Word, visual, meaning: The order of looking, rearranged

My niece loves making greeting cards. She is seven, and given the near paperless culture she’s been born into, probably hasn’t ever received such a card in her life. It’s an abstraction for her, an urgent and useless thing – as soon as she’s finished making one, she loses interest in it. It makes me slightly scared to imagine that god might be like her – uninterested in us right after creating us. How she came to create greeting cards is a bit of a mystery. I discovered that she began saying ‘crafts’ to the YouTube search engine as soon as she found access to her mother’s cell phone. This is how it must have turned up, in English or some other language that she didn’t understand, instructions to the eye. Paper, a box of crayons, her tiny fingers, as soon as they had acquired the intelligence to fold – that was all that was required.

Flowers, suns, stars, grass, birds, blue, blue sky, and blue water – they found hostel space in these pieces of paper. All of a sudden, the number of days to celebrate seemed too few – birthdays, wedding anniversaries, Christmas, the new year, even Independence Day and Republic Day, how few these are to supply occasions for the creation and gifting of cards? Soon, without knowing it, she was changing the calendar – filling it, even crowding it, with events whose significance was beyond the hierarchical ordering of the social world.

‘Will you sit next to me?’ She wrote this on a card for a girl on her school bus, someone older than her by a few years. There was a yellow bus on the card, the request written on its interior. She went to the bus stop the next day expecting her older schoolmate to sit next to her. No such thing happened. A few days passed. The little girl, perhaps hurt from not having her request kept, came up with an explanation: the person to whom she’d given the card hadn’t opened the card to see the words; she must have only seen the painting of the yellow bus.

This was a watershed moment in the making of her cards. So long, following what she had seen on YouTube, she had drawn something on the ‘outside’, the front of the card – the words were inside, like a house is behind a door. I say ‘door’ consciously. For that is what the folded page of a card looks like – its movement is similar to a door’s. My niece decided to change the order of looking – to keep the words on the outer page, the drawings inside. This year, she made a card for Valentine’s Day – what the words and the day meant would have been unfamiliar to her, but it is impossible not to hear its noise on television. It is the most unique Valentine’s Day card I’ve seen. On the front and back is an assemblage of a single word repeated over and over again: girl girl girl girl girl girl girl girl girl... Yellow sketch pen ink on white paper. From the words, it is hard to guess what this card could be meant for. Inside, on the left page, are three sentences about girls – they include difficult words, misspelled, perhaps because she’s only heard them being used around her. The concluding sentence on this page is a complaint about her brother; giving his full name, she lists her main grudge against him, his teasing her. On the right page inside is a drawing of an animal. She’s made it easier for us to understand what it is – ‘Mr. Fox’.

It is not the Panchatantra-inspired likening of her brother’s behaviour to the fox that surprised me as much as the location of word and image. How easily she had presumed that putting the words before the image would catch human attention. I wondered where she might have got it from. It came out one day, during a walk in the neighbourhood – she’d noticed the names on the walls, how they offered information. The house was more beautiful than the ‘words’, she’d decided; the house was the drawing on the card, the ‘greetings’ the name plate. It wasn’t so much the conclusion the seven-year-old girl had arrived at that surprised me as much as how she’d arrived at it.

What, then, is the outside of a greeting card? My niece occasionally folds the thin paper of her cards inside out – how easy it seems at that moment, to turn the outside into the inside and then the reverse. Often there is nothing that connects them, the outside and the inside, the ‘girl girl girl girl girl girl’ with ‘Mr. Fox’. What do we notice first – the painting or its title?

The writer is an author and poet. Her books include How I Became a Tree and Provincials.