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Nisha from The Night Diary - Coggle Diagram
Nisha from The Night Diary
Physical Appearance
Nisha has features and looks more like her father than her mother. Nisha has her father's small mouth and round face.
This is seen in the phrase " I look more like Papa. I have his round face and small mouth." (22).
Nisha is curious. She has a bunch of questions in her head but only asks certain people.
She keeps a lot of things to herself and doesn't speak as much as her brother. She is very quiet but is also curious.
An example of this would be when she is remembering when her father took her to see Gandhi. After remembering the event she asked herself "Could Gandhi fix things? Would we really have to leave?"(46).
Understanding and Caring
Nisha is very understanding of people, especially those in her family. She understands Amil's though process and the way he reads. She can see how hard he is trying and the way he feels when her father shouts at Amil for not being able to read.
This is evident in the novel where Nisha says "I see the way he studies the writing, his eyes squinted, his face pinched. I see how hard he tries " (8).
She also says that she feels bad for her father as he always looks sad and she wonders if he is thinking about their mother. This shows how well she understands people's thoughts and how deep her understanding can go.
Nisha observes small things
Many a times nisha notices things that other people don't.
An example is when papa was talking bout the leaders fighting "I nodded but couldn't take in everything papa was saying. Were we just at the mercy of leaders who couldn't agree?" (45).
Sense of Imagination
Nisha has a very vast sense of imagination. At one point, she imagines the family is creating "strange music" by drinking milk and tea from their cups and to imagine something like that requires an active imagination to occur. (43) "I took a sip of my milk. Papa took a sip of his tea. Then Dadi sipped, and then Amil, really loud. We were making strange music. I had to hold back a smile."
(22) she talks to the picture of her mother imagining that her eyes are saying yes to it all and that her mother who is the picture can understand her.
(10) here, she uses her imagination to think that her papa is not real and that she is dreaming when she is awake to see him in the morning sometimes because of how early he wakes up and how silently he leaves the house. and how late he come back home at night. "I think Papa's not real. He leaves early with the cool morning air and never makes a sound. Sometimes when he come back late at night and kisses me good night in my sleep, i wake up and see him. It feels like I'm dreaming."
Thought Process.
Throughout the book, we can see that Nisha has a very specific thought process: she likes to explain and understand everything, and in order to do so, she thinks deeply about even the smallest of things for long periods of time. These thoughts could be about why certain things make her happy, why people act in a certain way, etc.
For example, this can be seen at the very beginning of the book when she talks about her 12th birthday: “I like turning twelve so much already. It’s the biggest number I’ve ever been, but it’s an easy number—easy to say, easy to count, easy to split in half. I wonder if Amil thinks about you on this day like I do. I wonder if he likes being twelve?” She not only thinks about and tries to explain to herself why she likes the number 12, but she also wonders if other's think the same way. This is proven to be a pattern throughout the book.
Nisha is very naive, and is not very street smart. She is also not very knowledgable about the situation in India, where different religions are being split up to move to different places, as well as the country being split up into two countries. That is the one concept she does not grasp as well as the others.