If you go by Niharika’s example, watching TV cannot be a waste of time for children. That’s where the eight-year-old gets all the ideas to draw. Not the cartoon characters she loves, but the scenery behind them — a bridge over a lake that no one notices, a few trees, mountains and sea. When her mother Neeta, a college professor, posted it on her college WhatsApp group, Dr Krishnaprabha, former professor and wife of late artist Sasikumar, said there could be a space for her in their gallery — Shangrila that Sasikumar had founded in Thiruvananthapuram. When his fourth death anniversary came, Krishnaprabha remembered her promise and asked Neeta to bring Niharika’s paintings for a group exhibition. But the bigger surprise was that Niharika inaugurated the exhibition comprising the work of 30 artists.
“We didn’t notice her talent till I saw this picture she drew,” says Neeta, pointing to a drawing full of symmetric shapes in multiple colours. “It is not a random chaotic picture; there is a harmony to it.” Niharika, called Tasha at home, would shrug if you ask her where she got it from. “I just drew it,” says the little one, who does not seem to believe in long speeches. Pressed further, she says it might have begun when she was seven, all this drawing. “I used to draw with pencil first, on diaries, at my grandma’s house, then it became crayons and now watercolours.”
It is her grandma who showed her mother the picture of a sleeping baby that Niharika drew one day after school. “She told me, look how she got the expressions right,” Neeta recalls. But then Niharika is not interested to get trained. She just likes to draw on her own. And when you look at her pictures —different shades of blue coming to her sea, and varied greens for the leaves — you can see why she doesn’t need a lot of help. And since Doraemon — one of her favourite cartoons — is a Japanese series, Niharika likes to draw trees with pink leaves —perhaps a version of chrysanthemum — and caption them ‘pink’, in case it wasn’t clear enough. This has amused and impressed Neeta. “I also liked her galaxy of stars,” she says of a painting where Niharika has spread blue and pink shades and drawn stars on top. She’d also make book holders out of old cereal boxes and other craft that again, no one tells her to do.
“Next, we are thinking of bringing out a book, for she writes small stories.” Neeta opens her tab to show the story of a sparrow, with all its little mistakes, just the way the child wrote it.
