his own. In the course of her thoughts, Aranya moves from one Delhi to another, to finally settle in a trans-Yamuna residential complex, the older Delhis glimmering on the other side of the river. Ishan, on the other hand, is deeply spiritual and draws strength from his Danish guide in the Himalayas. In the autumn of their lives, Aranya and Ishan banter about time, existentialism, changing cities, food, music and people in general. They think aloud about living and dying. Sometimes they speculate on whether what they are doing amounts to biding time.  A novel about sharing solitudes and growing old in a city keenly private and aggressively collective at once, Krishna Sobti's The Music of Solitude is a portrait of changing times and the story of a beautiful romance that thrives on companionship.