28. Background Colour

I looked up from the drawing in my hand. “Why do they want a picture of Our Granny?” I asked.
“To do Her honour and show Her their love. That’s official. The portrait will hang in the football stadium where everyone can see it and remember how Our Granny cares for the island. Paitor told me when he gave me the commission. ‘It’s so long since She lived among the people that they don’t remember what she looks like.’”

“How far along are you with it?”
“I’ve done a lot of work” she answered, “but I haven’t made a great deal of progress. But that’s a long story and would probably bore you.”
“Not at all. I’m fascinated by the idea of trying to depict something that you have never seen. I was just about to get something to eat. Why don’t you join me and tell me about it over lunch?”
“I don’t usually eat lunch.” She hesitated “But why not?”

She picked her wallet up from the desk and added it to a basket already bulging with painting paraphernalia and scraps of paper and we set out for the market. Leaving the hangar, we passed the new tractor shed, specially built to house maintenance operations and the development project for the oil powered tractor.

“What is in the hangar now that they’ve moved the Tractor out?” The times when I had been in the Village I had been mostly at the reading room and I was interested to see that the main shed area in the hangar had now been partitioned off.
“Mostly offices.” Rega gestured towards the windows that now faced out of the tall doorway. “They control the issuing of money from there and the identity cards for people allowed into the upper Village. There are some new law courts and the offices of some of the football teams. Everyone that matters wants to have a place in there. It’s all who you know, you know.”
“I can imagine that. All those powerful people in one place.”
“Yes,” she smiled mischievously, “I have to remind myself every morning on my way to work that I may work in the building but I’m not one of them. At least I hope I’m not.”

We walked up the hill into the market area. The place was bustling with vendors noisily selling fruit and vegetables, heaps of spices, jewellery, trinkets, carved furniture and anything else one could imagine. Various tradesmen were at work on the side of the road; a barber was cutting hair and next to him a tattooist was completing an intricate design on a man’s shoulder.

We passed a butcher’s stall with pieces of chicken and pig being sold for the evening meal while fresh stock, in the shape of the live originals waited more or less patiently in cages for their turn on the table. Next was a dentist where the crunching sounds of a tooth extraction made us hurry onwards.

Our destination was a food stall where we selected fillings of roast pork, tomatoes and carrots which the owner, a jolly woman wrapped in a colourfully dyed dress, placed on pak choi leaves that she folded quickly into a triangle and dropped into the pot of oil bubbling on her charcoal brazier.

“What oil do you use for the frying?” I asked her.
“Palm oil, from the plantations. It’s the best. And you can buy it here in the market.”
“That’s good to know.” I told Rega, “My last ten years have been spent planting palm trees and at least it seems to be doing some good. When we started, we knew that it would take a long time until we produced any quantity of oil but even knowing not to expect early results there were moments when we felt we were wasting our time.”

The stall keeper scooped our samosas from the hot oil and handed them to us, wrapped in banana leaves. We bought some fruit juice from the next stall and went to eat our meal in the shade of the enormous wild fig tree that grows at the top of the market.

Sitting there on the grass, our world seemed perfect. As we looked out over the crowded stalls of the busy market and over the hangar buildings, standing high above the plain, we could see the farmland stretching down to the river. The Tractor was working methodically up and down with labourers like ants spread across the fields, each engrossed in their task of hoeing or weeding. In the distance was the football stadium and, beyond it, the black dots of the fishermen in their canoes out on the lagoon. Even the squalor of the shanty towns was not visible, hidden behind the corners of the hill.

The great tree spread overhead, cast a cool shadow to protect us from the sun, as if it had always been there to shelter us and always would be. The breeze blowing in from the sea was a welcome relief from the heat of the day as it brought the industrious smell of spices and cooking from the market. As we sat there, eating our food and drinking the sweet fruit juice, I think that neither of us could have imagined that the moment would not last forever.

“You were going to tell me about how far you’d got with your picture of Our Granny.” I said.
“Yes. And it’s been trouble from the start.”
“Hard to find people who can describe her?”
“Not at all. People will describe her all day. But when the Captain-Major called me into his office he warned me that that drawing Our Granny was lilely to be controversial. He would have preferred not to expose me to it but he said that he didn’t have any option. The request had come from the Head Gardener himself.

It’s strange that you should have mentioned Iliva. I think the whole thing really started from there. Even before I drew the picture of her, I had occasionally made sketches for the Guardians but it was and off-and-on sort of thing; nothing regular. After the picture of Iliva I started to get more work at the hangar and it became a real job. And of course, the people really looking for Iliva were Gardeners so they got to hear about my work. Most of them knew Iliva, so they could see that what I had done was a good likeness.

In any case, at some point the idea surfaced that it would be a good idea to have a picture – a sort of official portrait – of Our Granny. When I had my interview with Tahmo Lukuni, the Head Gardener, he told me that he thought of it himself, although that isn’t what Paitor said.

Tahmo Lukuni told me that the Village has grown so much in the last thirty years that most of the people who are here now don’t remember when Our Granny lived among us. They come to the Gardeners’ Courts and they don’t understand the traditions of the Village or Our Granny and they have no idea of everything they owe Her and how the Gardeners are her representatives.

What we needed, he said, was a portrait that would bring people closer to Our Granny so that they would understand how She cared for the Village, how wise She was and loving and how severe where people did not show the correct attitude and respect.”

“That sounds a tall order to me,” I said, “especially if you weren’t going to meet her. What are they going to do with this portrait when you have painted it?”
“I think the idea is to make copies of it. As I told you in my office, one is to be hung in the football stadium where everyone can see it. Our Granny gave the stadium to the Village and they want a large painting of her there to show that the Village is grateful. Then they also want copies they can hang in the various public offices – in the hangar, in the reading room, in the courts and so on.”

“But you’ll be kept busy for the rest of your life if you have to draw so many copies.”
“The idea isn’t for me to draw them all, necessarily. Once there is one, approved version, there are other people who can make copies. Their problem was to find someone who could work from descriptions, without seeing her. That was why they insisted that Paitor should assign me to the task.”

“Wouldn’t it have been simpler just to take someone up there to meet her?”
“Precisely what I asked.” Rega smiled, “But it emerged that the ‘official true portrait’ needed to be , shall we say, ‘younger’ than Our Granny is today. As Tahmo Lukuni put it ‘We are not interested in being critical; in encouraging people to see her frailties. We want a symbol that people can respect.’

But I’m getting ahead of myself. After the first meeting with Paitor, I had to go up to Our Granny’s house where I was interviewed by one of the Head Gardener’s staff. He was interested in my feelings about Our Granny, whether I had any doubts about Her and so on. I had taken some drawings to show him but he never asked to see them. I gathered that he had seen my picture of Iliva and he was amused by the idea that I had never met her. After about an hour he sent me home, saying that they might contact me again.

The next time I was called in, it was to meet Tahmo Lukuni himself. He explained that there was a danger that the villagers were forgetting Our Granny. They needed to understand that football and money were not an end in themselves, that they were only a way of encountering Our Granny and being a part of the Village. That was why they wanted the reminder, a picture that could be reproduced so that people could remember Our Granny and stop losing respect for her.

I asked who would describe her to me and he said that he would provide a description himself. When I explained that the portrait would be improved if I could speak to several people who knew her, it was clear that he had not realised that I would want to speak to anyone else. I told him that if he wanted a realistic portrait then I’d need to speak to at least three, preferably five people. It wasn’t that I doubted his memory but sometimes quite crucial details don’t come out in the first few sketches. Things that make the difference between a recognisable picture and one that has all the features right but doesn’t look like the subject.

In the end, he agreed to let me speak to some of the other Gardeners and he also gave me a photograph.”
“A photograph?” I looked at Rega in surprise. “I didn’t know there was a photograph of Our Granny. That must have made things easier for you.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.” She frowned. “The photograph is small. About the size of the palm of my hand and there are several women in it, and an American soldier. Of course I asked him which of the women was Our Granny and he instantly pointed to a young girl – a child really – and said that she was Our Granny.

I pointed out that when the Americans were here Manaku Apu, her son, would have been as old as the girl in the picture and asked if Our Granny wasn’t perhaps one of the older women. At that, unfortunately, Tahmo Lukuni became really angry. He asked me if I was aware of the penalties for Disrespect. So of course I apologised and that was that. We made an appointment for our first drawing session and my audience was at an end.”