Each month, we publish an original poem, written in response to a work of contemporary art. This month, poet Tishani Doshi chose Drachmas (2018) by Ala Younis.
For Younis, the miniature is not a reduction but a way of holding an entire world within the boundaries of a set or scene. Her small-scale models of television studios invite the viewer to lean in and occupy the child’s angle of vision. By using the form of modular sets and controlling perspective, Younis’s work suggest that memory is also an act of design – to arrange fragments and reconstruct spaces that once contained us. Working to this compressed scale, she links the domestic to larger architectures of power, media and history. Childhood, in her practice, is less a space of nostalgia, but a position of alertness, allowing us to be spectator and archivist of our own lives.
Childhood as Studio Scene
after Ala Younis
I.
Rajinikanth Superstar Visits Our Upstairs
Neighbours, who are Film Producers
Light falls around us like a darkroom
miracle, casting no shadows, and the day
with its nerve-endings is frenzied and alive.
It is 1978 in Madras, and I am three.
On the front seat of his Fiat lies a pack
of Gold Flakes. The flame tree by the gate
sheds flowers like matches alight, and he,
the king, superstar, who sends villains
spiralling and catches cigarettes mid-flight,
is suddenly here, swaggers over
ordinarily, bends, kisses my cheek.
II.
The Assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984
Back when the television was a small glowing
god in our living room, I used to believe death
was the part of night we visited in dreamless
sleep, the place we could not tell about. Our
family gathered around this god light night
after night, the whole country, unknowable,
even as it slid to the floor like canvas off
the easel. In bed, I was alone again, watching
shadows chase my dolls on the shelf. If only
we could face the squad together, arms a riot
of willows, lifting and rising against the flood.
III.
Forest at the Edge of the Classroom
As the First Fairytale of Warning
Years later, returning to the tiny clump
of trees at the edge of the old classroom,
it is difficult to remember how it felt to be
so small, to live close to the insides of things.
This path is not worthy of Hansel or Gretel.
These disinterested tamarind trees offer
no refuge for wolves. How deep I used to run
into this haunting. Even now, on some faraway
street, I can hear the soft smash of leaflitter
behind me, heart scritch scritching with its silly
iterations: Run, run it’s coming for you.
Tishani Doshi is a poet, novelist and dancer based in Tamil Nadu, India. Her most recent books are A God at the Door (shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry), and Small Days and Nights (shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is a visiting professor at New York University, Abu Dhabi. Egrets, While War, her fifth collection of poetry, will be published internationally in 2026.
