Cobalt Blue (3 page)

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 understand 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.

I realized that I had gradually stopped going to the station road, stopped visiting chat rooms. And this despite the fact that we didn't even hold hands for days. As I sat there reading, I glanced back to see you standing at the mirror, drying your hair. It occurred to me then that the change had happened of itself, on its own. You were there all the time. You were mine alone. Or so I thought.

In my head I united our names, inscribed them on a brass plate and attached them to a mahogany door that you had carved. Our door was the most beautiful in the entire building. Everyone would know what a creative person— with a bright, cool, clear mind—lived behind that mahogany door. When we discovered that we wanted the same colours on the walls, we high-fived each other. But it couldn't have been any other way. I hadn't given much thought to colour before you came into our lives. You wanted a wood floor; the last room would be your studio. Our doors would always be open to our friends: some theatre people, some artists. When Aai and Baba dropped in on us, a surprise visit, they always wondered why we took so much time to open the doors. That was because we had seen them through the peephole and we'd rushed about, taking down the nudes you'd just finished from the walls. And as soon as we opened the door, one of them would say, ‘Why does it always take you hours to open the door? Why lock the door anyway? Who's coming to steal your stuff?'

On her way to put down all her dabbas in the kitchen, Aai would add, ‘Now that you're doing all this, the least you could do is learn to wipe the counters properly, no?' Then she would wipe them herself.

In front of the bedroom balcony, I wanted a chaafa tree of the same profusion and invasiveness as the one that pushed into the tower room. You planted it immediately. When I complained that the building in front of us obstructed my view of the sunrise, you magicked it out of the way. We argued up a storm with the plumber. He had no idea that we wanted each tap to flow with a different colour of water. Only the tap in the kitchen would be different: it would have a steady supply of ice-cold beer. When he stepped back after he finished fitting the tap and demonstrating the flow of beer, I realized that he had Aseem's face. He said, ‘Saahab, you wanted it so I've put in a beer connection. But you should know that too much beer and your sperm count suffers.'

I would dream this house into existence as I was falling asleep, in the haze before of an afternoon nap. We hadn't met Ashish and Samuel then. I thought that it was going to be difficult, trying to live together. But then the city was getting used to difference. Heterosexual live-in relationships were permitted. And there were those who chose to live alone. Our ward's councillor was a bigamist. There was a famous brothel behind the market. There were hijras for hire at almost every traffic signal. If people weren't precisely proud of these things, at least they knew about them. So how was I any different?

When I was young, as if by unspoken agreement, the entire family would descend on us for the vacations. At first, everyone came to us for ten days, then all the children would go to Nasik for a week with Aatya and then for four or five days we would go to Ram Kaka. The last one or two days of this trip were spent with Prakash Kaka.

This was how the holidays were spent. When everyone was with us, one of the most important events was the making of ice cream by hand. Ice, milk, salt, mango pulp would all be mixed together, with everyone taking a turn at churning. You gave up only when your arms began to hurt. By four or four thirty in the afternoon, mango ice cream would be ready and we would eat until we were forced to decline any more helpings. No one was supposed to mention it again for the rest of the month.

On one of those days, I was taking the wooden ice cream bucket out of the kitchen when Sunil, Ram Kaka's son, hit me on the legs. I almost dropped the bucket. I sat down to rub my legs. Sunil was always exercising; he could talk about nothing other than his body and his exercises. He shouted, ‘Walk properly. Keep your legs apart and walk straight. Why do you mince along like a woman?' Then he took me into the backyard which was set with large square tiles. He forced me to spread my legs apart—and place my feet in separate tiles. Then he made me walk with my legs apart. For about an hour, he sat on Baba's scooter and tried to rewrite my gait.

‘Tannya, walk straight, don't trip about like a girl, keep those shoulders up, push your chest out,' he roared. Aai was in the kitchen scraping the meat out of coconuts and he told her, ‘Kaku, make him walk like this every morning and send him out to play with the boys. He just sits around reading.'

From then on, right up to this day, I fear that I walk funny, in other words, that I walk like a woman. When I find myself walking at my own pace, I almost immediately slow down. And I learned what men do not do. They do not wet their dry lips by running their tongues over them. They don't trot after their mothers into the kitchen. They don't use face powder. They don't sit on a motorbike behind a woman. They don't need mirrors in the rooms where they might change their clothes. On trips, they can go behind a tree. They don't even need an enclosed space to take a dump; they can do it in the open. They shouldn't be afraid of other people seeing their bodies. If there's only one bathroom, they can bathe in the open. When caned in class, they do not cry. They do not buy tamarind from the lady who sells it on the road and they certainly do not sit by her side and eat it.