TiSHANI DOSHI

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. ‘This novel came out of a really deep wound of not belonging. For a long time I loved being the outsider and thought that it was important to my work as a writer. Now I think that being an outsider wherever you go comes at a cost, because you never feel truly that you belong to something.’ 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

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

GIRL IN A BOX
PORTRAITS BY RICCARDO CAVALLARI