Tishani Doshi














Summer in Madras

How to be Happy in 101 Days

Coastal Life

Saturday on the Scores
















Summer in Madras

Everyone in the house is dying.
Mother in an air-conditioned room
cannot hear as rivers break their dams
against her nerves. Father stalks verandas,
offering pieces of his skin to the rows of lurid
gulmohars. Husband tries to still the advancing
armies of the past by stuffing his ears with desiccated
mango husks. And brother? Brother is most lackadaisical of all.
He opens the door. Takes death’s umbrella. Taps it this way and that. Sings.










How to be Happy in 101 Days

Resist stone. Learn to manoeuvre
against the heat of things. Should
you see butterflies gambol in the air,
resist the urge to pinch their wings.
Look for utilitarian values of violence.
Use the knife lustily: to peel the mango’s
jealous skin, to wean bark and cut bread
for the unending hunger of stray dogs.
Renounce your house. Take just one
object with you. Slip it in your pocket.
Marvel at how a simple thing can
connect the variegated skeins of time.
On the 99th day, you must surrender
this object, but until then feel free
to attach sentiment to it. Find a forest
to disappear in. Look for thirst-quenching
plants. Rub the smooth globes of their roots
in your palms before biting into their hearts.
Lean backwards and listen to the slippery
bastard of your own arrhythmic heart.
Remind yourself that you feel pain,
therefore you must be alive. Stain
your fingers with ink. Set out into
the world and prepare to be horrified.
Do not close your eyes. Catch a fish.
Smash its head and watch the life gasp
out of it. Spit the bones into sand.
Offer your bones to someone.
Clavicles are the chief seducers
of the human body. When you hear
the snap, allow yourself a shudder.
Find a tree to hold all the faces
of your dead—their hair, their rings.
Hang their solemn portraits from branches.
If you cannot find happiness in death
you will not complete the course.
Give your child to a stranger.
If you are childless, offer the person
you love best. Do not ask about possible
ways of mistreatment. Trust it will be terrible.
Climb a mountain. Feel how much larger
the world is when you’re alone. Think
of your child. Try to find words or images
to explain your loss. Give up. Stand on your head.
Grow dizzy on your own blood.
Spend the night in a cemetery.
Keep still and listen to the dead chortle.
Tattoo your face. Do not bother with stars.
They are for romantics (who are not happy
people). Learn to steer through darkness.
If you’re attacked, spread your legs and say,
Brother, why are you doing this to me?
When you approach a crossing in the woods,
take the one instinct tells you to take.
When you are knee-deep in mud turn
around and try the other path in order
to understand how little you know
of yourself. In a few days you’ll be ready
for the sublime. Before that, meditate
in a cave. If a tigress finds you offer her
the meat of your thighs, give her cubs
your breasts. If tigers are already extinct,
wait for some other hairy, hungry creature
to accost you. It will happen.
It is important for you to lose both
body and mind. Dig a hole in the earth
with your hands. Place your treasured
object in it and thrill at how little
it means to let it go. On the 101st
day, search out a mirror. Strip
away your clothes. Inch up to
your reflection. Much of the success
of this course will depend on what you see.










Coastal Life

It takes years of coastal living to understand
that you are the lifeless Malacca snake
discarded from the fisherman’s net,
buried in sand. That you are connected
to the million ephemera wings, clogging
the balcony drains. That seasons will bring
rotting carapace of turtle, decapitated
tree frogs, acres of slain mosquitoes.
All night the electricity surges and stops,
smothering wires and fuses, while lizards
plop. The resident mouse leaves imprints
of his teeth in banana skins, knowing
that soon, quite soon, he will succumb
to the poisoned biscuits we lay out for him.
Underground—roots of bougainvillea
delicately throttle the water pipes,
and as if sensing this menace, the dogs,
uneasy in sleep, move their frantic legs
against concrete in pursuit of a chicken.
Even the doorjambs, plump with rain,
know that something is coming to prise
open our caskets, unhinge us with salt.
We can latch all the windows and doors
but the sea still hears us, moves towards
our bodies, our beds—hoarsely,
under guidance of the moon, with green
and white frothy arms to garland us,
with pins to mount the beasts of our lives
against a filigreed blanket of rust.









Saturday on the Scores

You begin alone, soft-footed.
Hair, an unruly halo of hedgerows.
The wind stings your chest,
unleashes a street of neat,
gleaming houses. In the distance,
an ice cream stand, and the sea—
a beleaguered scrim of blue.
The body is just a cage,
but open one door, and the city
will offer her bones, shed colour.
Pull up the collar of your coat.
Tighten your belt. Know,
if you wanted, you could seduce
a stranger. Perhaps you have
already. He is walking beside you,
cigarette in hand, listening
to you talk of the tenderness
you feel towards the human ear;
how difficult it was, therefore,
for you to witness your mother’s
ears growing—not monstrously,
but enough to mar her indivisible
beauty. He admits to loving
his father more, to wanting children,
not necessarily with his wife.
You agree on nothing except
to walk till you have collected
enough lost objects to fill
the minutes of Mozart’s Requiem.
In the graveyard, one of you talks
of fire, how the soul must be endless.
The other wants a needle to thread roots
through the ligaments of the earth.
Each is an aberration. Must it rain?
Yes! Now, as the sky slips off
the girders, revealing a secret garden.
Light the rain falls. Light the dead.

















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