Rangoli on the Driveway

For Diwali this year, I decided to make a rangoli on our driveway, the colorful patterns my grandmother drew outside her door in Chennai every festival morning. I'd never made one bigger than a dinner plate.

I drew the outline in chalk the night before: a big lotus flower with eight petals, surrounded by a ring of peacock feathers and little lamps. In the morning, I knelt on the concrete with bowls of colored powder, rice flour and flower petals and began filling it in, pinch by pinch, letting the powder trickle out between my thumb and fingers.

By the second hour, I had company. The little girl from next door asked if she could help, and I gave her the yellow. Her brother took the blue. Their mother came out with coffee and stayed to fill in a feather. A man walking his dog stopped and asked what it meant. I told him it welcomes light and good fortune into a home.

By evening, it was eight feet wide and glowing under the clay lamps we set around its edges. A dozen neighbors came by to take pictures. The little girl told her whole class about it the next day.