Thoppil Bhasi
by Sneha Madhavan-Reese
I didn’t know any names for fruits in Malayalam,
and he didn’t know them in English, so I ran
up and down the stairs with every kind of fruit we had,
until we discovered it was strawberries he’d been wanting.
He was famous back in India,
a playwright, I think, or a poet. This was 1989;
I was 10. I was used to Indian celebrities—
movie stars and dancers—but this was the first
writer who stayed with us, as a guest of my father’s club.
His thinning, white hair didn’t hide his brown scalp.
Thick, black glasses framed his eyes.
I asked him to sign my autograph book,
and he covered a whole page with his native script,
blue ink on light pink paper. The bulbous letters
my father had taught me to read were a mystery of loops
in his fluent hand. I could make out only the top line,
the familiar characters of my name repeated twice:
Sneha-mulla Sneha-mol. Loving daughter Sneha.
I wonder what else he wrote to fill
an entire page for a girl who brought him fruit.
Sneha Madhavan-Reese was born in Detroit and now lives in Ottawa. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals across Canada, including Arc, Descant, The New Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review. The winner of Arc’s 2015 Diana Brebner Prize, she was also a finalist for The Malahat Review’s 2014 Far Horizons Award and a finalist for the 2013 Alfred G. Bailey Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Observing the Moon, is forthcoming from Hagios Press.