Petra

Once upon a pre-digital time, I was a keen photographer. But now—nothing stays the same, does

it?—now, I hardly take photos at all. I have a smartphone with a state-of-the-art camera, but in my hands, the phone is—let's not mince words—the phone is less than smart. Tools are only as good as the workers who wield them and—let's face it—I am a nincompoop when it comes to anything digital. Consequently, I shy away from taking photos with my phone. And so, when Petra took my picture last week, she put me to shame.

Petra put me to shame when she took my picture last week. My nincompoopery when it comes to photography is at its very worst when I try to take selfies. And last week, reluctant though I am to have dealings with anything digital, least of all self-snappery, a moment arose when I felt I had to attempt a selfie. My bus pass application needed a photo and, well—despite major misgivings—I accepted the challenge. Please, I know, I know. There's no need to say that I can't possibly be old enough to be eligible for a bus pass. I raise my hand to acknowledge that I am. Only just, but it is what it is. Documents assert that I am a senior. So, I attempted the selfie. Several times. The first time my image came out blurred. The second time my image came out scowling at me. The third time I decapitated myself. I thought long and hard, for approximately five seconds, and decided to phone to ask for Petra's help.

I phoned to ask for Petra's help. I don't know Petra well, but I am friends with her parents. I called her father. Petra, he said, was out walking in the neighbourhood, but she would surely be pleased to assist me when she got back. I was not surprised she was out walking. Petra is an inveterate walker. I have often seen her out walking and nodded to her. I have seldom exchanged words with her, though. Few people have. Petra doesn't say much. In fact, she hardly speaks at all. But everyone in the village knows her, because she paces the streets endlessly, only stopping to take photos of daffodils and starlings, squirrels and silver birches, butterflies and hedges. Gordon, the postman, believes her name suggests the hardness of rock, but since last week I associate it with the stone-silent beauty of the ancient city of Petra. They say the city is one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. And so is Petra—in my opinion. Since last week. Last week I decided she is a wonder, even if the conventional wisdom says otherwise. The conventional wisdom says she has special needs; she is on the spectrum. Unlike me.

Unlike me. Chalk and cheese. I am not like Petra. I talk. You may find this hard to believe, but some people go so far as to say I talk too much! I even repeat myself, so they say. God forbid! And some of those same people say I have a high IQ. Not as high as Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking, but not too far behind those geniuses. So, I am definitely not like Petra. And yet.

And yet, when it comes to photography, Petra, who takes inspirational pictures, sizes them with ease and, when necessary, prints them to perfection, is truly brilliant. As a photographer, Petra is in a class of her own. I had heard this through the grapevine. I discovered it for myself when she came to see me last week. She brought a portfolio of her work to show me. Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, Karsh of Ottawa, step aside, please. You are no match for Petra. Petra has transformed a single orange-green maple leaf into a kaleidoscopic vision of infinity. Petra has immortalised the breathless beauty of a Japanese bullet train in a translucent moment of frozen kinesis. Petra has outmanoeuvred time in her portrait of a nonagenarian's wrinkled face that has unveiled the dormant, but still present, softness of its infant beginnings. Petra's photos paint the world anew. Eroding the borderlines between fast and slow, old and young, fat and thin, her camera liberates immanent beauty that has been invisible to others. Petra trashes commonplace notions of difference in epiphanic caches of variegated colours. Her photos upend the very notion of normality. Sadly, though, Petra was born to blush unseen. Her virtuosity has been unchronicled until now. No one has written about her genius. Until me, in the present sketch.

Until me, in the present sketch. In another incarnation, I might have been the Homer to her Odysseus, the Valmiki to her Rama. As it is, I can do no more than offer this humble account of the wonder I experienced when Providence smiled on me by responding to my plea for help and sending Petra to my door. She arrived about an hour after I spoke to her father. The doorbell rang, and there, in all her silent splendour, was Petra. She was holding her portfolio and a tin that solicited donations for a cancer charity. She thrust the tin towards me, tapping the side and nodding her head up and down vigorously. I wondered if perhaps she hadn't received my message and we were at cross-purposes. We weren't. I mentioned my struggle with the photograph. She smiled, a knowing smile. She spoke. A single word. "Easy." She pointed at herself. She pointed inside my house to invite herself in. She came in. She sat me against the backdrop of a white sheet. She removed my glasses. She took the photo. I offered her a tea or coffee. "Water," she said. "I like water." I explained that the photo would need to be sized to fit the online bus pass application form. I showed her the designated space on the form. She said, "I do it."

She did it. She spent a few seconds adjusting the photo's size, pointed at my phone and asked, "Number?" She forwarded the photo to me. When I struggled to upload it onto the application form, she laughed, pointed at herself, and said, "Me." A couple of deft touches and the application was complete, with the photo. The site confirmed it was "successful." My pass would be with me within two weeks. It was then that Petra opened up her portfolio and wordlessly treated me to a private viewing of her work. I commended her. And that, from one point of view, was that. Petra drank her water and, in a very matter-of-fact way, brandished the cancer charity tin in front of me again. She pointed at me. She pointed at the tin. She spoke a further word: "Coins." Swayed by the alacrity with which she had solved my problem, I proffered a £10 note. She laughed and rotated her head in a broad circle four or five times before uttering yet more words. "Too much." But she didn't refuse the note. On the contrary, after a two-second pause, she snatched it, folded it twice and stuffed it through the narrow slit in the top of her tin. Then she got up and moved towards the front door, impervious to my thanking her, and not thanking me for the donation. She tapped her left hand firmly with the middle three fingers of her right. She nodded and muttered, "Job done." Then she was gone.

She was gone and I was left staring at my image in the photo. An image required for a practical purpose, but now become so much more. I looked at myself in the mirror; I looked at myself in the photo. I saw two different people. In the mirror, I saw a man entering the bus pass generation. I was nondescript, grey, balding, slit-eyed. In the photo, I had shed decades. My turkey neck was hidden. The angle at which Petra had caught my head had partly obscured my receding hairline. The smile on my face was my kindest, most unselfish smile. My eyes were bright and wide open. My crooked teeth were hidden from view. Petra's art had unlocked a superior version of me. It may be that this new identity was created solely by her technical skill, but I believe my transformation can be attributed to the aura that Petra exuded as she snapped me. The photo is surely a true portrait of me as I existed, under her influence, in the fleeting moment when her camera caught me. I came to a quick decision. When my bus pass arrives, I shan't use it. I will keep it to myself and aspire to live up to it, to be the version of myself that Petra created. After all, the photo will cast doubt on whether I am eligible for a bus pass.

About the Author:

John Thieme is Professor Emeritus at London South Bank University. He has held professorial positions at the University of Hull and the University of East Anglia and has also taught at the Universities of Guyana and North London. His critical books include Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (2001), Anthropocene Realism: Fiction in the Age of Climate Change (2023), and studies of V. S. Naipaul (1987), Derek Walcott (1999), and R. K. Narayan (2007). His creative writing includes Paco's Atlas and Other Poems (2018), Digitalis and Other Poems (2023), and the novels The Book of Francis Barber (2018) and Cabinets of Curiosities (2023). He edited The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (1996) and was the general editor of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature for two decades. He has just completed a third novel, provisionally entitled Age: The Final Comedy.