Tishani Doshi Quotes

With me and India it's all about leaving and returning. Madras is home. It's a very complicated relationship. When you are away too long you get homesick, and when you are there too long you are sick of home.

In truth isn't it a waiting that never ends like the chasm between the cycles of the world Between separation and union longing and abandonment And somewhere between the waning isn't this what we're left with the music of uncertainty the aftertaste of rain

But it is difficult to rewrite the story of your life, especially when you have been telling it one way for so long.

Ultimately, we will lose each other to something. I would hope for grand circumstance—death or disaster. But it might not be that way at all. It might be that you walk out one morning after making love to buy cigarettes, and never return, or I fall in love with another … It might be a slow drift into indifference. Either way, we’ll have to learn to bear the weight of the eventuality that we will lose each other to something. So why not begin now, while your head rests like a perfect moon in my lap …? Why not reach for the seam in this … night and tear it, just a little, so the falling can begin? Because later, when we cross each other on the streets, and are forced to look away, when we’ve thrown the disregarded pieces of our togetherness into bedroom drawers and the smell of our bodies is disappearing like the sweet decay of lilies—what will we call it, when it’s no longer love?

Six months of waiting. Six months of understanding the inner workings of faith and the outer spheres of the world. Six months of time: hundreds and millions of awakening seconds and sleeping minutes. Six months of aching stretched out like the Sahara: lickety-split, snippety-snip, jiggity-jig Six months of fading and blooming, stopping and starting. Six months of love: a breath, a deluge, an eternity; a single flake of snow.

Ode to Drowing" If rain signals the lover’s return then I am lost in the desert burning like the brain fever bird looking for images of you through mesquite and teak Because there’s no sign of you or what I know to be as you only clouds adrift in a vanquished sky like vines of throbbing arms and mouths drinking at the shore intoxicated with the night

Being is simple, being somebody is complicated.

We talk about the past as if it were a country we could return to any time we wanted.

How it is only ever through the will of nose, bronchiole, trachea, lung, that breath outpaces any sadness of tongue.

Even the sea is lifeless - a sheet of metal suspended out of the sky's head like an exhausted grey tongue.

Everywhere, shit and spit and jasmine and marigold. And somewhere in the distance, the sea.

The whole day feels threadbare and alone.