One girl from my class sold her first painting today
I am teaching Mithila painting to a small group in my village, mostly girls, on Sunday mornings in the room where my mother used to sit with her colours. One of them, Sunita, she is fourteen, she has been coming since two years. Very quiet girl, hardly speaking, but her line work is steady, better than some who have been doing longer.
Today a lady from Patna who buys from our cooperative took one of her paintings. A small one, two fish and a lotus, on handmade paper, done with the black from lamp soot and the red from kusum flower. Two hundred and fifty rupees.
Sunita's mother came to my house in the evening to tell me. She was holding the money folded in her blouse. She did not say much. I also did not say much.
The thing is, when I was that age nobody gave us money for this. We painted on the mud walls before the wedding, we painted for the ritual, and that was all. The wall got whitewashed every year and the work went away with it. For long I thought that was the whole of it, that our painting was for the wall and for God and not for selling.
I don't know what to feel sometimes. Half of me is happy that the girl has earned something of her own at fourteen. Other half is thinking, will she now paint only the small ones that sell fast, the fish and the peacock, and never learn the whole story of the Kohbar or the wedding of Shiva and Parvati which takes many days. It is a real worry for me. The market wants the easy ones.
Anyway. I have told her next month we start the Kohbar, slowly, small portion everyday before she does any selling work. Let us see.
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Steady line work at fourteen, after two years, that is the whole thing. People talk about talent but it is mostly the hours, and the quiet ones often have them. Two fish and a lotus in soot black and kusum red on handmade paper, and a stranger from Patna chose it over everything else in the cooperative. That is a real thing. She will remember the first sale her whole life, and the woman who bought it probably does not know she just did something enormous.
Your mother's room, her colours, the Sunday mornings, I have no doubt that carries into the work somehow even if the girls cannot say it. Keep her at the drawing, Sunita I mean. The ones who are quiet at that age are the ones who see the most.
You are right ji, the hours. People see a small painting and think it came by blessing. But Sunita has come every Sunday for two years, and in the beginning her hands were shaking, the line was breaking here and there. Now it is steady. That steadiness is only time.
And about the quiet ones, yes. She hardly speaks in class. But when she is drawing she forgets everyone is there. That is the real thing, when the child forgets the room.
The lady from Patna, she did not know anything about Sunita. She only liked the painting. Sometimes I think that is better, the buyer choosing the work and not the story. Though I also feel the buyer should know whose hands made it.
Her mother came to my house in the evening with some jaggery for me. She was not saying much also, just standing there. I told her, keep sending the girl on Sunday. That is all.