‘And above all light’: Writer Tishani Doshi on the ‘truthfulness’ of ‘truth’

It begins in the house of orange and black gates in Madras. I am locked in the bathroom where my sister and I used to soap our bottoms and go bumskating on the floors. I must be seven, eight? I am in the bathroom alone. My sister and mother are outside, telling me to turn the key this way and that. I struggle with the lock, but there is no satisfying click sound to set me free. The air grows thin at the top of my throat. Unbearable. I think I will faint. I cannot remember how I got out, only the terror of not being able to get past the door.

Another door. This time I am twenty. My friends and I have just baked a tray of brownies with unconventional ingredients. Our first time. I feel as though I’ve been dropped into an Agatha Christie novel. My mission is to figure out how to get beyond this front door and save my friend’s dogs who are outside and must surely have discovered the brownies by now. I spend half an hour, maybe more, before giving up to go lie on a couch. In years to come I will be brought...

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