Memory Games

In The Pleasure Seekers (Penguin India,Rs 499),poet and dancer Tishani Doshi’s debut novel,Sian Jones,a cream-skinned girl with a strict Calvinist upbringing from Wales comes to India with the intention of marrying Babo Patel,a Gujarati boy with “jhill mill teeth” based in Madras. They had met in London,where Babo had gone as a student; their covenant is to spend the first two years of their marriage in India,but at the end of it Sian decides to stay back. “We know about people coming to India for spirituality but I had never read anything about a westerner coming here,looking for love,” says Doshi.

The story is based on her parents,the “original pleasure seekers” as she describes them in the dedication. “I did not grow up with lots of stories so I had to make them up. It takes off from their lives but a lot of it is fiction,” says Doshi,35. A memoir is risky,she says,being so inconveniently close,so the book turned out to be an “alternative history”. The probing was gentle,the narrative relying more on the “beauty present in wisps of memory”. “With the imagination at play,you can tell the truth,and say it better,” she adds.

Dance gave the Chennai-based Doshi the discipline necessary to become a writer. It was 2001,and she had just come back after completing her masters in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University. Her review of a book of poems by the noted danseuse Chandralekha brought forth an opportunity to meet the latter. “I was mortified,she seemed so intimidating,” Doshi recollects. Still,Chandralekha became “not just a guru figure but my best friend,” she says. She gained from the open house of writers,filmmakers and sculptors who gathered at Chandralekha’s house too; the latter treasured her as a “non-dancer,an open slate”. Doshi was one of the two dancers in Sharira,Chandralekha’s last piece,a 65-minute non-stop exposition on femininity.

For now,Doshi is happy to be back in the world of poems,a medium that is “more containable” (her first collection,Countries of the Body,came out in 2006). She looks forward to living like a nomad for a year,travelling with the book. “I haven’t worn a watch for the last 15 years. I guess I don’t like to be reminded of time,” she sighs.