‘We’re encouraged to numb pain’

“If we understood loss better, perhaps we could accept it better, and understand that loss and reclamation are opposite sides of the same coin,” says Tishani Doshi, whose book of poems, Everything Begins Elsewhere, was launched in Chennai recently. She lets us into the story of beginnings and elsewheres, two ideas, she admits she’s “obsessed with”. Akhila Krishnamurthy listens in.

What inspired the title?

Some years ago, I discovered Scottish poet John Burnside, and in his exquisite memoir, A Lie About my Father, I came across this sentence: “Everything begins elsewhere, he knows that: dawn, Christmas, love, beauty, terror, the wind, the sky, the horizon, his own soul. It begins far in the woods, or out on some windy field by the sea.” As soon as I read it, I knew I’d found the title for my next collection. If there’re two themes I’m obsessed with — they are the idea of beginnings and elsewheres.

There’s an underlying tone of loss and longing in the poems. Was writing a catharsis?

Loss is the overarching theme of the collection — loss of love, homeland, life. And yet, the act of writing poems is against this loss. It’s the idea that, through vanishing, we can become whole again. This is something I truly believe in, and also explore in dance. When people say, “Oh you’re not very optimistic, are you?”, I think they are not seeing the poems, not hearing in them the underling imperative that is whispering, urging, to take back, possess.

Was the poem The Art of Losing inspired by this thought?

I wrote The Art of Losing because I think we’re not encouraged to embrace loss, yet we know it’s inevitable. We’re encouraged to numb pain, to “get over it”. This constant, zippy happiness expected of us, is horrific. If we understood it better, perhaps we could accept it better, and understand that loss and reclamation are two sides of the same coin.

Your frame of mind when you wrote these poems?

They began when I was trekking in Bhutan a few years ago. I was struck by beautiful bridges I saw there, and prayer flags that adorned them. I learnt they were one of the first architectural structures, built to improve the way of the traveller, and that, to show kindness to a traveller was a way of improving your karma. As a person who travels widely, I was struck by the idea of erasing borders instead of creating them. That’s when the first poem came to me: how to build a bridge between past and future.

Is the liberated voice, acting, performing, observing in these poems close to yours?

It’s a mystery. In some poems, I feel very close to the voice, I understand where it’s coming from. In others, it’s not my own, and I don’t know where it came from. I suppose writing is a way of trying to discover the voice, which is always changing.

Do you have reference points, or do your poems always plant themselves in your head?

Oh — always reference points — an image, a song, a dog barking, a visual picture, a line of something I’ve read, a scene from a movie… Sometimes I forget what the origin was, because it spins off in a different direction… on other times, it stays true to the initial trigger. Either way — it’s an interesting arc.

Was it easy to travel in the poems to Wales and back to Madras?

Not only easy, but necessary. Poems are bridges themselves. I tried writing the sestina Memory of Wales for many years, but somehow it never came together. I knew I wanted to talk about a recurring memory — almost a dream — of this playground down the road from my grandma’s house in Wales. This became the central vision where everything — time, memory, summer, life — unfolded. Only when I entered this space, could I imagine encountering my mother as a child by the swing, meet her, child-to-child, in a different dimension, watch her grow, change, move to India abandoning her home and playground, and, I understood something about myself that was the key to the poem.

Is Chandralekha, the dancer, to whom this book is dedicated, your fuel for great expression?

Chandra’s a huge influence, but the reason I dedicated this book to her is, I see this as a continued conversation with the poems in Countries of the Body, my first book. Those were perhaps more visceral, while these newer ones are more meditative, going beyond the physical into ideas of space and time. But these are explorations that began when I started dancing, so it’s inevitable I go back to the stone floors of her dance theatre, where so many conversations happened, ideas shared and inspiration given.

What inspired Adulterous Citizen, that ends with: “to lie in the folds on one city while listening to the jagged, carnal breaths of another”?

It’s more about being a writer, that makes me feel I’ve got one foot in, and the other out. The notion of the adulterous citizen was taken from Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City. He writes, “When I’m in one city, I am dreaming of the other. I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing.” This straddling of worlds, a great privilege but also cause for confusion and fragmentation, is a state I understand well. The relationships we have with a place are as potent as love affairs — there’s a sense of fidelity. When I’m away from Chennai for too long, it’s not homesickness I feel, but a sense of betrayal.