Cobalt Blue

by Sachin Kundalkar

  When I first went to her house, it was about 11. 30 in the morning. I knocked and waited for some minutes. Then I began to call her name. A little girl came out of a neighbouring flat. ‘Hey,’ she called and beckoned. I turned to her but she ran back into her flat and closed the iron security door. Sticking her nose out through the bars, she said: ‘What’s the use? Rashmitai must be still asleep. When I ring her number, the phone wakes her up.’ She giggled at this and ran inside. The phone began to ring in Rashmi’s flat. In a while, Rashmi came to the door, sleep clouding her eyes. She took the papers from my hand. To the little girl who had reappeared at the grill, she said, ‘Cheene, your Aai is going to be late. Don’t open the door to anyone. And come by in the afternoon for bread and jam.’ Then she took the papers, thanked me and both Cheenoo and she slammed their doors.

  Now I have a key to Rashmi’s flat.

  You didn’t seem very curious about people. I’m different. After I got to know you, I wanted to know every little detail about you. Where did you go to school? Did you ever fall in love? With whom? How do you manage alone? What do you plan on doing? I would ask a flurry of questions and I would volunteer a flurry of details about myself.

  I don’t know how you managed it: an intense relationship with me, an attraction to Anuja, and then to leave with her? To live somewhere else?

  Yesterday, Ashish and Samuel invited me over for a meal. Both their names were on the door. Ashish was cooking while Samuel helped, unobtrusively. They refused to let me do anything. I sat on a stool in the kitchen and watched them at work. I think they deliberately chose not to mention you. After lunch, while we were having coffee, Ashish went and sat next to Samuel and placed his warm cup against Samuel’s cheek. I looked down immediately. Samuel saw my discomfiture and said, ‘I’ll get some cookies,’ and went into the kitchen.

  In the last couple of years, I have begun to feel the need for a permanent relationship, something I can grow into. The thought had crept up on me that I might have such a relationship with you. When I looked at my parents and thought about this whole ‘together forever’ thing, it never struck me as anything exciting. Yesterday, I was a little envious of what Samuel and Ashish had. When she spoke of Aseem’s wedding, Aai always said, ‘It’s best if these things happen in good time.’ In her world, unmarried men were irresponsible, free birds and unmarried women like Rashmi had ‘not managed to marry’.

  What do two men who decide to live together do? Men like you and me? Those who don’t want children? Those who don’t have the old to look after or the young to raise? No one would visit us because we’d be living together as social outcasts. For most of the day, we would do what we liked.

  You sometimes asked me, ‘Why do you stare at me like that?’ Did you know what I was thinking? We hadn’t met Samuel and Ashish then so I didn’t know any male couples who lived together.

  You spoke of a couple who had never lived together. She was a French writer whose work you loved. He was also a writer and a philosopher. They had never lived under the same roof. But they were friends and had remained so. Throughout their lives, they had pooled in their income. They did an impressive amount of writing, teaching and fighting for the causes they valued. They had given themselves the right to create a new kind of relationship. You spoke animatedly about them; the second time you described their relationship, I said, ‘You’ve told me about this already.’

  ‘I’ll get some cookies, ‘ Samuel said and went into the kitchen. Ashish and I sat there without speaking.

  Samuel did not come back. Perhaps he’d gone for a nap. After a while, Ashish came and sat down next to me. He said, ‘It hurts, doesn’t it? I get it.’ But it was he who began to cry. I hugged him and patted his back as he cried and cried. Finally, exhaustion set in and he stopped and wiped his reddened eyes.

  He said, ‘Don’t worry about it. Sometimes, I don’t understand Samuel at all. There are these phone calls that go on for hours on end. And if I’m with him, he goes into the next room. I just look at him. What can I say?’

  For hours on end, I sat in that upstairs room, staring at you while you went about your life, unaware of my attention. You would be squeezing paint out of tubes, hanging your clothes out to dry, wiping your stained hands on your T-shirt, blowing on the milk as it bubbled over, lifting vessels off the hotplate, or sucking on a singed finger. I’d be staring at you and thinking, I should ask, I should ask, I should ask: do you want to be in a stable monogamous relationship for the rest of your life?

  Even if we’re not going to have children, even if we don’t have to worry about guests, even if we’re going to end up sleeping on two single beds, separated by a table on which there’s a copper vessel containing water, I want us to be together.

  Why? I was a child then. I woke up in the middle of the night and went in search of a glass of water. Aai had a fever and Baba was sitting by her side, stroking her head. He gave her her pills and then he helped her up and took her to the bathroom . . . I still remember that scene.

  No one had made me want to ask that question. Not Shrikrishna Pendse with whom I stole some moments in empty classrooms; not Amit Chowdhuri who lived alone behind Sharayu Maushi’s home; not Girish Sir who kept me back after rehearsals when all the other kids had been sent away.

  After we made love, I felt a delicious lassitude creeping over me. When consciousness returned, I realized that you were still with me; you hadn’t turned your back and edged away.

  Later, I was awakened by the warmth of the sun, filtering in through the window, and a delectable aroma in the air. It was you, after a bath, your hair wet, sitting in a chair, looking at me.

  ‘Why the lines on your forehead? Why that look of pain?’ I cleared my face, consciously letting happiness through.

  A thought: what if the ground were glass? I would be able to see a bunch of friends talking about their children. And Aseem’s hidden stash of Debonair with its photographs of topless women would fall out from among his books. A cousin was being gheraoed by a circle of relatives; he had published his mental and physical needs in the newspapers. Now it’s Aseem’s turn, they shout. Now Tanay’s. In the other room, Aai and her friends are looking at the jewellery that has been reserved for Anuja. Aai tells her friends that she has been scrupulously fair: whatever she has made for Anuja, she has had identical pieces made for her future daughters-in-law. In the next room, two colossal cradles have been hung. In them are two babies whose naming ceremonies are about to commence. Ashwini’s husband of three days cannot take his eyes off me. The turbulence of ritual swirls through the house. The women are jostling for place and for priority. When I see Ashwini’s husband standing near the dark wall of the station, he blushes and laughs. Having trapped the woman who has delivered herself of two children and grown fat, the men dance in a ring in a maidan. Happiness, happiness, everywhere happiness. Even the woman who has had two children and has grown fat is happy.

  I want to go and say something in each of these places and see what effect it has. But in this kerfuffle, who will hear my voice? So I sit silently in a corner. It occurs to me just as suddenly: what if everyone suddenly looks up, through the transparent glass ceiling, at us?

  I woke again—Baba shouting for me. I drew the curtain on the hostel side. I sorted out my clothes from yours and slipped into them and ran downstairs. I thought I was going to be upbraided for laziness, for sleeping until eleven. But it wasn’t that. It was only that the prasad he had brought from the Swami of Akalkot had not been sent across to the Ranade family. Mischievously, he said, ‘This is your punishment.’ Then he pushed a cup of not-very-good tea into my hands. When I drank it, he told me he had made it himself. From scratch. Sting was singing ‘Fields of gold’ deliriously from Anuja’s room. Aai was making onion thaalipeeth. The first one went to Aseem, as it always did. As he ate it, he looked at me and laughed.

  Perhaps the night had gone well for everyone.

  Everyone reacts differently to alcohol. Quiet men shout their prot
ests against the world. The aggressive turn humble and polite. It’s different with you; alcohol makes you ask questions, the odd questions only you can ask.

  When your glass was empty, you picked up an ice cube and began to look at me through it. You did this fairly often because my glass was usually empty as were the bottles. Then you rubbed the cube on your face, on your eyelids and you asked, ‘So tell me. Why do you call your city the cultural capital of the state?’ I tried to remember what we had learned in school: that there were some great colleges here, and a famous university that attracts students from across the country, from across the world. We had some of the state’s finest writers, poets, musicians, singers and the like. You had to win the approval of the audience in this city to prove yourself.

  But of course, to us, culture is anything that is more than a hundred years old. We are rather worried about keeping our culture alive. In order to do so, almost everyone has started some kind of cultural organization. There is a river that runs through the city. Those who want their culture to survive and those who want it to change live on different sides of the river. That the Ganeshotsav started by Tilak should be kept alive is a given. When the palkhis go through the city, young girls wearing nine-yard saris sing songs on special television programmes. There are laavnis and other traditional dances at mass meetings.

  This is it: we present an account of ourselves in our art forms. Every family seems to have a member who lives in America or one who is acting in a television serial based on a classic novel. And so this city is called the cultural capital of the state.

  In the middle of the city runs a river. When I was in school, there were only three bridges across the river. Today, there are nine. When this otherwise thin trickle of a river swells into a torrent of tea-coloured water, Anuja, Aseem, Baba and I would go to look at it. We’d lean against the bridge and watch the drama of water and mud. It’s been a long time since the river filled up like that.

  A road runs by the river and then turns left to run past the station. At the end of the road is my college. Through classes eleven and twelve, I was oblivious of it but some time during my first year of senior college, I realized what was going on along that road. It must have been one of those days when I was returning home late from rehearsals. I could see men standing along the road, each maintaining a certain distance from the other. Almost all of them turned to look at me, as I passed by on my bike. Within some weeks, I had gone with one of them to his home, with another to the five-star hotel in which he was staying. I had no idea how to satisfy the hungers of my body. Perhaps many of them didn’t know either. I struck up conversations with some of them. Some of them had married out of fear of their families. Some came from other cities, seeking a night of love. Some were truly lost; they had stopped caring what they were doing.

  In a few months, it occurred to me that I seemed to have lost all fear. I would slow down until the bike was crawling along the road. Some young man would walk up and offer his hand. If I liked him, I would ask him his name, tell him the pseudonym I had invented for these encounters. The next question was always the same: ‘Got a place we can go?’ I would say no. If he had somewhere we could go, he would climb onto the bike and we’d go there. There was no money involved. We pleasured each other for the pleasure of giving pleasure. After that, I would be empty of any feeling, except for a loathing of my body. I would go into the bathroom and scrub myself clean. I would wonder why I was doing this.

  After Aaji died, the parents decided to use the upstairs room for a paying guest. It took them some time to make up their minds. Aseem was ready for marriage, Aai said, and it should be kept for him and given to him and his wife. But when Nadkarni Kaka built a girls’ hostel in his large yard and began to earn money, Baba began to feel the need to turn his home into a paying proposition.

  Aai told Aseem all this as she tied his tie one morning. He listened without comment. The next morning, he tied his tie himself and announced that he was thinking of buying a small flat of his own.

  The morning after that, Aai told Baba about this and they decided to rent the room out. Without actually discussing it, they decided that the paying guest should be a man. It said so in the advertisement they put in Mid-Day. Perhaps they thought complications might arise if a girl were to be allowed into the house what with me and Aseem on the loose. Anuja added another dimension to this. ‘Let’s not have a woman. The Nadkarnis won’t like it; competition to their girls’ hostel.’ The ad also stated the time of the day when the room might be viewed. Only Aai and I would be at home at those times. I showed the room to four or five other men before you came along.

  Priyadarshan Majumdar was the first to reply to our ad. He came home in the afternoon, and I took him upstairs. He was about five and a half foot tall and had spectacles on. He had a carefully groomed stubble and could not have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three but he affected the air of a mature man. He didn’t like anything about the tower room. Not the independent access, not the walls so thick that a full-grown man could sit on the window ledge. He didn’t care for the breeze, not for the chaafa tree that grew so close it practically forced its flowers on you, not the bathroom that he wouldn’t have to share, not even the bevy of girls from Nadkarni’s hostel. When he did not call for many days afterwards, I began to assume that the tower room was going to be mine.

  About a week later, a young man from Chandigarh who had just joined a multinational wanted to see the room. With him, he had brought a young woman whose face was largely obscured by a pair of dark glasses. He liked almost everything about the room. Not bothered that I was there, he waltzed her round the room, holding her hand. When Baba said at dinner that they were married and were going to get a flat of their own and needed our room as a bridge residence, Aai was brusque. ‘We don’t have to be anyone’s bridge residence, please. And certainly not that type of person. I can see her now, coming and going at all hours. Besides, who can be sure she is his wife?’

  When you came, I wasn’t at home. At dinner again, Aai announced, ‘I see no objection to letting this one have the room. He has good manners. I like him. He has no parents. I think he translates from French or something. He’s studying art in the third year. He’s coming to take another look tomorrow. This Tanay had taken the keys and marched off so I couldn’t show the room to him.’

  When I opened the door the next day, you were wearing a battered off-white T-shirt and faded jeans. You walked up the stairs in front of me. I opened the room and you stepped in and picked up a cobweb lying on the floor and threw it out of the window. I opened the other windows as you wandered around the room. Then you began to mutter, ‘Here the bed. There the deck. And a satranji in the window. The books go there and in that niche behind the cupboard, the hotplate. What do you think?’

  I shrugged. And thought, ‘Lucky fucker. A whole room to yourself.’

  Then I saw that you were still looking at me. You walked up to me and took me by the upper arm and squeezed.

  ‘Good biceps. Gym every day?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Then you stretched out your arms and said, ‘What a tempting aroma this room has.’

  We didn’t bother much about caste and such matters at home. But when we sat down to dinner and you asked Aai for a poli, I could see her perk up. Brahmins say ‘poli’ while other castes make do with the humble ‘chapatti’— same bread, different brand name.

  Baba took the bull by the horns.

  ‘May I ask who is your family god?’ he asked.

  You said, ‘You don’t have to be so formal, Uncle.’

  ‘No, no, who does the family worship?’

  You sat back and quietly finished the mouthful you had begun to eat. Then you said, ‘I begin from myself. I have no home, no caste, no clan. I have kept my relatives at arm’s length. I do not know who I believe in. I am a seeker.’

  Perhaps Aai made sense of this because she stopped the interrogation in its tracks. I could see that Baba didn’t unders
tand what you had said. So he tried another tack: ‘Where does your family come from?’

  ‘Where I am, that’s where I come from.’

  Then you turned to Aai and said, ‘Kaku, the aamti is excellent. Did you put ghee in the daal when it was boiling?’

  Aai began to tell you the recipe and the topic changed.

  Generally, every surname brought with it a hundred questions for people like my parents. If I brought a friend home and introduced him a name was never enough.

  ‘Aai, this is my friend Rohan.’

  ‘Rohan? Rohan what? Does he have any other name? Do you find it terribly difficult to introduce your friends with their full names?’

  Once that cat was out of the bag, then she’d be able to see some special features in his face. Or not.

  That you don’t use any surname at all seemed odd to me at first. I thought it was some form of artistic licence. But then you said that the only name that had any meaning was the one that someone used when they wanted to call out to you. And I saw the vanity of the surname through your eyes. As I began to think like you, eventually I began to wonder what I should do with my father’s name and surname.

  You thumped me one and said, ‘If you have a surname, keep it. There are hundreds of Tanays. How will you stand out from them?’

  ‘And you want to stay in the shadows?’

  ‘If I find someone whose surname I want to share, I’ll add it to my name.’

  In my head, I tried your name with our common-or-garden Joshi attached.

  Once you asked me to soap your back. I took off my T-shirt and rolled my trousers up to the knees. I washed your back and then came out, rolled my trousers down again and put on my T-shirt. Then I sat down at the table and began reading.