Cobalt Blue

by Sachin Kundalkar

  When you first decided to bask in the sun, clad only in shorts, the girls in the hostel began to murmur. And giggle. One of them, the one who always let down her wet hair so she could dry it on the balcony, came out, saw you, gasped ‘Aiyya’ and scuttled in again. You didn’t seem to notice. With your Walkman plugged into your ears, you were lost to the world.

  Slowly the girls who dried their hair in the balcony began to gather again. Shamita, Ground Floor, would come out and read Sartre in a marked manner. Sarika, Second Floor, would drop her towel or her kurta into our courtyard from time to time; you’d hand it back and accept her thanks quietly and go back to your music.

  One day, the wind brought a bra and dropped it into our yard. You were listening to music, your eyes closed. I was washing my bike in the yard. When you opened your eyes, you saw the bra lying on the ground. You picked it up and waved it at the balcony load of girls.

  ‘Excuse me. One of you looking for this?’

  The balcony emptied immediately. Everyone scuttled off to their rooms. You waved the bra aloft and said, ‘No one for this?’ and then shrugged and hooked it on to the washing line. Silence. Shocked, I looked around. Just your luck. No one was around. I pictured the kind of expressions Nadkarni Kaku and Aai would have had, had they seen you waving a bra around. I didn’t want to be called upon as a witness. I went into the house quickly.

  I kept ducking Aai all day; she’d come into one room and I’d go into the other. In the afternoon I was lolling about, watching a film on Star Movies when Nadkarni Kaku called. I sat up immediately. Aai went to the washing line. Nadkarni Kaku began to talk, her head wiggling volubly.

  Since it was my duty to run interference, I called, ‘Aai, phone for you.’ Aai came back into the house and said, ‘Thank you.’ She had a steel dabba in her hands—hot batata vadas. Nothing to worry about. When I came up after dinner, you’d already finished a quarter of Old Monk rum. You were sitting in the window, a loving look on your face. I curled up in the remaining space and we looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  ‘What plastic women these are! Did you see them running in? Every item of clothing is important. I mean, any piece of clothing . . .’ your voice tailed off.

  ‘Yes? Any piece of clothing?’

  ‘I know this may sound absurd . . .’

  And you dissolved into laughter again.

  I waved the empty bottle in front of you. ‘Did you drink all of it then?’

  You stopped laughing and said, ‘Though it may sound absurd to you, no piece of clothing is more important than the others.’ Then you yawned and added, ‘They don’t get this. So I don’t get them. All the girls in college are like that. They scramble to look good. They want to be safe. Not my type. I like people who are basically good at heart . . . totally free. You can dialogue with them. I can adjust, I suppose. Now I won’t go to bed with someone unless he’s a friend. Being alone’s a habit now. But I suppose I could break that too.’

  You were already falling asleep as you spoke.

  When I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night, I discovered you’d turned your back on me and moved away.

  Yesterday, as she dropped me home, Rashmi said, ‘I’m going to spring-clean tomorrow. Come and help?’ I smiled and stuck my thumb into the air and went into the house. If you’re asked something when you’re reading a book, browning onions in the kadhai or otherwise occupied, you don’t even raise your head. You just stick your thumb into the air if you want to say yes.

  It’s recently come to my attention that when I’m listening to someone, I cock my head. On the phone I hold the receiver between my head and my shoulder as Anuja does, playing a rhythm on the table in front of me. When I watch a film, I run my fist over my face, as Shrikrishna used to. When I shave, I bring my face close to the mirror, as Baba does. When the milk boils over, I walk to the gas range calmly, turn it off and wipe the counter down, without a word— as Aai does.

  How did I acquire those habits? Perhaps that’s what happens during the forging of a relationship: if nothing else, you adopt some of the other person’s habits. It makes you feel those small adaptations, those adoptions, make him one of you.

  Have you picked up some habits from me? Do you draw circles with a finger on your thali when you’ve finished eating? Do you, every once in a while, squeeze shaving cream on to your toothbrush? Do you sleep with a knee drawn up to you, the bedclothes kicked away? Do you fold the newspaper neatly and put it where you found it, when you’re done?

  Yesterday, when a cobalt blue smudge of the wall ended up on my hand, I wiped it on my trousers without thinking.

  Your habit of saying ‘We’ll see’ irritated me immensely but I have to admit you deployed it skilfully and for the longest possible time. When Arindam sent his first email asking us to a meeting, I asked you if you would go with me.

  ‘Let’s see,’ you said.

  So I went out, knocked on the door and came in again, and said, ‘Will you come with me to the meeting?’

  You laughed and went to look for some clothes.

  I hate the kind of person who keeps his options open until the last moment. It makes me angry.

  ‘Say yes or no and let the person who’s asking you go free,’ I said to you.

  ‘The person’s free already.’

  ‘Are you afraid to say “No”?’

  ‘If I were to say “No”, would you accept it without arguing?’

  Try it and see,’ I said. ‘Besides I’m arguing right now because your “Let’s see” generally means “No”.’

  ‘If I don’t change my ways, will things fall apart?’ you asked.

  At such times, I’d go thundering down the stairs. This was a tricky ploy. My plan was:

  I thunder down the stairs.

  You come after me. You apologize. You ask me to come back up.

  I say, ‘Buddy, you cannot be so self-centred in a relationship. You have to learn to make some compromises with your principles.’

  You apologize again, you say that you get it, and instead of ‘Let’s see’, you say ‘Yes’.

  We go out together.

  Most times my plan failed at step one. I would come down the stairs and wander about in the house, waiting for you. I’d snarl at everyone and sulk in the kitchen.

  Once I came down in just such a manner. I waited for you to follow. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang. I refused to answer. Naturally, no one else came to pick it up so finally I had to. It was some senior citizen from the French Institute, asking for you in a polite voice. I told Aai to call you and sat down near the phone, a frown scoring lines on my brow.

  You took the phone and I heard half of the conversation: ‘Hello? . . . Yes . . . Okay? . . . Let’s see . . . I’m not sure . . . Maybe, yes . . . Okay . . . Okay . . . But that’s not fixed yet . . . Okay . . . Bye.’

  Then you turned to look at me and shouted to Aai, ‘Kaku, don’t you need to get the gas cylinder? This Tanay is just sitting here, shall I take him on the bike to get it?’

  Aai bustled into the kitchen and said, ‘Oh yes, that’s right. It’s a good thing you remembered. No one else in this house seems bothered. Tanay, come on, get up. Go and get a cylinder.’

  I looked at you and shouted, ‘Going, going.’ Aai had no idea why I shouted so loudly.

  Last week, I couldn’t sleep and so I stepped into the courtyard. I sat down on the stones of the old washing area and looked up at the tower room. It began to drizzle, a thin but determined spray of droplets that wet me completely. I don’t know how long I sat there. The sound of Baba’s scooter startled me.

  Anuja has been sent to Sharayu Maushi’s for a change of scene. The parents had gone to see her. When they returned, Aai was weeping, the edge of her sari stuffed into her mouth. Baba simply took off his shoes and went into the house. I gathered Aai into my arms and tried to calm her down.

  You would have liked the way I behave now. Your rules. Don’t let them get to you. Don’t argue.

  Baba
came out and said, ‘Tomorrow, go and see Anuja. That might cheer her up.’

  I didn’t want to hurt him by saying an outright ‘No’ so I said, ‘Let’s see. I’ll phone and go.’

  When it became clear that you had left with Anuja, I began to look for reasons.

  We became friends almost instantly. With me, this was a first. We both disliked girls who sang light classical and boys who wore banians with sleeves. Girls who had to be dropped home after rehearsal or any other practice session, rude rickshaw drivers, shepu bhaji in any form, group photographs at weddings, men who left the top two buttons of their shirts open, lizards, tea that has gone cold, the habit of taking the newspaper to the toilet, kissing a boy who’d just smoked a cigarette et cetera.

  Another list. The things we loved: strong coffee, Matisse, Rumi, summer rain, bathing together, rice pancakes, Tom Hanks, Café Sunrise, black-and-white photographs, the first quiet moments after you get up in the morning. And on this latter list there was also a man we both loved very much: you. I had only met men like you in novels, men who lived their own idiosyncrasies.

  Sometimes I got angry with you. You’d behave as if you were some perverse actor; the poet of your own unreasonable spirit. Now that it’s all over, I wonder if I could ever love anyone again.

  I knew there would be comments and questions if I were to mope at home so I went to Rashmi’s house or simply hung out in the tower room. I don’t cry now. I don’t even feel anger. When I do, I go into the tower room, memory floods back and washes the anger away.

  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when Aai tells Baba that I’m this way because I miss Anuja. Now Anuja, who never shed a tear before all this, weeps all day, weeps until she’s exhausted, and then goes to sleep without looking at me. They call what afflicts her depression and they’re taking care of it.

  Psychiatrists, pills, a change of scene, that sort of thing.

  I didn’t like Dali; now, like you, I do. Like you, I began to drink my Coke with a pinch of salt. Like you, I stopped bothering about ironed clothes. Like you, I sit with a dictionary while reading the papers. Like you, I sit on the compound wall after a bath.

  Was that why? Because I began to behave like you?

  Rashmi’s bedroom wall features a photograph of the two of us. We’re sitting on a garden bench, our backs to the camera, arms across each other’s shoulders. I heard something, I think, and I looked back and Rashmi clicked. I’m not smiling in the picture but the happiness inside me radiates out of it. I told Rashmi to take it off the wall and keep it safe.

  When Arindam’s first email about the meeting came, you got ready albeit a little reluctantly.

  We went on the bike, wandering through an unfamiliar part of the city. Once we came down the hill, it took us a while to make our way through the grandiose bungalows and we got late. Although I had been the prime mover of this expedition, I wasn’t entirely ready for this meeting. But I liked the intellectual tone of Arindam’s mail and I felt I had to go.

  At the meeting, you behaved exactly as Marathi novelists of the last century tell us husbands do in sari shops.

  At the door Arindam was taking down names and email addresses in a register. As he wrote mine, he asked, ‘Are you okay with giving your postal address?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said and gave Rashmi’s address with our names attached. Taking in the common address, Arindam looked up and said, ‘Great! Are you a couple?’ I looked at you but you said nothing and continued to read a brochure. So I said, ‘Yes.’

  Ten or twelve men were gathered in the room. That’s where I first saw Ashish and Samuel. I thought Arindam, a shortish man with a way of waving his arms about to make a point, was talking sense.

  Now with the aid of statistics and charts, he said we should get together, share experiences. It didn’t matter how small the group was. What mattered was a beginning; we had to make a beginning.

  Throughout the meeting a boy with reddish hair kept staring at you; this left me a little disconcerted.

  On the way home, you said that you couldn’t understand the need for collective action. I said, ‘I am not a big one for talking clubs but at least we’ll meet people with similar problems.’

  You said, ‘If it ain’t broke, why fix it?’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Let’s face the problems when they come. Maybe it’s because I’ve not lived in a family situation but I don’t think I have any problems as such.’

  Then you began to sing, cutting loose. As we rode over the hill outside the city, then when we were within city limits, through the sounds of traffic, you sang. The honking of the cars would mix with your voice but you sang on, tapping out a rhythm on my shoulder. When we stopped at signals, you ignored the traffic policeman, the people laughing at us from cars. When they rolled up their windows, you smiled and went on singing. You only stopped when we got home. Then you hugged me and said, ‘Come up after dinner.’

  Whistling, you took the stairs in four leaps and vanished into your room. I thought, at that moment, that I might have understood what you meant.

  ‘Whatever happens, happens for the best!’ That’s how any domestic counselling starts in a Marathi family. Everyone in every family has an inner psychiatrist who rises to the occasion with some home-made mottos, a few lines from a Jagjit Singh ghazal. An older generation may quote Tukaram but underlying all this is the bedrock phrase: Whatever happens, happens for the best.

  Anuja was taken to a real psychiatrist yesterday. When she was taken into the doctor’s cabin, I came out and sat on the clinic steps. The rains had caused havoc: the gutters were thick with storm debris and city sludge. A school bus shuddered to a halt in front of me. A toddler tottered down the steps, trying to manage his school bag and water bottle. The bus pulled away. The boy looked around. No one seemed to be on hand to take him home; no mother, no elder sister. He sat down on the kerb, planted his chin on his hand and settled down to wait.

  ‘Remember what I said about exercise?’ It was the doctor and Anuja. ‘Have you thought about going on a trek now that it’s raining?’

  Anuja was leaden-eyed and hardly there. In contrast, the psychiatrist’s face was so receptive, so inviting that I wanted to go up to her and tell her everything. Then she added, ‘Everything that happens, happens for the best.’

  I burst out laughing. The doctor looked askance at me. When I turned away, the little boy was gone. I look at Anuja. I think about what happened to me. How could it have been for the best, any of it?

  I sense the presence of other people. They’re keeping me company without saying a word, without foisting themselves on to me. It’s as if they’ve materialized suddenly, made me aware of them. They seem to be saying. ‘Didn’t you know? We were always here for you.’

  In that wasted time between exams and results, I go to Rashmi’s flat every afternoon. She has given me a key. I can shut out the world there. None of the doors or windows overlook the street. Through the afternoon, I move from chair to sofa, sofa to chair, checking what I feel. I break this rhythm for a cup of tea. I read the first four or five pages of the books she has. I watch blue films. I stand under the shower for a long time. And I wait for it to strike four.

  At four, Rashmi returns. In one hand, her purse. In the other a stuffed bag: groceries, ironed clothes, and a special treat for me. A hot vada-pao perhaps. But it’s her face, her smile, that brightens up the room and the evening.

  Then I make tea for her and we both stand in the balcony to drink it and chat. At six thirty, on her way to the gym, she drops me home.

  Once, when I was giving her a head massage, I said, ‘If I were that kind of boy, I’d have married you.’ She said, ‘Good grief. I don’t think I would have married you. I could have lived with you for a week but after that I’d have had to return to my place here.’ Then she rumpled my hair and said, ‘That’s life: the guy I could really be friends with wants nothing to do with my kind.’

  Rashmi’s ways are her own. I didn’t talk much ab
out you; when I did, she changed the subject. So I made a conscious effort and stopped; and you vanished from our conversations. This made me aware of something else: of how friendship can offer surcease from noise.

  At six thirty, on her way back to the gym, Rashmi drops me home. Aseem was still at the office; the parents were at Sharayu Maushi’s home. I unlock the gate, then the front door, go in. At Rashmi’s, it’s possible to close a single door and lock out the world. In our home, even after you’ve closed the front door behind you, the world has many ways of sneaking back in. There’s the back door, the side entrance. Facing the road, four windows. Five at the back. Many of the rooms don’t have doors, just thresholds. No one can be alone here. Any number of people can be watching you at any given time: family, neighbours, the vegetable vendors passing by. Each of us must perform our joys and sorrows for all the rest because this house has a front door, a back door and a side entrance. And often, no doors between rooms.

  On the door of a cupboard, you had stuck the photograph of your parents—who you had lost in an air crash. You didn’t say much about them. I never saw you perform any of the rituals of ancestor worship. Your father had been a consultant to the Indian embassy in Paris; your mother a journalist. The French language flowed through your family, as the Hanuman stotra and the verses of Sant Ramdas did in other families. In their five-year Paris stint, they took you there, but only once. Your memories as an eight-year- old: the Eiffel tower by night, sunlight until eight in the evening, and a variety of exciting cheeses.

  Perhaps it was because your father had always been abroad, but you spoke a little more about your mother. I liked listening to you talk about her.

  You remembered her sitting at a table, spectacles perched on the top of her head, writing. As someone who put you into a papoose and took you to the market. As someone who munched popcorn with you as you watched English movies together.

  When your father returned and took your mother’s attention from you, you resented it. In your box of books, there were often two copies of the same novel, one with your father’s name and one with your mother’s.