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A review by quicksilvermoon
Small Days and Nights by Tishani Doshi
4.0
quicksilvermoon
The pandemic continues to drag on, burning up all the adrenaline that kept me going, and I am left in the ashes of two and a half emotions. There’s the boredom, the grinding, crushing, claustrophobic weight of listless days spent at home, punctuated by a predictable list of sisyphean chores. There’s the grief, both for the mundane (cancelled plans, lost opportunities and watching petty little men with small minds and narrow vision dismantle the pretty little things I built with my team) and the momentous (all the people I’ve lost in the past two years and the people with whom my time is running out). Sometimes the fog lifts and allows me to experience gratitude, for parents restored to health, for the loving partner, for my beautiful friends, for steady work, and books to read. I picked up this one at the 2019 DLF when I had to moderate a panel featuring Tishani Doshi, and only now did I get around to reading it. Fleeing a failed marriage, Grace returns to her childhood home in South India for her mother’s funeral and learns she has inherited a dilapidated mansion on a secluded strip of land by the beach, and a sister with Down’s Syndrome she never knew she had. She too, must struggle with heartbreak, loss, tedium and helplessness in ways she never anticipated. Hmm. How to describe this book? It’s as if Arundhati Roy and JM Coetzee, and Chitra B Divakaruni hung out and watched Rain Man together on a hot summer’s night. The writing is what VS Naipaul would cruelly, unfairly dismiss as ‘feminine tosh’, for it is lavish and morose and sentimental in a way a cisgendered man could never manage. Doshi doesn’t apologise for her characters, doesn’t sugarcoat their reality but also remembers to notice the beauty amidst the ugliness. This isn’t a fun read. But it made me feel a little less alone when I read it.
The pandemic continues to drag on, burning up all the adrenaline that kept me going, and I am left in the ashes of two and a half emotions. There’s the boredom, the grinding, crushing, claustrophobic weight of listless days spent at home, punctuated by a predictable list of sisyphean chores. There’s the grief, both for the mundane (cancelled plans, lost opportunities and watching petty little men with small minds and narrow vision dismantle the pretty little things I built with my team) and the momentous (all the people I’ve lost in the past two years and the people with whom my time is running out). Sometimes the fog lifts and allows me to experience gratitude, for parents restored to health, for the loving partner, for my beautiful friends, for steady work, and books to read. I picked up this one at the 2019 DLF when I had to moderate a panel featuring Tishani Doshi, and only now did I get around to reading it. Fleeing a failed marriage, Grace returns to her childhood home in South India for her mother’s funeral and learns she has inherited a dilapidated mansion on a secluded strip of land by the beach, and a sister with Down’s Syndrome she never knew she had. She too, must struggle with heartbreak, loss, tedium and helplessness in ways she never anticipated. Hmm. How to describe this book? It’s as if Arundhati Roy and JM Coetzee, and Chitra B Divakaruni hung out and watched Rain Man together on a hot summer’s night. The writing is what VS Naipaul would cruelly, unfairly dismiss as ‘feminine tosh’, for it is lavish and morose and sentimental in a way a cisgendered man could never manage. Doshi doesn’t apologise for her characters, doesn’t sugarcoat their reality but also remembers to notice the beauty amidst the ugliness. This isn’t a fun read. But it made me feel a little less alone when I read it.