Tanvi

nonfiction by Emily Northey

In my travels, I found a wonderful friendship with my Hindi teacher, Bhavani, and her young daughter, Tanvi.  This piece is dedicated to both of them in thanks for the joy and love we have shared.

The little girl with raspberry lips that fumbled around letters in three languages ran up the cement stairs, down the cement stairs, paused halfway to toddle near the railing.  The hem of her miniature dress flitted about the brown steel bars, her tiny hips easily fitting in between.  She giggled and kicked her cinnamon legs and tinkling ankle bells as I, gasping, tucked her under my milky arms.  We both peeked over the edge, three floors up.

Laughing, we spun out into the sizzling yellow balcony, drew on the patio with crayons, practiced our colors, this one is, gulabi, and this one, gulabi, no…laal!  And she swirled the red crayon in spirals on the cement, repeating days of the week, chirping the “nes” in Wed-nes-day, bobbing her head side to side on Saturday.  Then the rain came and the sweeping clouds poured over us.  We danced in it the best way she knew how, by stomping and spinning and screaming.  And then it stopped as quickly as it arrived, and we sat soaked and giggling as it all began to evaporate, steaming from the porch and our clothes.

Later, while her mother drove us home on her wobbling turquoise scooter, I held her in my lap and she slept and drooled on my dusty kurti, which had bled blue on my pale arms and the back of my neck as I had sweat throughout the day.

Then I went home a second time, with no one to practice colors or days or x-y-zeds.  So I wrapped a book in brown paper, one about a baby caterpillar, and on Wed-nes-day it ate some phal baingani, and inched across the world in search of its colors.

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Emily Northey is a senior creative writing major, minoring in photography and Asian studies.  Her poetry and photographs have been published in RiverCraft and she has had a photographic essay published in Essay.  When she's not writing or taking pictures, she spends her time shimmying with the SU Belly Dance Circle, of which she is the marketing and promotions manager.

Coming next week: fiction by Dana Diehl