Cobalt Blue (2 page)

I took two textbooks and started to come upstairs. I tried to be as quiet as possible but, when I went into the next room, I could hear Aai and Baba talking about something. They were speaking softly as they did when something was worrying them. Hearing my footsteps, they stopped. Aai wiped her eyes; Baba adjusted his expression and said, ‘What happened? Not sleepy? Want me to rub oil on your head?' I didn't think I could come upstairs right away. I'll tell you about it later, I thought. When I took my Pentax out, the rain had stopped. You were wet through. Soaked to the skin, you were looking at the sky, close to a black boulder washed clean by rainwater.

I watched you through the lens. The cold made my hands tremble and the frame trembled too. At that moment, I felt I had to tell you what

I felt, devil take the consequences. Then you wiped your face with your sleeve and I stopped you, mid-wipe.

When you arrived, I was ready to be friends with the kind of person who read management books, studied computer software and wanted a green card. I was bored of the same old stories and the same old people. I would have been willing to befriend anyone my age. Anyone. Those first few days, at the start of term, were quiet, peaceful, as you were. That might have been because the idea of a lifelong partnership, a long-term commitment hadn't crossed my mind.

Shrikrishna Pendse was a boy like any other in our class; but when school reopened after the Diwali vacations one year, there was something different about him. He left the top button of his shirt open. His eyes were intense; and when he threw his arm around my shoulders, the smell of his body was seductive. Before school, after school, when the classroom emptied because everyone else was going to the laboratory, we grabbed at every opportunity to grab at each other. In that time between the ninth and the tenth standard, we began to rediscover ourselves. I couldn't sit still, I couldn't stay at home. The months passed in a haze of Euclidean geometry, Shrikrishna's chatter, full marks in mathematics and the slow growth of down on Shrikrishna's chest.

By contrast, our lovemaking was beautiful. At around three thirty in the morning, you slowly took me into your arms and I realized that this was the first time I had allowed this physical bliss to burgeon slowly. With Shrikrishna, there had always been an element of roughness. Was someone watching us? Would someone wake up? And then the habit of silence. And between you and Shrikrishna, how many different bodies! Twenty-five? Thirty? But they were all pretty much the same, and often it didn't matter if I didn't see their faces.

Once when I visited his house, Shrikrishna was in the bathroom. His mother told me to wait in his room. With nothing to do, I opened a magazine lying on the table. Madhuri Dixit was featured in a swimming costume. Some nights later, as he was about to come, Shrikrishna closed his eyes and mumbled, ‘Sheetal.' Sheetal was a girl in the second year. At that time I only felt slightly surprised.

Once after a bath, I opened the door of my cupboard to get a change of clothes. Just the day before, Ashwin Lele had got hold of a video cassette. It was not the kind you got easily. You had to know someone at the video library. Then, you had to have the house to yourself. Lele knew someone and his parents had gone off to their village. He had a cassette player. After class, everyone gathered at his house. I laughed uncomfortably as we watched. All the boys were trying to sound sophisticated. I took my clothes out of the cupboard and looked at myself in the mirror. I dropped the wet towel. I took a long, clear-eyed look at myself. That I was different was nowhere apparent.

In school, the question was unimportant. In college all my close friends were women. The other boys and girls did seem to get together, they did go out together, they rehearsed plays together and even went out of town on trips together. But it was only when it came to arranging the annual college day—who to invite, what to get—that I first went to Rashmi's home. No event in senior college seemed complete without Rashmi. Through the year, she didn't actually join any of the extracurricular activities of the college: not the literary circle and not the singing group; she was not part of the trophy- hungry theatre group and was not in the National Cadet Corps. But if any of these clubs had an activity or an event, Rashmi was sure to be part of it. She seemed to be able to talk to teachers and caterers, to lighting men and sound technicians, to the student union and even the principal. This was the same man who didn't even look up when he spoke to students but he would stop to chat with her before getting into his car and driving away. Often I didn't understand the behaviour of the girls around. (Still don't.) I saw Anuja as one of the few sensible girls I knew. All the others seemed conventional; they were the kind who would have to be ‘proposed to', they would have to get home by seven in the evening, they would weep as they sang the kind of syrupy bhav geet that would bring tears to the eyes of the senior citizenry whose own children were settled in America.

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 protests 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.