A Memory from Last Winter

If you look a little carefully, you'll see a strange little dimple below the corner of her mouth, almost as if evolution wavered a little while plotting the angles of her face. You should see her smile with it, all tiny even teeth and black eyes and smooth skin, except for that one dimple.

It's funny how you think you know all your cousins, and then one appears out of nowhere and you have to make place for them in a family tree that is already pretty frustrating. But a four-year old with a misplaced dimple is a different matter.

I watched her discover painting in my room. Smiles of pure, wild excitement as tomato red merged with blue and yellow, and then a distinct laugh, almost half a squeal. She created a mess, of course. I won't be able to use the paint bottles anymore. The same brush went into all of them with a most cavalier disregard for the water bowl. But the mess is the fun part of the painting, and she got to this secret within two seconds of beginning. She was shy at first, and so quiet that you wouldn't guess she was this quick. But in three minutes she'd figured out that blue mixed with yellow gives green, and it broke my heart to see her hold up her postmodernist masterpiece in front of her mother and grandmother, and to hear them go "Tcha, what have you been doing with akka's colours?!"

She's four. She knows how to mix colours and she can paint. Huts and trees and things, almost what every kid paints, but not quite. She's so intelligent and so beautiful that it just killed me, and I asked them to let her have art lessons. To please let her have art lessons back in Chennai. To please let her make a mess if she wants to. Because she sure as hell won't let that strange dimple show very often if she stays all orderly.

And do you know what she did before she left? She handed me a plastic sunflower she'd pestered her mother into buying her an hour ago. It's the best feeling in the world, being given flowers. Even artificial ones.