Sunday was for the city.
He went to Nakasero Market in the morning with the quality of someone who had been told to rest and had interpreted this as doing something that was not transformation work.
Nakasero was the serious market — the food market, the one the city ran on. It moved with the specific logic of a place that had been in operation long enough to have developed its own topography: the spice section, identifiable from twenty metres; the vegetable section with its organisation by variety and then by size; the meat section which he navigated with Luganda and the attention of someone who had been studying ingredients since October.
He bought: fresh groundnuts in their shells. Dried spices — the specific combination Nalukwago had used in the groundnut stew on his first evening, reverse-engineered by smell and confirmed by asking. Plantain, green and ripe. Seeds and dried ingredients from the Herbology class. A small clay pot made by the woman at the corner of the spice section, who had been making them for forty years and whose work had the quality of something that had been doing what it was supposed to do for so long it had stopped trying. The clay pot was for his mother. She had a collection.
He spent an hour in Nakasero and could have spent four, but he had the afternoon planned.
Owino Market was different — larger, denser, the specific organised chaos of the largest market in East Africa, selling everything from secondhand clothes to electronics to crafts to food to things he could not immediately classify. He moved through it with the methodical attention he brought to environments that rewarded patience.
The craft section was where he spent most of the afternoon.
He found the beadwork from a woman named Nakato, who had a stall in the middle of the craft section and whose work had the quality of something that had been thought about. The beads were glass, in a specific combination of blue and green and cream associated with the lake, with water, with clarity. The necklace he chose for Hermione was simple: a single strand, the beads graduating in size toward the centre. He held it and thought about Hermione and bought it.
For the carved wooden pieces he found a carver near the edge of the craft section — an older man named Wasswa who worked in Mvule wood and had the quality of someone who understood what his material was. The crested crane was Wasswa's signature piece — he had been making them for twenty years and the best ones had the quality of something that had always been in that shape. He chose two, decided which was Hermione's and which was his by a logic he could not fully articulate, and commissioned the carved Snitch for Harry.
'The size, the wings, the way it moves,' he described. Wasswa listened with the quality of a craftsman receiving a commission and asked two questions: what it was for, and how it should feel in the hand. Ron answered both and Wasswa quoted a completion time of the following Saturday.
He spent the rest of the afternoon finding the remaining gifts. For his father: a small brass compass with Ugandan magical symbols on the face. For the twins: two identical pouches made from bark cloth, extremely well-made, which would confuse them productively. For Ginny: kanga fabric, the East African printed cotton, in a combination of colours he had seen her wearing equivalents of all year. For Percy: a brass paperweight in the shape of the Ugandan Ministry's seal — exactly the kind of thing Percy would find satisfying. For Neville: the seeds and dried plant material from Nakasero, carefully packaged and labelled. For Luna: two sets of the creatures photographs, one standard and one with his notes on each creature in the margins. For his mother: the clay pot, the groundnuts, three Ugandan cookbooks.
He found the painting on Monday afternoon, in the gap between his first integrated spell work class and the second stage of the transformation.
The artist had a small gallery on a side street off the magical district — a single room with perhaps thirty canvases, the work of someone who had been painting Kampala for twenty years and had found, sometime in the middle of those years, a way of seeing the city's light that was specific to him and impossible to mistake for anyone else.
His name was Kato. He was perhaps fifty, with hands that carried the permanent evidence of paint in the creases and the calm of someone for whom the work was simply what he did rather than what he performed.
Ron stood in front of the large canvas for a long time.
It was a view of Kampala from the hill above the magical district, looking south-west toward Lake Victoria. The evening light — the specific Kampala evening that Ron had been watching from his window since the first night — was rendered in a palette that was not quite realistic and was entirely accurate: ochre and burnt orange deepening toward the lake, the city's seven hills in graduated layers of green and terracotta and shadow, and at the far edge the lake itself, not blue but its own colour, a brightness at the edge of everything.
It was approximately sixty by ninety centimetres. It would need careful packaging for transport. It was, he thought, the best thing he had encountered on the trip, and the trip had contained many excellent things.
He bought it.
Kato rolled and packaged it himself, with the care of someone who understood what he was sending into the world. Ron paid the price asked without negotiating, which was not how Diagon Alley worked and appeared to be how Kato's gallery worked, given the expression it produced.
'You see it,' Kato said, looking at Ron with the assessment of a painter for someone who has stood in front of his work for a long time.
'Yes,' Ron said.
'Most people see a landscape,' Kato said. 'You see the light.'
'The light is what makes it the painting rather than the place,' Ron said.
Kato looked at him for a moment. 'Come back tomorrow,' he said. 'I have something smaller. For travelling.'
Ron came back the next day and found a study — a small canvas, twenty by twenty-five, the same view in early morning rather than evening, the light completely different and entirely the same painter. He bought that too. He put the study in his trunk for travelling reference and the large canvas in the expanded pouch for safe transport.