Manu

• Lucy Barker, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2010

I’m painting a picture, in my head. Mixing all my favourite colours into bright streaks of sky; a vivid, orange-purple-pink sunset stretching from one end of the painting to the other, swirling in a magical explosion of colour over a dry, Indian landscape. Under the wondrous sky I paint brown, dusty ground, dotted with smudges of brown and green that are the banyan trees, who are a shield for travellers and animals alike from the scorching sun. There is a corner of my painting, the bottom right-hand corner, that has no trees. Instead, there is a collection of houses, grouped around the darker ground of the road. The little houses with their yellow-hay thatched roofs seem so small beneath the majesty of my sunset, but beside them I paint things smaller still. Little pinpricks of dark-brown paint, they are the men. Men, who think they are all-important, the centre of the world. If only they could see my painting, they would know how tiny they really are. But they do better than see my painting; they are in my painting, with a sky performing for their entertainment, and wind whispering through the trees on the edge of the village, what secrets might it hold for their ears, if they thought to listen? But they don’t listen to the wind, they listen to themselves. They don’t see the landscape, they see only themselves. And another like them, but not one of them.

Another pinprick of paint on the canvas in my head, she stands apart from the others, she is different. Not in the way she looks; one brown speck is, in the scheme of things hardly distinguishable from another brown speck. It’s her thoughts and experiences as well as her positioning that sets her apart from the others. I can’t paint thoughts, but if I could, hers would be golden. She alone of all the dots in my painting takes in the world around her, appreciating its beauty and knowing and loving that she is a small part of it. A part of this land and this country, its places and its people.

Thinking of people, she feels eyes on her skin, and draws her own eyes from the distant banyans to the men, who are now thinking not only of themselves, but also of her. This outsider, who thinks she can just march into their village with her crippled old great-uncle who liked to be known as “Mahatma” and make everything right. What would she know of their history, their past, their suffering. How could she, a Hindu, possibly understand?