past simple 11




			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 101^st 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.

					pastsimple