36. The Beginning

When I asked my father about what Manesh had said, he just smiled.
“Can you seriously imagine me going out and beating people up or ‘kicking ass’?” he asked.

My father is one of the gentlest men you can think of so I had to admit that the thought seemed somewhat unlikely.
“In my day, thank goodness,” he continued, “we had enough on our hands, learning to use the Tractor for ploughing. And there was plenty to do, clearing land to plant. The concrete runways had not even been taken up then and I can promise you that was backbreaking work.
No. I was never a tough guy and I never wanted to be one.”

He thought for a moment then went on.
“You have to feel sorry for Manesh, though. I can remember him as a young recruit. He was always the most enthusiastic. He was determined to be a captain one day, and now he sits there selling his birds. You have to allow him his dreams. I can’t imagine that they would harm anyone now.”
“Surely someone should put him right about you, Dad. People will think you are the way he tells it.”

“Pah! What harm does it do? The people who know me won’t believe him and the people who don’t know me won’t care. In a way, his life is over and if you could convince him that he was wrong about things, it would probably make him very unhappy. Better to leave things as they are.”
“But isn’t there something wrong in believing what isn’t true?”

“You youngsters!” my father snorted, “Perhaps Manesh is right. You do too much thinking. Everybody needs to believe something. Before the Americans came, we lived in the forest and every tree had a name and a spirit that lived in it, with its own personality and relationship to the tribe. We believed that but I can’t imagine it was the truth. Now the trees are gone and so are their names and we believe in the Tractor rather than the spirits. And yet, it was those old spirits that fed us and cared for us before the Americans.

Manesh gets through his life believing that I might have been a hard man. Why disillusion him? He has enough problems without having to think that he is wrong about me. And where would you stop in this truth campaign?

Tahmo Lukuni told him that he was the bravest man he had ever met and that he would always remember him. Do you think that Tahmo really meant that?”
He looked at me for an answer.
“Well, no,” I replied hesitantly, “he probably says that to everyone he gives a medal to.”

“Exactly. And you saw that Manesh’s medal is really important to him?
You spent some time thinking about how to make colours. It probably crossed your mind that the feathers he told you were from rare birds might have come from nearer to home. Would you tell him that what he believes in came from a chicken? Would you take the meaning of his medal away from him just because it isn’t exactly what he thinks it is? There's so little left of his life that we have no right to remove what he has.”
“But he wants to control what people think. He wants a world in which everyone thinks the same. Surely that is wrong?”

“Possibly, Tommu, possibly.” My father answered. “But you have to think of the context. You know when the Guardians go out into the jungle, they take those little shelters to sleep in. Bivouacs, we call them. Space inside for two men.

If you are in hostile territory and you live like that with another person, you have to be sure that they are not going to let you down. Your lives depend on each other so there is no room for differences. Everything boils down to a common point of view inside that tiny tent. The tent protects you from the rain and the wind and you can’t afford a split. Every move that you make has to be synchronised. If you want to take a pee, the other person has to co-operate. That tent is your whole world.

In the Village, believing in Our Granny is our tent. It’s a bigger tent with more space. We can afford more freedom than in a two man bivouac but Manesh is applying the standards of the two man tent – or at least the platoon – to the Village. I have never believed in stopping people from thinking or from being themselves, but with the threat of Hama Batu and the Shadows, who can say whether Manesh is right or wrong? Perhaps we need someone like the Gardeners to protect us from what we don’t know.

Do we want to walk out into the night and face the wind and the rain on our own? I’m too old to want to do that. And in any case, I haven’t read all the books that you have, so I don’t know if I could tell what was true out there or not.”
The conversation drifted on to other things but what my father had said stuck with me. I realised that, for the most part, I agreed with him and I began to think about the different ways in which people saw things. I thought about the dispute between Hama Batu (about whom, I realised, I knew next to nothing) and the Gardeners. From the time of the fire, I had lived mostly with the Gardeners at Our Granny’s house but I had never thought very much about what the war against the Shadows meant. Like Manesh, I was a part of the Village and saw things as a Villager.

I knew that the war originated in a different interpretation of Our Granny’s Will and that it had become desperately vicious, with both sides prepared to go to any lengths to achieve their aims. I had naturally assumed that the Gardeners, living so close to Her, understood Our Granny’s Will but the interpretation that Manesh had given to it seemed so one sided that it made me doubt what he had said and think more carefully about my own sense of what was happening in the world.

I think it was at that point that I decided to write this story; to record what people thought and, if possible, to let people see who was right and who was wrong. I had, almost without realising it, begun to think in terms of the history of Morakeewa. At first, I thought that all I needed to do was to record what people said, so that what I had been told by Manesh became one of the first things that I wrote down.

There is a sense in which this point, rather than the chapter that is first in order of reading, is the beginning of my book. In a way, the whole of this book is about Manesh and what he thinks, and a tiny tent, but as soon as I showed the first draft of what I had written to my friend, Bahla, I realised that there was more to do. Without some background material to describe the island and the people who lived there, the arrival of the Americans and the role of Our Granny, nobody would understand what I was writing.

As a result, Bahla and I discussed what I should do and he offered to tell me about the story of the Trading Expedition, which I have already described. The rest – the rest followed more or less naturally.

What was clear, almost immediately, was that I needed to talk to people involved in the events I wanted to describe so that we could capture their perceptions and obtain reliable information. At the same time, we needed to be aware that some of the participants might try to emphasise elements of the story that reflected well on them.

Bahla was anxious, in particular, that we ensure that only reliable information was included. Having seen what I had written about my meeting with Manesh, he took the view that the whole story would be better left out.

“Tommu,” he said, “You can’t include this rubbish. He thinks that he is the centre of the whole world. He is an unwitting pawn in the conflict between the Gardeners and Hama Batu over a vision of the future of the island and he doesn’t really understand either of them. What he told you is entirely subjective.

Even the stories he tells you, where he actually saw what happened, are really about his illusions and emotional reactions. I can see that you might not want to bring him down to earth with regard to some of the things that he believes in, just as you would not tell your child that the bird that takes away their baby teeth is not real. At the same time, why would anyone else need to hear about it?”

“No Bahla,” I disagreed, “The fact that Manesh and people like him believe these things is important, without regard for whether they are true or not. The only reason that the Gardeners and Hama Batu can sustain the war is that they can create stories that attract supporters. You can’t just ignore those stories. Also, as my father said, sometimes you can’t even tell which of those stories are true and which are false.”

“I still think that you should restrict yourself to verifiable facts. Only put in things that you can prove. The alternative is just too complicated and difficult. Your book may be shorter but you will at least be able to rely on it. Find yourself some intelligent people who understand exactly what happened and can give their insights.”

“I will do that too,” I replied, “but actually, I think that you are wrong. If I start to cut people out and to select people that I trust for inclusion then I am falling into the same trap as Manesh. It becomes my illusions and emotional reactions that I put in and my judgement of what it all means that I write down. I think that its better if I leave that judgement to my readers. Then I remain impartial.”

“Be careful,” Bahla said, “You’ll end up confusing people. You can’t record a murder or somebody being tortured in the same way as you talk about studying and increasing understanding; as if they are of the same value. At some point you have to say what is right and what is wrong. At some point you have to choose.”

“You may be right, Bahla,” I said, almost as if I believed him. Then I stuck out my chin defiantly.
“But I’d like to see how far I can get before I have to. I’d like to give everyone a chance to have their say. I don’t have any ambitions to control people and force anyone who reads my book to think one way or the other. I’d rather have them make their own minds up.”