‘I Don’t Feel like an Overnight Sensation’

Writer Tishani Doshi speaks of creating her own luck, her debut novel and life as a ‘pleasure seeker’.

Writer Tishani Doshi speaks of creating her own luck, her debut novel and life as a ‘pleasure seeker’.

It’s easy to envy Tishani Doshi. She’s beautiful, undeniably. She won the Forward Poetry Prize, poetry’s most prestigious award, for her very first collection of poems, Countries of the Body. She worked with the ‘rebel dancer’ Chandrelekha during her last years. And she has the likes of Salman Rushdie and Louis de Bernieres vouching for her debut novel, The Pleasure Seekers. Most of all, you envy the new darling of the publishing industry for being the real ‘pleasure seeker’, quitting a 9-5-job because she “didn’t like being told what to do” and going on to do the things that bring her the most joy. A conversation:

At 34, you have a spectacular CV. Is this luck or part of some grand plan?

You know, my first agent used to keep telling me that you don’t want to get a big advance. He felt this would just distract from the book. But I was like, why not, why can’t I have a little of what Zadie Smith has? What’s wrong with it? Anyway, I believe luck is largely created by us. Time and circumstances have played a huge role in what I have achieved. I don’t feel like an overnight sensation at all.

The Pleasure Seekers is based on your parents’ romance…

That’s the seed of the novel. I felt it was a unique love story, a reverse immigration of sorts. We are used to the other stories, the diasporic ones, of Indians going abroad. Here, my mother spent 40 years in another country. She came from an entirely different setting; her whole village could probably fit into an apartment building in Madras. But I was not interested in writing a memoir. We all like to imagine what our parents were before they became our parents. My parents seemed to me young, brave, romantic people. I decided to make their love, their rebellion the kernel of the story. That’s why the title The Pleasure Seekers: the idea of doing the thing that brings you the most joy. It was a wonderful starting point to write about love, home and family.

Is there a part of you in any of the characters?

There’s really a part of me in all the characters. You rely on memory, and project your preoccupations and obsessions in your writing. Love, home, loss, beauty, death are themes I’ll always explore as a writer.

Reports mention that you’re working on Sri Lankan cricketer Muralitharan’s biography.

No, I’m not writing it, I have just helped work on it. I did a lot of the research on the childhood part of his life. At one point, I was in Sri Lanka, with a journalistic idea of writing about racism in cricket. I met Murali then. I told him then that if he ever thought of doing a book, I would like to be part of the project. I couldn’t write the book itself, though, there are lots of technicalities, which needs a cricket expert. Anyway, my part ended three years ago.

You have your journalistic work, the novel and poetry. How difficult is it to switch from one to the other?

The wonderful thing about journalism is that you write it, send it, and it’s printed. It’s very quick. Whereas you sit with the novel for years on end. It’s daunting and depressing sometimes. It’s important to have the immediate thing—dance, journalism—that bring a sense of closure. But poetry is my first instinct, and now I’m back to it. With poetry, the vision is different from that of a novel. One is focused on a single poem and you don’t need to think of the larger collection.

Did the financial aspect of taking up writing as a career ever bother you?

It did worry me. At 20, I knew what I wanted to do, but how do you live doing what you love? I work as a journalist and a dancer, but perhaps I would have been better off working as a banker.

The Pleasure SeekersTishani Doshi