“The River of Girls”
“The River of Girls” encapsulates the antagonistic gender-linked misery that girls submit to due to their gender which is elicited by their carnal organs. Tishani Doshi expounds, "This is the sound of ten million girls/singing of a time in the universe/when they were born with tigers/breathing between their thighs;/when they set out for battle/with all three eyes on fire, their golden breasts held high/like weapons to the sky.” The river is emblematic of the countless girls that are underprivileged by their femaleness. As soon as one is born ,she is inaugurated to the river of distress. The ‘breathing tigers’ connote the sex organs that delimit girls. The proprietorship of womanly genitals qualifies the girls for skirmishes against the “three eyes on fire” that depicts limiting, horrendous muscularity.
“Lament-I”
Tishani Doshi engages the Richness versus Poverty binary when she writes, “When I see the houses in this city,/the electric gates and uniformed men/employed to guard the riches of the rich,/the gilded columns and gardens,/the boats on water, I wonder,/how to describe my home to you:/the short, mud walls,/the whispering roof, the veranda/on which my whole family/used to spread sheets and sleep./”The contrast between the city houses and the persona’s house illuminates the persistent class incongruences. The opulence depicted in the city houses is unattainable for deprived individuals who reside in scantily furnished, mud dwellings. The discrepancies are problematic for the poor individuals to accept for the speaker asserts, “I want to open my mouth like my son,/and swallow things whole—/feel water filling all the voids,/until I am shaped back into existence.” Clearly, the speaker feels as if poverty is an obstruction to his outright survival. Accordingly, insufficiency of substantial physical provisions can be unfavorable to one’s worth of being.
