A God at the Door

Tishani Doshi is an award-winning poet and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent. She was born in Madras, India, in 1975. She received her masters in writing from the Johns Hopkins University in America and worked in London in advertising before returning to India in 2001 to work with the choreographer Chandralekha, with whom she performed on many international stages. An avid traveller, she has been trekking in the Ethiopian Bale Mountains, visited Antarctica with a group of high-school students, and documented the largest transvestite gathering in Koovakam. She has written about her travels in newspapers such as the Guardian, International Herald Tribune, The Hindu and the Financial Times. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 2001. In 2006, she won the All-India Poetry Competition, and her debut collection, Countries of the Body (Aark Arts), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers (Bloomsbury, 2010), was longlisted for the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the Hindu Fiction Award, and has been translated into several languages. Her second poetry collection, Everything Begins Elsewhere, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2012. Fountainville: new stories from the Mabinogion was published by Seren in 2013. Her third collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2018. Her second novel, Small Days and Nights (Bloomsbury, 2019), was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her fourth collection, A God at the Door (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Tishani Doshi currently lives on a beach between two fishing villages in Tamil Nadu with her husband and three dogs, and sometimes moonlights as a dancer. For more information, see her website www.tishanidoshi.com

11 Mandala
12 Pilgrimage
13 Creation Abecedarian
14 The Stormtroopers of My Country
15 My Loneliness Is Not the Same as Your Loneliness
18 A Blue Mormon Finds Herself Among Common Emigrants
20 Why the Brazilian Butt Lift Won’t Save Us
22 Every Unbearable Thing
25 Advice for Pliny the Elder, Big Daddy of Mansplainers
26 Roots
28 In a Dream I Give Birth to a Sumo Wrestler
30 Instructions on Surviving Genocide

37 The Comeback of Speedos
38 Face Exercises for Marionette Lines
39 I Found a Village and in it Were All Our Missing Women
41 Contagion
42 Tree of Life
44 Homage to the Square
46 I Don’t Want to be Remembered by My Last Instagram Post
48 Everyone Has a Wilting Point
50 Tigress Hugs Manchurian Fir
51 Poems Lull us into Safety
52 After a Shooting at a Maternity Clinic in Kabul
54 They Killed Cows. I Killed Them.

59 Cell
60 Self
61 Collective
62 Nation
63 Species
64 Cosmos

67 The Coronapocalypse Will Be Televised
69 Variations on Hippo
72 A Dress is Like a Field
74 Postcard to My Mother-in-Law who at 16 is Chasing Brigitte Bardot in St Tropez
75 Together
76 Many Good & Wonderful Things
78 I Carry My Uterus in a Small Suitcase
79 Bacterium
80 A Possible Explanation as to Why We Mutilate Women & Trees, which Tries to End on a Note of Hope
82 What Mr Frog Running Away from Marilyn Monroe Taught Me About #MeToo
84 Tiger Woman
85 We Will Not Kill You. We’ll Just Shoot You in the Vagina

89 Microeconomics
91 Macroeconomics
92 This May Reach You Either as a Bird or Flower
93 Petard
94 Rotten Grief
96 October Fugue
97 Do Not Go Out in the Storm
100 Listening to Abida Parveen on Loop I Understand Why I Miss Home and Why It Must Be So
102 End-of-Year Epiphany in the Holiday Inn
104 It Has Taken Many Years to See My Body
107 Hope Is the Thing
109 Survival

113 Notes
118 Acknowledgements