TiSHANI DOSHI

For Vogue India's June issue: a short lockdown diary on loneliness: "If you aren’t already in love with loneliness you must learn, and it will need practice. I’ve been practicing since I was a child. Whatever my sister was playing, I needed to be a part of it too. She’d say, “I’m going to play my game, you go play yours.” Shunned from my sister’s imaginative kingdom, I turned to story books, to painting tigers and elephants, and M shaped mountains with an orange sun peeking through. I wrote in leather-bound diaries that my father brought home from office—complaints, dreams, lists, and eventually, poems. I didn’t know it then, but this was world building 101. Over the years my reliance on this world deepened. Theatre, dance, music, film. I thought, as long as people are creating, we can never truly be alone. The terror of being alone is replaced with the terror of being forced to sit through gatherings in which you have little investment. You go because you’re told this is what people do. When you are back in your room, the door closed, you feel relief..."

People might not get paid outrageous amounts of money to play with a bat and ball in a stadium that is empty, but instead, it might be decided on the evaluation scale, that healthcare workers, teachers, and transportation workers deserve more. The notion of celebrity might get an overhaul. Carbon footprints will shrink, and once again, when a child sees an aeroplane in the sky, it might be cause for such excitement that they have to run into the street to marvel at this metal bird in the sky. In short, wonder, may be reinstituted. for the hindu photo: rohit chawla

Three New Poems published in The Brooklyn Rail - "Marcroeconomics" "Survival" "Mandala"

I'm on BBC Woman's Hour Talking about Small Days and Nights - From approx 11 minutes in....

"When you're writing fiction, reality is the myth."

PUBLISHED in RATTLE

SIX NEW POEMS PUBLISHED IN GRANTA ISSUE 151 MEMBRANES

TISSUE ‘Even if you could walk through the corridors / of your body, you would not know which rooms / to enter, which were full of stone.’

SELF ‘We all want to be / monuments but can’t help shoving our fingers / in dirt.’

COLLECTIVE ‘If you need proof you’re alive, regard the oar / in your hand.’

NATION ‘Understand friend, the conscience is a delicate broth. / Sometimes it feels good to be bad.’

SPECIES ‘Will it be for them / as it was for us, impossible to imagine oceans where there are now / mountains?’

COSMOS ‘Remember when we were / young and the end was a black hole at the edge of forever, / a million light years away.’

Interview in the Friday Magazine, Gulf News: “The poem stands by itself but when you put music and dance to it, [it morphs] into a different being; it’s like multiplying something you have created. The move from one type of discipline and genre to another is amazing. I’m really interested in [developing] a connection between the reader and myself, and performance allows me to do that.”

Interview in Kitaab: " What does it mean to be a caregiver in a country that disregards so many of its citizens with such disdain and violence? How to tell that story without sentimentality and how to reframe our structures of the family, what if our families disappoint us or let us down? These things weren’t things I set out wanting to write about. Honestly, all I wanted to do was to write about the abundance of dogs, but then other things crept in."

A New Essay in LitHub: "Time expands in solitude. Our days and nights took on a different rhythm at the beach. Carlo worked in a room down the corridor and I worked at a desk in our bedroom. He was in charge of lunch, I was in charge of dinner. We met for meals and walks but for many hours of the day, we sat behind doors in rooms by ourselves. Certain experiences took on religious proportions—swimming in the ocean with dolphins, observing a black-shouldered kite hover and swoop, hover and swoop. Interactions with bronze-back tree snakes, frogs, field mice, and our army of Indian beach dogs (at one uncontrollable point, we peaked at eighteen), came to form the backbone of our days. Our rule became: It’s okay if we talk to the dogs, but once the dogs start talking back to us, it’s time to go to the city."

SMALL DAYS AND NIGHTS IS A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLERS EDITOR'S CHOICE

Doshi’s coastal map is current, with its sea an “exhausted gray tongue.” And, most impressively, her focus never wavers. Starting with a corpse in a freezer box, “Small Days and Nights” turns a fragmented family into an overflowing one. An estranged father and deceased mother end up creating a legacy that includes a house, sisters, husbands and lovers, a village headman and his wife and those ever-breeding dogs --- NYT

Radio Interview with READING WOMEN

"This sense of the accretion of days and nights, building a life in a small place, the difficulties of that, and given that this is essentially a book about women and their lives – this sense of enshrining the small, the domestic, those traditionally “womanly” spaces – and giving them a larger platform, saying actually these stories can and should be part of the larger stories we tell about history and nation because they comprise it."

AN HONOUR TO BE IN CONVERSATION WITH NOBEL LAUREATE
WOLE SOYINKA AT NYU, ABU DHABI

"In dreamlike writing that overflows with emotion, Doshi investigates culture, caste, politics and ethics as Grace struggles to bring some semblance of meaning in her life." -- Library Journal

"As much about national as it is about familial belonging, this is a beautiful and angry book that challenges assumptions about what it means to be a woman, part of a family and part of a nation." - The Times Literary Supplement

*** NEW PAPERBACK COVER FOR THE BLOOMSBURY UK EDITION ***

SMALL DAYS AND NIGHTS IS ON THE TATA FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR SHORTLIST!

Talking about Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods for the Scottish Poetry Library Podcast

"I’m interested in life’s accretions. The washing of elbows, the chewing of food, the brushing of teeth… the repetitiveness of it, and how the monotony of all that is broken with unexpected shafts of beauty — an encounter with dolpins in the ocean, the electric blue of a kingfisher’s wings. These are in the novel, too — a real attention to the beauty of the world they inhabit. " PUNCH MAGAZINE

Talking bookshelves with ABC Australia's Kate Evans

I’m fascinated by the fact that we’re living in this age of information but are still no closer to explaining consciousness, that truth and fake news sit side by side, that change is happening at such a torpedo rate. I often think poetry is the one form I have that allows me to respond to all these things.

SMALL DAYS AND NIGHTS WILL BE PUBLISHED BY NORTON IN THE USA - JANUARY 2020

Small Days and Nights is more than a novel with a happy ending; it is a refreshing but deeply unsettling read that throws down the gauntlet to the self, answering several questions and leaving just as many unanswered. Far from alienating, you are helplessly pulled by the strong tides, into the microcosm that is Grace’s life.... While poignant and also deeply introspective, this fast-paced novel ... makes you take a deep breath when you finally put it down, as though you have been underwater all along.

Talking about Small Days & Nights on radio - Narratives Library

I talk to ABC radio's Sarah L'Estrange about sisters, poetry & the kingdom of dogs in Small Days and Nights.

India is too complex and immense, too historically storied to attempt the "great Indian novel". "I wanted to write the Great Paramankeni Novel. Or at least, the Small But Relevant Paramankeni Novel." And, so, she has and it is electrifying. The Sydney Morning Herald

Fiction that chooses the domestic for its sphere, especially fiction populated by women is routinely considered narrow, feeble, written for women. Yet the battles for power and control in the domestic sphere and in the community in the 'small days' of this novel, are what shape the fabric of life ..." ANURADHA ROY, THE INDIAN EXPRESS

Small Days and Nights is a novel about contemporary India in the best sense. It’s not a literary Lonely Planet guide to inequality, women’s experience of public space, or the challenges of caring for a person with disabilities in the “third world"—even though all these concerns are at the heart of the story. Instead, Doshi’s writing is lit by palpable rage as well as visceral affection, often for the same things. Raw injustice is not always harnessed into forgiveness and if situations jolt us into questions, we do not always have the comfort of answers. MINT LOUNGE

In this book if you've noticed, the men are peripheral characters, it's the women who are central and build a life together. I'm interested in how they develop those relationships, how women can support other women. Grace takes on this role of being a caregiver without knowing anything about it and it's almost too much for her to do alone. So rather than saying, Let's find her a husband, I was more interested in whether she could do it differently."

Her first “proper” public poetry reading – as opposed to bookshop audiences swelled by “blood or friendship”, as she once put it – was at the Hay festival in 2006. She was on stage in front of 1,200 people, reading alongside Seamus Heaney and Margaret Atwood. “It was pretty stellar,” she laughs. “But that is the great thing about poetry. One minute you’re doing that and the next you’re reading to five people in a basement. And both events are always worthwhile.”

Ideas flow over across forms. These things are fluid and work themselves out. I wrote the poems first because they seemed more urgent, and they require less stamina. It takes longer for me to find my way into a novel, and it’s harder for me to stay there. Small Days and Nights and Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods share many themes, and these are not new themes, they’ve been popping up since I first started writing. Writers have obsessions. We return to them like cream buns.

"I have a few people I show work to – a couple of writer friends, my husband, my agent. By and large I keep things to myself until it’s published. As for critics, I’ve always loved Shirley Jackson’s letter to a snippy reader: “Dear Mrs White, if you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree.” Interview in the New Indian Express

"WE WILL NOT KILL YOU. WE'LL JUST SHOOT YOU IN THE VAGINA." NEW POEM PUBLISHED IN THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW

"Doshi hinges her story on the everyday decisions people have to make within the context of much larger issues of nation, family, politics and generation when the narrator moves from America back to modern India." Observer booksellers' summer reading

I think the idea of nurture as a way of mending oneself is available to us all. For Grace, she is torn between freedom and duty, but she understands that by tending to her sister, the house, the garden, the army of pariah dogs, she is tending to herself, and more. She is finding her place. It is an uncertain place, but it is the place she is given, and that she claims. Part of her trajectory as a character is also to struggle between a fierce independence and a realisation that she cannot manage alone. That however much people disappoint us, we still need them.

In Australia's SA Weekend, Small Days and Nights receives a 4 star review " Life is colourful and free but how safe is she, on a secluded beach in a community in which her presence breeds gossip and resentment? It can be close to idyllic, but never gets there and Grace, the acerbic and free-spirited narrator, tells a complex, nuanced story of struggle and loss." Penelope Debelle

"What you see in Indian streets is always dichotomy – in one corner a beggar sharing her pakora with a street dog, in the other a kid throwing a dog off a balcony just for fun. Dogs for me represent not just a wildness, a refusal to be tamed, but a sturdiness, which is needed to survive this environment. The astuteness to align themselves to certain bipeds, to begin on the periphery and slowly work their way in, dissolving boundaries, marking their territory. My husband and I howl with our dogs on the beach when we go on walks with them and those howls are as ancient and ever-resounding as those drums. They tell our story, and it is the rarest love I have ever known." UNBOUND

The novel revolves around duty and freedom, the ways in which family relations and obligations are defined and tested. ‘Beautiful landscapes can very quickly become dangerous. I enjoyed working that tension into the novel.’ The novel was inspired by the story of Arthur Miller and Inge Morath’s son Daniel, who was institutionalised with Down’s Syndrome in the 1960s and effectively forgotten. Doshi’s personal experience with a differentlyabled sibling informs the book, as does grappling with being an outsider. --- Sandeep Parmar in Mslexia

Small Days and Nights features an imperfect protagonist who faces entrenched political and cultural challenges, and without much fuss, works to survive them. In its lyrical, deconstructed form, the novel tells the story of big things that happen in small places. The things which deteriorate over time while still thriving, ready to “bludgeon you with their aliveness." HELTER SKELTER

I think of Rilke in his Letters To A Young Poet, he talks about how important it is for writers to befriend their solitude.... Sometimes the companionship we seek, in reality does not match our expectations and we are left disappointed.

Carlo and I talk about our books "Mappillai" and "Small Days and Nights" and some of the overlapping themes -- dogs, belonging, the sea. I talk about how growing up in Madras, the sea was the lifeline, the sense of coming and going & Carlo talks about how his grand dream of riding in on an elephant for our wedding was dashed and how he got a bullock cart instead, how memory is a traitor and how the grumpy Italian in Small Days has nothing to do with him!

"Radiantly written, with a couple of interludes in Venice where Grace's father lives, this superb novel from Doshi (Orange-prize longlisted for The Pleasure Seekers) ranges over family secrets, trying to do the right thing, and the sheer contingency of life in all its richness and uncertainty." THE SUNDAY TIMES

"Small Days and Nights is about disjunction, dislocation and the failure to meet impossible ideals of nationhood, womanhood and parenthood. The title is surely ironic, because this is a concise novel of staggering depth...In its vivid setting, the novel is not exactly a paean to modern India so much as a piercing Munchian howl of grief." THE OBSERVER

"The drama of the story is embedded in our protagonist’s need to recover something that time and family have denied her, and through which she can redeem something like a sense of purpose. Unlike the redemptions offered by popular cinema, here characters swim to shore while trapped in a web of big and small abandonments and betrayals, trying to weave friendship into the semblance of an anchor." THE HINDU

"No matter which part of India you live in – whether it’s rural or urban, if you are a woman – you are thinking about safety issues. There is no place that is safe.... I want to stress that imagined fears for women are as real as the real fears. We cannot separate them or be rational about it, because, I mean, look at the news…"

Of course, I think all my characters have something of me in them. Grace is not really someone that I feel close to me though, strangely. There’s an aloofness to her and I suppose that’s how I created her, but I do understand many of her concerns — the questions of hybridity, of whether or not to have children, of caring for a differently-abled sibling, of isolation and coastal life — I think I’ve inhabited all those zones, so I am speaking from inside the skin, but I am a much more optimistic person than her, and she is probably braver than I am.

"When family or religion or caste or position in society are removed – when all those crutches are gone and you are simply singularly moving through the world – whom do you choose for your family and support? Whom do you belong to? This is Grace’s journey."

An intense meditation on solitude, on a semi-moored life...It is a sort of feminist utopia. And it is as though Grace has paused the narrative of her life and segued into this innately resistive existence. SCROLL

Small Days and Nights is a book with a big heart. And, it is the perfect book to begin summer with. Quiet, gentle, poignant and powerful, Tishani Doshi’s story of Grace and her sister Lucia, or Lucy, is one that lingers on long after you have finished reading it. It has all the ingredients needed in a family saga—love, loss, betrayal, secrets and one that is satisfyingly complicated. THE WEEK

'Tishani Doshi brings all her skills as one of the world's best poets to this lovely, beguiling, brilliant novel. Run, don't walk to your nearest bookseller.'
GARY SHTEYNGART

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‘This is a glorious book of immense power and beauty. I can’t stop thinking of Grace and Lucy and their band of dogs.’
KAMILA SHAMSIE
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'Every sentence in this achingly beautiful book carries multiple meanings that resonate across the pages. Tishani Doshi uses language like a blade, cutting through our defenses to illuminate what it means to love, and forgive, and truly exist in the life we have.'
MAAZA MENGISTE
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'A beautiful gem of a book full of heartbreak and joy. A deep exploration of what it is to be within family and what it is to occupy your own skin and the ebb and flow between the two.'
NAYOMI MUNAWEERA

Small Days and Nights has a beautifully restrained voice. I found myself reading it compulsively, drawn through the book on a knife edge. She manages humour in the saddest of moments, and tension in the quietest.’
EVIE WYLD, Jury of Ondaatje Prize

‘An astonishing novel that is beautifully written but underpinned by a quiet simmering anger about injustice and unrealistic expectations of a family – and of life in contemporary India.’
PETER FRANKOPAN, Jury of Ondaatje Prize