Cobalt Blue

by Sachin Kundalkar

  ‘Do you think it will be all conferences and talks in Mumbai?’ I asked Samuel.

  ‘Do you want to go with Arindam?’ he asked.

  I was quite surprised when you agreed to go. Had you not been there, I would have felt quite lonely. But when you were there, I kept worrying about their unsubtle advances. That was the first and last party we attended. Dancing to loud music wasn’t something new; I quite enjoyed it. Powered by beer, we danced until our legs were aching, our bodies soaked with sweat despite the air conditioning. I went to the counter, bought myself a beer, and began to watch you dancing alone. For a while, I seemed to go deaf. The multicoloured lights began to merge into one. And suddenly, nothing seemed clear. Who are you? Would you acknowledge me if I met you on the street in broad daylight? What do you want? What is going to happen after this? My head began to spin.

  Around us, a sea of men. In shorts and tight banians. In jeans and T-shirts that showed the bodies they had earned in the gym. Married men with paunches packed into full-sleeved shirts. A flamboyant drag queen with a face of stone. All of them were dancing as if no one was watching. It was a near-orgy. The men were draped across each other, at the tables in the corners.

  What did I want? What did Arindam think he would achieve? At one of the tables in a corner, Ashish and Samuel were nursing their drinks and a quiet conversation. I put my drink down on the table and went up to you. I did up all the buttons on your shirt and said, ‘Let’s go.’

  You followed me out immediately. Only when we were back in the tower room and I had wrapped my arms around you did I feel safe again.

  Manjiri’s kelvan. All Baba’s relatives arrived to stay. Durga Aji had brought a year’s supply of sesame chutney and papads. Sita Kaku and Kanchan had put on weight. Since Arjun had just begun to walk, his mother Kanchan and everyone else seemed to spend much of their time chasing him about. Anuja took Prachi for a haircut and the loss of those long, lustrous locks sent Durga Aji into a rage that came and went over the next two days.

  Prakash Kaka looked a little tired. After dinner, he and Ram Kaka and Baba would go for a paan and a walk. The house was busy, vibrant, a fairground. The pleasure of so many guests kept Aai in a state of constant ferment. Even Aseem had taken four days’ leave. Every evening, there were party games and until the last boiled peanut had been eaten it was impossible to even think of coming upstairs. Durga Aji was measuring Aseem and Sunil for wedding shervanis in her head, even as she cracked her knuckles meditatively. After dinner, sitting on a cot and watching these people, I thought: I rather like them. I felt soft and warm and welcoming. Manjiri said, ‘Now that I’m going far away to Nagpur, we’re not going to see much of each other. You’d better keep in touch on email.’

  I looked up at that moment and saw you with an armful of wet clothes. I felt ashamed that I hadn’t been to see you for two whole days. I came up and looked down; the afternoon sunlight flattened my family into dwarfs.

  Six months after you vanished, in the middle of a storm of beating rain and theatrical thunder, Anuja returned. The storm had given us no warning and so Aai had sent me to close all the doors and windows, thus plunging the house into darkness. After Anuja’s departure, Aai had begun to look like she was slowly falling apart; in this gloom, she looked even stranger. Baba dug out a sweater and put on his slippers and slumped into an armchair. I was channel surfing mindlessly.

  Aseem came back from the office and Aai made tea. As he was tossing his smelly socks into the bathroom, the bell rang. He went to the door, carrying with him the smell of his feet. He opened it and shouted, ‘Aai-Baba.’ We were all electrified. And there she was. Anuja, who had returned as she had left, with no warning. She looked as if she hadn’t slept for days. Her hands seemed thin. Her hair was a little longer. Her clothes seemed old and torn. No, she was wearing your clothes. So your clothes seemed old and torn. Your torn clothes stifled all my responses.

  While I was conducting this examination, she was weeping in Aai’s embrace. I looked at her and managed a smile. Until then, I had laboured under the impression that you and she had left in different directions.

  I went into my room and watched the rain. Moisture had seeped through the wall and the photographs were all crooked now. My illusions stripped from me, I felt my body go hot. I felt a sense of loss; the world felt a deceitful place.

  No one could talk to her that day. She had a bath, a hot meal and then slept for twenty-four hours at a stretch. By then, the light was back in the house and questions were on every face. Anuja woke up and began to cry again. She begged Aai-Baba’s forgiveness. Sharayu Maushi and Nadkarni Kaku turned up to give Aai moral support. Baba went to inform the police. Anuja refused to tell the police anything.

  When Anuja began to talk, when it was all put into words, I felt no anger, just misery, aridity.

  In the evening, when I was sitting in the tower room, doing nothing, Anuja came upstairs and peered in. She was in the mood to talk. She told me that you had left her, without warning, suddenly, one morning. I could offer no consolation. But as we came down the stairs, I wanted to drag her back up and throw her off the roof.

  In the next few days, my mind was a desert. Just as it was when you vanished. No, I should face it. Just as it was when you ran away with Anuja. I wasn’t shocked then. Nor did I feel any anger. I had decided that I would wait for you. When you didn’t show up all day, I ran to Sunrise. Menden said that you hadn’t even come for breakfast. The next day, when I asked whether you had said anything about travelling, Mehnaz said you had paid your bill a day earlier. The photograph of your parents was missing too. When Baba ransacked the tower room, I found some photographs, other ones. I began my vigil.

  Two days after Anuja returned, she was sent to a psychiatrist. She was sent to live with Sharayu Maushi for a change of scene. Rashmi took me into her care and managed to bring me back to my senses.

  I’ve had many people come and go in my life. I didn’t see myself as having been cheated by anyone. This time everything was different. This time changed every tomorrow.

  I have no tears now. Why should I? No one around me would understand. But memory surges back, hot and fresh. In your arms a stack of books. Your favourites. The image is out of focus now so I can’t make out the titles. And your face, above the books, filled with laughter. Behind it the fuzzy light that spilled from the room.

  Another photo I found in the debris of Baba’s room raid.

  Anuja

  10 July

  Today, I told Dr Khanvilkar that I seem to have made only bad decisions. My life was not the way I wanted it to be. I told her that I thought I was going to have to live one of those fraudulent lives I saw around me.

  To which she said, ‘Are you the only one who wants to live differently? Those who choose to live differently must suffer the consequences. They must take the pain their decisions bring. Anyway, you’re still young. Why should you accept defeat?’

  I wonder if I should believe what she says. But when you’re not strong in yourself, anyone can tell you anything and you’ll fall for it.

  Today, I also looked at myself in the mirror: swollen face, dark circles under sunken eyes, white tongue, hair like nylon to the touch. My face tells of the side effects of the drugs they’re giving me.

  At that moment, I wanted to end it all. I did not feel I could go on. I went into Sharayu Maushi’s bathroom and opened a bottle of eau de cologne and drank as much as I could in a single gulp. My mouth and throat began to burn; I dropped the bottle which fell and broke. I couldn’t even swallow; it came out again. This was failure piled on failure and I sat down in the middle of the glass and the intense smell and began to wail. Sharayu Maushi and Aai came running to see what was going on. Aai took in the broken bottle and began to rain blows down on me. I gritted my teeth and took her blows. Sharayu Maushi interposed herself. Aai tried to push her away and said, ‘You want to die? If we can hurt you so much, why did you come back? Go now, find some other man and elope with him.’
/>
  Then she began to weep. My leaving must have hit her hard. I think she needs a psychiatrist more than I do.

  But her weeping caused a fresh storm inside my head. I thumped off into the hall and put on the television. A woman was singing a bhajan. I raised the volume until it drowned out the world and locked the door and sat there, barely listening. I did not open the door until Baba came in the evening. He gave me a lecture about my duties. Aai decided that we would stay in Sharayu Maushi’s house for a week. My sentence begins tomorrow morning. I told Baba, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not about to commit suicide. I don’t have that kind of courage. If I did, would I have come back?’

  He listened, his face like stone, like cold stone.

  ‘Right,’ he said and then added: ‘Until the time you get married, you will behave yourself according to the house rules. You will obey. We gave you your freedom and we saw what you did with it.’

  I slapped my forehead and walked off.

  My finger had been hurting since the afternoon. When I looked at it carefully, I saw a sliver of glass embedded in the skin. I took a needle and slowly, carefully, drew it out.

  12 July

  Dr Khanvilkar suggested that I write a diary. Why is she so interested in my life? Because she’s being paid to be interested, right? Otherwise why would she tolerate me sitting there, my face contorted, blabbering away for an hour, every other day? If my parents sat there instead of Dr K, they might learn something about me and we’d save a lot of money. But they don’t want to hear any of this. They want it wrapped up, put away, forgotten. As you might take a car to the garage, I was brought to Sharayu Maushi’s house. To be repaired.

  I’m not sure I can write every day. I told Dr K that. I also told her that I wasn’t about to share what I wrote with her. To which she said in a honeysweet voice, the kind you hear those announcers use on the radio, ‘Write whatever comes to your mind. What you feel now. What you felt then. It doesn’t matter if you don’t write every day.’ I wasn’t paying much attention.

  Thinking brings more questions to the surface. My head begins to hurt because no one has any convincing answers. Why did this happen to me? And when everything was going so well, why did he vanish? Did I do something wrong? Or did he feel nothing for me?

  They’ve sent me here, far away from home, to Sharayu Maushi’s house. For a change of scene, they say. She and Aai are going to keep an eye on me. I hate it here. They behave as if I’m some kind of mental patient. And then, it’s an odd place: far from the city, no trees, no gardens, just an expanse of plots and half-built bungalows. The house bakes in the afternoon sun. I toss and turn, wondering if it’s a frying pan I’m lying on. I don’t look out of the window. It’s supposed to be the monsoons but the sky is clear. My head swims. Aai sits with Sharayu Maushi, crying over spilt milk. I’m tired of crying. When I finished school, I thought I had grown up, I thought I had become independent. I felt I could stand on my own feet. Now I’m a child again, a helpless child.

  When I realized he was gone and I decided to come home to my mother, nothing was clear. In a trance, I packed. Half the clothes were his. As were those on my body. I set out to burn those clothes when Sharayu Maushi stopped me and took them away for the gardener’s son. The result? Those very clothes kept crossing my line of vision. I complained to Sharayu Maushi who gave the boy a month’s leave.

  Tanay has changed. The other day, he acted very strange. He said he had come to see me but most of the time he just sat there, saying nothing. Then he went to the cupboard, opened my bag and took out the olive-green T-shirt and left. Like the gardener’s son, he’s going to be wandering about in those clothes too.

  They punish me with their silences. I keep telling the doctor this.

  One morning, I woke up and looked around to find him missing. He hadn’t returned even after I’d made myself some tea. Afternoon came but he didn’t. His cycle was gone too. I shoved my feet into slippers and went to look for him. The library, I thought. No. The seashore? No. The streets? Nowhere. By evening, I began to feel lonely. Had he left a letter? I tumbled everything out of the cupboard. His bag was gone. Also some of his clothes. Other things too. That’s when it hit me: he had left me. I had not eaten, I began to feel dizzy. I found that I had two hundred rupees in my pocket. In one of his trouser pockets, I found another fifty- rupee note. I had dinner and returned to sit on the steps with the door open.

  Nothing.

  Next day. Nothing.

  I began to get frightened. There had been nothing to warn me. In the past few days, he had taken to sleeping on the floor alone but we had not fought or anything like that. I asked the few acquaintances we had made if they had seen him. I described him to those we did not know. Such a small town but no one had seen him. In the evening when I returned to the room, I began to feel dizzy again. I did not have the nerve to tell the police. I tried instead to figure out what had happened.

  Bag? Gone.

  Personal stuff? Gone.

  Clothes hanging on the wall? Gone.

  Had he planned this? What was I to do?

  Finally, I got up and packed. The rent for the next two months had already been paid but that didn’t matter. I didn’t know where to go. I hadn’t much money left. As I put on my shoes, I realized I would have to go home to my parents. Where else?

  I sat down to think about it. It took me all day. Where could he have gone? Would he return? I kept looking for reasons. I tried to remember exactly what he had said, the precise words he had used in the days before his departure. But I could find no clue to his behaviour.

  I had never spent so much time thinking about someone else. I hadn’t even thought about an issue in this sustained way. I was impulsive; if I felt like it, I would do it. I had once been a climber. In the heat of the afternoon, I would drag myself up narrow footpaths to the top of a hill. Keeping fear at bay, I would scramble up steep hillsides, often with the help of ropes. When the group arrived at the top, huffing and puffing, everyone would take a breather and stop to admire the view. Not me. I would walk to the very edge of the summit and look down as the wind screamed around my ears.

  From there, the villages and fields look like they belong in a picture, the jagged edges of the mountain framing a burning sun. Then I would suddenly be filled with a great joy and my mind would say, ‘You want to. You know you do. What is there to hold you back? Jump. What you feel now, what you want now, that’s all there is. Jump. Just jump.’

  13July

  If truth be told, Aai and Baba should not have felt so bad about my going away with him. I had done it before, left, I mean. Usually, I would tell them and go. This time I had not told anyone and left. That was the only difference. Otherwise, I had always planned on leaving.

  How long could I have stayed in this world of Aai’s religion and her swamis, her rituals and fasts; this world of Baba’s, he who was always afraid of what ‘they’ would say; this world of marriage and children and aunts who performed the Mangala Gauri ritual to signify their happiness with their married state, and cousins who organized rose-giving competitions on Valentine’s Day? I messed up my first escape attempt. I wonder if there’s something wrong with me.

  For the first time, Aai took some time to try and talk to me and be my friend. What she wanted to tell me, I had learned from books and from the conversations and experiences of my friends. I listened, keeping my face blank. I wonder why she had never tried this before. The strange thing is that she never tried to do the same thing again. It was a game she played with me for a single day. She was ashamed and she wanted to hide her shame. Once you try something hypocritical, you can never sound convincing again.

  Until yesterday, I thought I was feeling better. But in the afternoon, my limbs began to feel heavy and I felt alone again. The future frightened me so much I began to cry. I did not know what was going to happen to me. I felt that everyone must be laughing at me. My head began to fuzz over. Sitting in a chair, I began to cry copiously. I wept on and on until my b
reath began to catch in my throat. Then I went and locked myself in my room and continued to cry. Sharayu Maushi realized something was wrong; she began to bang on the door. I didn’t move. She went on banging for half an hour. I grew tired, physically tired of crying. It was only when poor Sharayu Maushi climbed a ladder to peer in at the window that I got up and opened the door. She gave me some pills and put me to bed and drew a sheet over me. I stuffed a handkerchief into my mouth to stifle my sobs.

  I remember his mood, the day we left home together. He didn’t seem excited or anything. I said, ‘Hey, let’s get this straight. I’m the one who’s leaving home. But you’re the one with the long face.’ When I went up to his room with my haversack, his paints and brushes were packed, his canvases rolled up. When I knocked, it took him a while to open the door. I remained standing on the staircase. I felt sure that Baba would not go to the police for fear of a scandal. After a trek to Mudumalai with our ecobuddies, he was going to take me to Pondicherry. And after that? Neither of us knew. Finally he came out. He didn’t lock the door.

  I didn’t look back but he kept turning around to catch a glimpse of his room. At around three, we left the city on the general compartment of a train, crowded in with hundreds of other people. At the campsite, he kept drawing that room, again and again.