Everything Begins Elsewhere

Tishani Doshi

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Title Page
Note to the Reader
Dedication

I. Everything Begins

Dog in the Valley
Ode to Drowning
Lesson 1: Building a Bridge between the Past and the Future
Xuanzang Contemplates the Wonder of Sugar on His Return Home after Sixteen Years
Cutting Broccoli
Lesson 2: Learning Mudras in Bhutan
Turning Off the Lights
Falling, 1968
Seasons
Evensong
That Woman
Lesson 3: Stillness
The River of Girls
Ode to the Walking Woman
Another Man’s Woman

II. Elsewhere

Buffaloes
Michael Mangal’s Dream
After the Rains
Found Poem
Fisher-Price Men
Lesson 4: Zero, or Infinity (Ramanujan)
Evening on an Indian Railway Platform
The Dream
The Adulterous Citizen
The Immigrant’s Song
Madras Morning
Lesson 5: Saying Goodbye to Love in Butoh Class
Lines to a Lover from a Previous Century
The Magic of the Foot
Love Poem
Lesson 6: How Not to Age
Lament —I
Lament —II
Walking Around
Lesson 7: How to Dream a Beautiful Death
Homeland
Memory of Wales
The Art of Losing
Visiting My Parents in Summer
Love Poem Disguised as an Elegy
After the Dance

About the Author
Books by Tishani Doshi
Links
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks

I. Everything Begins

Everything begins elsewhere, he knows that: dawn, Christmas, love, beauty, terror, the wind, the sky, the horizon, his own soul. It begins far in the woods, or out on some windy field by the sea. He wants to be there, not here; he wants to be where things begin, and he is so close, he is so near.

JOHN BURNSIDE, A Lie About My Father

Dog in the Valley

Last night

I heard a dog

in the valley

puncturing the hills

with a sound

from a long

time ago.

It was the sound

of a man and woman

falling out of love,

the sound of a century

caught in the dark.

A deep-throated howl

made under stars,

made against death,

insisting there are drums

underground,

cymbals in the clouds,

a music that goes on and on

because someone

somewhere

is listening.

Ode to Drowning

is it or is it not

the cold monsoon

bearing the shape

of my dark lord,

speaking of his cruelty,

his going away?

NAMMALVAR

This is an ode

to be sung

in the latest hour of night

when rain clouds

have gathered

over shingled roofs

and blue-skinned gods

with magical flutes

seduce the virgins to dance

For there can be no love

without music

No rain

without peacocks

perched

in branches

of sandalwood trees

with plumes

of angels

and voices of thieves

pleading for their loves

to return

II.

If rain signals

the lover’s return

then I am lost

in the desert

burning

like the brainfever 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

III.

There are as many ways

of yearning

as there are ways for rain

to fall

slow

incessant

gentle

squalling

melancholy

warm

It’s that old idea

of drowning

in another to find the self

the compliance

that water gives in form

and depth

to something else

But what if the humming bees

are quiet

and the garlands of jasmine

have been laid out

to dry

How long to wait

for everything to turn

heavy with flower

washed of dirt

IV.

It’s desire after all

that spins us

Demands to be praised

as though it were new

like the stillness

before the first monsoon

when the hymen

of the earth

is torn into

and the brazen smell

of damp

fills the air

Must there be surprise

after we’ve thundered

and rolled

and appeased our thirst

when the silence returns

again

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

Lesson 1: Building a Bridge between the Past and the Future

The road is long. So do not mind the smallness of the present.

PRAJNADEVA IN A LETTER TO XUANZANG, CIRCA AD 645

I. SAMSARA — THE WORLD

“Journey long,” the teacher says,

so we go down, deep and deeper,

till we see ankles first, then feet.

And only after touching our heads

to the diamond back of the earth,

do we rise again, arched like curls

of river silk, emptying our souls

into the sky, forgetting the world.

II. DHAMMA — THE MEANS

We meet as lovers do, through births

and deaths, worn-down nubs of thigh

and breast, silent spaces of inadequacy.

“Come through the gates of drowning,”

the teacher says, so we cross with lotus

rafts and abandon them at the water’s edge

where love’s refrain is whispering: The world

begins and then it ends. Begins and ends again.

Xuanzang Contemplates the Wonder of Sugar on His Return Home after Sixteen Years

Here, on the roof of the world,

Xuanzang sees lights gleaming.

They could be monasteries,

or Arcadian kingdoms, or a palace

of drumbeats skirting the sands

of the great and vigilant Taklamakan.

They are something: sixteen years

and 10,000 miles away from home;

from cypress trees and hunts for treasure

in the Luo River. Xuanzang is old

and young now; keeper of the past,

bearer of the present.

He follows the bones of animals

laid out as beacons by caravans

carrying spice and indigo.

And when the dust storms rise,

wrapping their latticework of mirage

around the tamarisks,

he dreams terrible things:

of his elephant drowning,

his 657 manuscripts unfurling

like prayer flags,

scattering Sanskrit kisses

across the sky.

Was it so long ago he passed the Pamirs,

the Oxus, those mighty Bamiyan Buddhas?

When he cast himself down by the Bo tree

to weep? What was this new burning then,

spreading through the water tables

of his sandy body? Something miraculous —

those water reeds that produce honey

without bees. He reaches for it now,

deep in the folds of his travelling robes.

And it is like touching that sweetness

called childhood — a piece of nephrite jade

cradled in his river hands.

Cutting Broccoli

Between this moment and the next

there’s always space for a lover’s return,

though you may no longer weep for him,

or ache to lie down in the woods with him.

But say he chooses to appear on a Sunday

afternoon, when you’re walking upstairs

for lunch; cutting broccoli into perfect spears

while the rice in the cooker is boiling.

Would you ask first that he strip away

the layers of the past, the times you washed

together in darkness between whispered words

and the husky calls of nightfall’s birds.

Would you say how you’ve been waiting

for something to grow from the silence —

nothing phenomenal — just cracks of light

in the long doorways you’ve been walking through.

And now that he’s here, do you let him

stand in the house like a newborn god,

carrying the empty weight of sky

in his eyes, saying nothing is irreversible.

Do you offer your impermanent body

against the solid frame of the kitchen door,

allow him to fall easily — into the future —

knowing the moment never disappears.

Lesson 2: Learning Mudras in Bhutan

Here, in this room of Bhutanese elders,

I learn to catch my breath again, allow my fingers

to be shaped into lotus-flower offerings

to the sky. And when I can do this 108 times without

guidance, the woman behind me — cataract-beset,

toothless, wrinkled — who’s been picking stray flecks

of fleece off my back, touches me in a way you can’t;

gives me the food she hasn’t eaten all day, the words

she hasn’t spoken. So afterwards, it is almost easy.

To walk outside where the young monks are chewing

gum in the sun, listen to them scatter down stairways

like sparrows, point to the opening of space through

which I mean to escape. I want it to be graceful,

as she was, feather touches on your jacket and a jewel

in your hands. But when the light hits us from behind

the granite cliffs, all I can muster is to lie with you

on the monastery floor, guide your fingers to the door-

ways of my weary heart, so you can feel it too —

the ocean that travels with me; how it gathers and breaks,

gathers and breaks; like love, how it stills, then parts.

Turning Off the Lights

These walls are from yesterday.

Today, rain falls like history,

and trees speak of distant woes.

My father stands on a cliff

contemplating childhood.

By afternoon, the world has changed,

become smaller,

desolate.

All this is nothing —

these red leaves on autumn walks,

these planets hurtling from long ago.

Later, we may dream of fires

and singing.

The house will open her doors

for the dark, salty territory of night

to enter on wet footstep,

falcon wing.

My father comes in to turn off the lights.

Together, he says,

we must call in the lost,

breathe shape into all that is vanishing.

Falling, 1968

My mother arrives in India

breathless, leaning against

the airport railing, looking sad,

bereft, as though she’s never put

her head against the wind before.

It is Guy Fawkes Day, 1968.

The start of National Small Pox

Eradication Week. It has been raining;

cruel, historic, monsoon rain,

uprooting posts along the border,

where Pakistan, only 21, like her,

is drowning in silver cattle skulls,

locust dreams. My father,

standing on a cusp of sudden light,

waits like sin to watch her fall.

The rest of the world is falling, too:

students, Bedouins, lorry drivers,

in West Berlin, Amman, Ootacamund.

Throwing their Marxist lives into ideas

like liberation, like love.

My mother, moving across the air

of all this, must have known how falling

in love is something like dying after all.

Something the seas and sky evade

to survive the centuries.

Perhaps this is why she agrees to tumble

to the blackened chambers of the earth

like a virgin queen ant on her nuptial flight,

burying the snow-lit nights of her youth

in galleries of dust, blades of wing.

So later, after birthing kingdoms

from the gauze of her Celtic belly,

she can say she was the illumination

once — the slow possibility

of love in my father’s life.

Seasons

By October the reach of sky is complete.

Everything longs for escape —

the snow geese weaving their way south,

the pigs in the yard,

the leaves.

We are walking that line between the trees,

shameful in their half-foliage,

replete with desire.

Somewhere across the valley

there must be another life —

a woman drawing her children a bath,

a husband returned to this picture of wife.

If we believed in seasons

how easily we could hold to this:

this falling away and returning.

But we, who live

with only the heat and rain,

with perpetual dying —

we, who are impervious to birdsong,

we must imagine the sound of love

as something of a deafness —

a single vowel of longing scratched across the sky.

Evensong

after John Burnside

It’s moments like this

when the animals down by the river

are singing their lament for rain —

when fractured pieces of Canterbury

begin to show themselves in Madras

in cloisters and coconut husks

miracle windows of glass

It’s moments like this

I hear you on Pilgrims’ Stairs

pinning the day’s despair

to the underbelly of dusk

By nightfall

when the mosquitoes have retreated

and you’ve parted the skies

for cathedral spires to rise

you’ll have chanted our promise

of togetherness

repeated it like hollows worn in stone

But it is nothing —

this song of our communion

Less than what the animals share

as they walk to the riverbank in slow repair

stopping to lick each other’s wounds

No bonds to tie them

to the smell of certain skin

certain hair

That Woman

That woman is here again.

She’s found her way out

from under the stairs.

For centuries she’s been weeping

a song about lost men,

the disappearance of beauty,

disgrace.

Now she’s back in the world,

down by the traffic lights,

in the shade of trees,

hurrying to the parlour

to fix the crack in her face.

Don’t become that woman,

my mother said.

By which she meant,

don’t become that woman

who doesn’t marry

or bear children.

That woman who spreads her legs,

who is beaten, who cannot hold

her grief or her drink.

Don’t become that woman.

But that woman and I

have been moving together

for years,

like a pair of birds

skimming the water’s surface,

always close to the soft

madness of coming undone;

the dark undersides of our bodies

indistinguishable

from our reflections.

Lesson 3: Stillness

All morning I try to hold it —

the desperation of a fly

beating against glass,

a dog’s distant bark,

the dull throb of a lorry

winding its way up the hills.

By afternoon I think I’ve mastered it.

Nothing the world offers me

can be as complete or as full as this.

When I step into the light,

I have no song for the stones,

no thought for the grass.

I only want to remember

this long road,

this steady pulse,

which feels like love.

So when evening

feeds itself to night,

clearing the way

for frost or flood,

I’ll still be left with this —

the bright suffocation of flowers,

the weight of the day’s hours.

The River of Girls

i.m. India’s missing girls

This is not really myth or secret.

This murmur in the mouth

of the mountain where the sound