The Colour Of Things Unseen

Chapter 2

Adi was upsetting everyone and so Totot went all the way to Yogyakarta on the train to ask his uncle if Adi could move in and work for him in his batik department store. But the uncle said Adi was too young and suggested instead that he be sent to a rich family in Jakarta, a distant relative, who might take him on as a servant. Adi and his brothers knew nothing of this, but Yanti heard of the plan and became alarmed. She borrowed a neighbour’s bicycle and rode to the village where their father’s older sisters, Bude Kartini and Bude Nur, lived to ask for their help.

Of course the story of Adi’s deteriorating behaviour had already reached the aunts, and when Yanti pleaded with them to stop their father from sending him away, they decided to act. First they consulted with their husbands, and then they asked Totot to let the boy come and live with them.

Totot agreed, and when Adi went to live with his aunts, the villagers, who had known and loved his mother, gathered him up and gave him a fresh start. And to everyone’s surprise, a kind of peace drew down around him and his wild behaviour subsided. The aunts had time for him too and, because they were better off now than when their children were young, they insisted on him going to school. And, that’s when the colour seeped back into his life.

At the end of his last year of primary school, the aunts decided to approach a wealthy man from the village who was a distant cousin and who had been a childhood playmate. He was the owner of two large batik department stores, one in Solo and one in Yogyakarta, and he and his wife lived in Solo. Like the aunts’ own children, his were grown up, and when they asked if he could help them to secure Adi’s high school education, he suggested that Adi could stay at his house in Solo, where he would do odd jobs in lieu of rent and meals while attending junior high school. He said he would pay Adi’s school fees and even provide him a small allowance as long as he studied hard. If he turned out to be a good student, he would support him to go on to senior high school as well.

Chapter 2

From the moment he arrived in Solo, Adi found his time was consumed by work, school and homework. Most weeks he was visited by one of the aunts, or he called at the markets to see them at the stall where they sold children’s clothing. During the holidays he sometimes travelled to the village for a day or two to see the family, but mostly he could go for no more than a few hours. When classes were scheduled in the afternoon, he spent the mornings sweeping the street or working in the house and garden. Every day there were floors to mop, grass to clip, garbage to dispose of, errands to run, or shopping to be done in the early morning market. When the family was away, and there was just the maid, the security guard and him, he could easily do his homework, but when they returned he had to do it late at night, and with a single candle when the electricity failed.

At the end of junior high school, Adi was grateful that there seemed to be no argument with him stepping up to senior high school. And now there was a new opportunity for him to study English with Pak Harto, whose English language skills were valued highly by the school. When Pak Harto made a request to run classes in art as an elective for interested students, the principal agreed on the condition that they take place outside the normal school hours. Adi and some of his friends were keen to study art but Adi first had to seek permission from his employer.

This was given after Pak Harto explained he would run the art classes in English, and when he began to get good marks in the subject, Adi’s employer told him he could practise his English by helping out with the super-size busloads of tourists that pulled into the department store each day. He would continue to live with them and do odd jobs, but for the most part he would work two to three hours a day in the store. He would receive a higher wage for this, which would allow him to purchase the canvases, paints, brushes and other materials he needed.

In Pak Harto’s art classes, the students spent six months drawing before moving onto oil painting. Pak Harto set weekly exercises and by the end of their first year they had learned to construct a frame, stretch and prime a canvas, mix oil paints to a magical number of colours and shades, and observe how the same colour might brighten or fade when placed next to a certain shade, or when seen in a different light. He also encouraged them to study how they responded with different parts of their bodies to certain colours and, depending on the lesson, there was always a row of prints by different artists pegged to a line of string that stretched along the top of the blackboard.

Some of these images would remain with Adi for life: Pablo Picasso’s Guernica with its tortured and terrified animals, and bodies contorted with fear; Salvador Dali’s Burning Giraffe which made him feel queer – what did the skinny frames of the women with rows of open drawers in their body mean, or the flaming orange back and neck of the standing giraffe in the background? What kind of person painted such things? Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night was a swirling universe that dwarfed the human, and Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon (he could never remember the full name) thrilled him with its daubs of colour that shimmered and broke apart when you looked up close. There was African art, Islamic art, Australian Indigenous art, Dutch art, Japanese woodcuts, Inuit prints and Chinese art. And there were Brett Whiteley’s Sydney Harbour paintings, and Georgia O’Keefe’s Black Iris which glowed, and tugged him deep into its heart.

Pak Harto kept his art history books in a locked cupboard that was opened only during class. When a student asked what a painting meant or was about he would always say the same thing, “What do you see? How does it make you feel? How do you think it does this?”

Art led Adi and the other students to discover things about their own world and the world beyond; it connected them to landscapes, histories, places and cultures that were so different that they never could have imagined they even existed. And when Adi walked home after art classes, it was as if the streets and houses and people in them were paintings too. Colours were more intense, and he saw things he hadn’t seen before. The design of a wall poster, an intricate moss garden the size of an egg yolk in a hole in the footpath, an oily rainbow in a puddle. Once, in the courtyard of a homestay, he glimpsed a nude statue of Venus whose head was wrapped in a real hijab.

Sometimes Pak Harto bundled them into several becak and took them to local artists’ studios to see the paintings, sculptures or installations they were working on, or he took them on painting excursions to faraway villages where they slept the night. Sometimes he arranged for them to participate in local art exhibitions, and once they went to Yogyakarta in a small bus to see an exhibition of many different artists.

Pak Harto’s enthusiasm for art making and practice was contagious and no one was at all surprised when, in their final weeks of senior school, five students announced they had been accepted to study art at the Institute of the Arts – ISI – in Yogyakarta. They were the lucky ones whose family could afford the fees, but for Adi this question of what to do next was not so straightforward. In his early days at high school he had considered becoming a religious teacher but this path had long since lost its appeal. Now, it seemed, almost everyone was ready to offer suggestions about his future; he could become a becak driver like his uncle, or a tailor like his brother-in-law, or get work in a batik factory, or use his English skills to work in a department store, or become a tour guide.

Chapter 3On the day Pak Harto sent for him, Adi found his teacher wrestling with a large map of the world that insisted on rolling itself back into a cylinder. At Pak Harto’s signal, Adi gathered books from a shelf and placed them at the outer edges of the map. When he finally had it tamed, Pak Harto beckoned him to look at the spot he was indicating with the long paint-stained nail of his right thumb.

“Java,” he announced. Then he drew the thumbnail southwards to a large, odd-shaped island. “Australia,” he said, “and this is Sydney.”

Adi was puzzled. He had studied geography and knew that Sydney was a city of perhaps three million people, one of the biggest in Australia but not large by Indonesian standards.

Pak Harto gestured for him to sit down. “How would you like to go and study art in Sydney for three years?” he asked, and then waited to see Adi’s reaction. “If I told you this was possible, would you be interested?”

Adi had no words. When he glanced up, Pak Harto began to speak even more slowly than usual as if to allow the words to sink in. “Well, I’ve asked you here to offer you this opportunity. I studied and also taught painting at this art school, and I think you would gain a lot from going there as well. You would have a Bachelor of Fine Arts if you completed the three years.”

For Adi, it was as if a cloud of the deepest pink had floated into the room and was colouring everything in it – the walls, furniture and even Pak Harto’s own abstract paintings, whose looming oversized figures appeared to be neither human nor non-human. As the cloud of colour began pouring into his entire being, Adi felt his mother’s love was gathering him up and lifting him clear out of the room. Only when Pak Harto spoke again did Adi return to the room with a start. The teacher’s voice seemed far off and he strained to catch his meaning, “The art school will waive your fees and I have secured a scholarship for you that will cover living expenses – rent, food, art materials, that sort of thing.”

The way Pak Harto spoke Indonesian was different to almost everyone he knew, either in the village or in Solo. At first, when they heard him speaking like this, using bigger words and more complex verb constructions, the students found it difficult to understand, but as they got used to him they too began to follow his lead and use a more formal language, but only in the classroom. Outside it they mostly spoke Javanese, and if they did speak Indonesian they still spoke it in the normal way.

Despite his efforts to focus on what his teacher was saying, Adi found his attention drawn to a ceramic sculpture Pak Harto kept on his desk. It had a yellow cream glaze, with intricate red patterning over it, and writing in a script he did not recognise. The artist was an Australian sculptor whose name he did not know, or was she Iranian? For the first time in all the times he’d seen it there, he now recognised that its curving shape was like that of a woman’s body. There was a knob at the top, small handles like tiny legs at the side, and three openings with a smooth black stone inserted into the bottom slit that suggested a deep dark opening.

Adi felt his body heating up in response to the sculpture’s strong suggestion of s*x, and it was with some effort that he dragged his eyes away. When he looked up and saw Pak Harto watching him, he blushed and turned his eyes back to the map to avoid eye contact.