Tishani Doshi

If dancing by day and writing by night seems fairytale like, it’s because a lot of Tishani Doshi’s life is like that. Five years after the half-Welsh half-Gujarati Tishani returned to hometown Chennai to write, she’s sharing the stage with literary heavy weights like Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka and Margaret Atwood at festivals round the world. “Countries of the Body’ her collection of poems has won poetry’s prestigious Forward Prize (the poetic equivalent of the Booker). And next year will see the launch of her debut novel ‘The Pleasure Seekers’ by power house publishers Bloomsbury.

Talk to Tishani and it’s hard not to be charmed. She’s earnest and speaks with a thoughtful, wonderfully deliberate intonation. Slim and fair with kohl rimmed eyes and long shiny hair, Tishani would do any book promoter proud. “Tishani looks lovely”, publisher Alexandra Pringle of Bloomsbury tells me when I mail her a photograph of the two together at the recent lit-fest in Mumbai. The meeting with Pringle, like Doshi’s introduction to dance and indeed much of the other exciting things in her life was serendipitous, when the two shared bed and breakfast lodging during the Haye literary festival. Pringle, who was so impressed with the prose and poetry Doshi showed her, got back to London and contacted Doshi’s literary agent, to sign her on in a successful scout for new talent process that will culminate next year in the publication of Tishani’s The Pleasure Seekers

Certainly there is something about Tishani that gets her powerful patrons. Take Peter Florence for instance, the organizer for the prestigious Guardian festivals. Florence who has an impeccable track record for spotting talent (having prompted Arundhati Roy long before she was recognized by the Booker) put the young debut poet on the same stage as Margaret Atwood and Seamus Heaney, as each read 7 minutes of their poetry to an audience 1200 people strong. That was last year. This year she shared the same forum as Nigerian poet Soyinka at Cartagena in Colombia.

And then there was the legendary Chandralekha who taught Tishani, when she was over 70 and Tishani 25 years, how to dance. “Come and meet me”, the Chandralekha asked the young Doshi five years ago, in a meeting in Chennai, soon after Tishani had come came back from a John Hopkins, USA. “And six months later, we were in Taiwan performing to an international stage and I was a dancer”, Doshi marvels. “It was like the best love affair”, she reminiscences of her bond with Chandralekha,” I had gone all over the world but never had this quality of relationship. For me it was being in contact with somebody who you could look up to at many levels, not just as a guru “. Dance for Tishani became a way of exploring the possibilities of her body, possibilities she never knew existed.

For a writer working ‘in great patches of solitude’ dance turned out surprisingly , “rewarding at a different level”. Like Tishani’s other passion – travel, and there’s been much of that for this young bag packer – from Ladakh to as far away as the South Pole. “The only thing I’m greedy about is travel”, she confesses,” anybody would say come and I’d go. If I can afford it, I just go”. Mostly the journeys turned out well but sometimes, like on a solo trip to the Greek islands, they didn’t feel all that great. Still as Tishani reasons “I don’t want to be too comfortable. I don’t want to have a house and two kids – for me that’s not where my writing comes out from .I want to experience somebody else life I want to be a fly on the wall “. It’s a creative position comes with its own particular perils. In a humorous take on singledom Tishani writes for a daily on ‘The Rains have come and you’re not married ? ‘. “It was borne out of frustration that piece “, she admits “The whole thing about being a 31 year old unmarried Indian woman - everybody is concerned about your well being – why aren't you getting married – you can be a writer and be married at the same time .I’d had it up to here if I have to hear about the M word anymore “, she exclaims. But the feature was “, she continues seriously “a deeper thing to examine the urban Indian woman … she has so many possibilities ..she can be a many armed goddess. Why not? Let’s do it.”

At 31, poet, traveler, dancer and writer Tishani Doshi is as many armed as many armed can be.
She talks about the differences of writing poetry and prose, the difficulties she faced in writing a novel “When I started writing I realized I hate narrative. I didn't want to write ‘He got up and opened the door’. But you have to write that sometimes , because otherwise the reader doesn’t know how it happened.” Doshi’s favorite writers like Marquez or Michael Ondaatje are not the most sequential writers either “what I love about them is their language – sometimes it doesn’t matter if you don t know what’s going on “. Ultimately though she analyses, “a novel requires great stamina because you have to hold the entire thing in your head , like a 100,000 words at a time ” . A poem is different,” like a little jewel”. Sadly today poetry has become a marginal activity, with none of the following a poet like Pablo Neruda inspired. “80,000 coal miners would come to his readings “, she exclaims.

But then, as she concludes “ultimately you have to do what you love – if you want to make money you become an investment banker or something”

This feature appeared in the Deccan Herald April 2007