Cobalt Blue (4 page)

This dates back to the time before you came to live with us, about four or five months before your arrival. I was reading the paper when I recognized the face of a man who had killed himself. I had gone with him once to his bungalow.

One night at the station road, there weren't too many men on offer. There was, however, a large car standing at the edge of the road. Leaning against the bonnet was a man in his early forties, tall, slim, with a gym-built body. The station road had become part of my routine. When I arrived, he was already there. When I saw him, I slowed down and stopped right in front of him. We left together in his car. Even though it was his own house, he seemed to be afraid. Would the watchman wake up? Would the gate creak? The house was large; I think he had a military post of some kind but he lived alone in that huge bungalow. He asked me to sit down when we went in. He brought me a can of beer from the fridge. Then he went away, changed his clothes and came back. He took me to a bedroom upstairs. There was a fridge and a bar tucked away behind a glass door. For a long time, he wandered around the room and I sat on the bed, watching him. Then he seemed to relax a little and he came and sat down next to me and put his hand on my shoulder. He pushed the hair away from my forehead. Then he drew me close and pulled my head into his lap. He began to pat my head. For what felt like an hour. In the beginning he was silent but then he began to talk, almost to himself. He had slept with many people, he said, but he had never found someone to talk to. He loved children. He paid the fees and expenses of his old retainer's grandson. Now he was beginning to feel lonely. He had not married and had tried to hide himself in the military. He told me, ‘At first the bodies of young men excited me greatly. But that has passed now. When I see someone of your age, I think: I should have someone like that as a partner. Someone I can call my own, someone to worry about me. But now, at my age, who's going to let me adopt a boy?' I just sat there, listening to him. He kept stroking my hair. As I listened, I felt a sadness grow inside me. Then he brought me back to the station road. I gave him my email address; for a few days after that,

I got email from him. I didn't know what to write back, so I let them go unanswered.

Now he had killed himself. I set the paper aside. His voice echoed in my ears. His loneliness was like a warning. I wondered: how long could I play this game of bodies? I needed to find someone with whom I could have a steady relationship.

Baba came and picked up the paper. He took it and sat down in the chair opposite. Aai brought him tea and said, ‘If you'd care to listen, I was talking to Aseem about the upstairs room. He says now he's thinking of buying his own flat. So if you want to put that ad in the evening papers for a paying guest . . .'

Years ago, when Aaji was in charge, we paid strict attention to rituals. The family deity was in our care. That meant festivals and ceremonies had to be celebrated as much for Aaji as for the deity. When Aai had finished cooking, Aaji would take some of what was cooked, on banana leaves, to feed the cow that was tied up outside the temple. Sometimes, she'd take Anuja with her. She was scared of the traffic. If Anuja complained too much or wasn't home from school, I would have to go. There was no question of refusing; when Baba obeyed without protest, who were we to refuse?

For three or four days, Aai would sit in a room by herself. She would do no work. She would eat only the food Aaji cooked. Aaji would make everything herself, even the tea. I had no idea why Aai was in seclusion. I'd ask Baba but he wouldn't answer. All I knew was that she could touch no one and no one could touch her. She even looked different during that time, as if she were a guest in her own home. I would go into her room and sit on a mat and stare at her. Once when she was sleeping, I crept up and touched her body gently. Nothing happened. She looked beautiful and fresh. All day long, she would lie there, reading magazines. Then on the fifth day, she would be up and about, doing her work. Her hair would be wet. But when Aaji fell down the stairs, Aai stopped incarcerating herself for those days.

When you left suddenly, I felt somewhat as I had felt when I watched Aai sitting alone in her room. That day, it turned dark. And it began to rain. I stood in the backyard, letting myself get wet. You'll laugh, but for a moment, I even heard the guitar playing in your room.

When I think about my childhood, I feel the best times came before one began to seek pleasure in the bodies of others.

When you're looking for a relationship, the process weakens you. You feel you have to bear with whatever the other person wants. This is one of my basic beliefs about human nature. Each one of the people I have met has made this a little more clear.

Once when I came up to the tower room in the middle of the night, you said, ‘Would you mind sleeping downstairs? I want to be alone tonight.' Hurt, I turned to go. You saw this, perhaps, and you said, ‘If you want to chat a while, stay for a bit.' I couldn't bear your pity but I sat down anyway and found that my sense of belonging had evaporated. I said, ‘Oh, is that the way it is?' You laughed and shrugged. You threw open your arms and hugged me close and stroked my back for a while. Then you let me go and said, ‘Go, get some sleep.'

Disappointed, I came back to the house. I hoped you'd at least be at the door but when I looked up the light in your room was out. I said to myself: Don't disturb him. Enough. He wants to be alone.

I called Anuja. Cursing, she came and opened the door.

‘What is it? What happened?' she asked. I said nothing and went in, locking the door behind me. ‘Where did you go?' she kept at it. ‘Upstairs?'

I nodded.

‘Don't go and wake him up in the night. His eyes hurt sometimes because of his work.'

In my head I thought, why is she taking your side?

I snapped, ‘No need for lectures. Go to sleep.'

‘Hey, why are you fighting with me?' she said and rumpled my hair.

Insult added to injury. When Anuja put out her light, I opened the door and went upstairs again. I was about to knock on the door when I looked in at the window. You were sleeping on the floor, a sheet covering your body. You looked like some homeless person sleeping on a railway platform. I thought: Enough.

I didn't want to wake someone else up so I sat on the steps. And then a couple of firecrackers leapt into the sky and burst. They lit up everything for a moment and then went silent. Suddenly, from all four sides, crackers began to go off. Young men began to run down the road, roaring. From the hostel, someone shouted, ‘Hey, Sonal, Shamita, we won, we won!' The screams and shouts almost drowned the sound of the crackers.

Slowly, everything settled down again. I could hear you coughing inside your room. I came to look in at you but you had turned on your side. I wanted to call to you, wake you up, ask you why you had turned me out. Perhaps if we talked things over, I wouldn't feel so bad. What do you mean, you want to be alone? It's me after all, so what's all this about privacy? How can you suddenly start behaving like this? What do you think of yourself?

Then you turned over again and once more I could see your face. I looked at you and I could do nothing.

Two days after you left, as he was drinking tea, a thought occurred to Baba. He got up and asked Aseem to come with him upstairs.

‘And what are you lot up to?' Aai asked as she came into the courtyard.

I had been lying around doing nothing but I got up too and followed him. Baba opened the cupboards and began to throw their contents on to the floor. For a moment, Aseem was frozen, watching Baba go berserk. Then he too began to throw things around.

Many of the things they were treating so savagely were mine but they didn't know that. The upstairs room is still that way: books on the floor, canvases shredded. Blue paint has dried on the floor where a bottle broke. The lampshade you fashioned out of handmade paper is torn. I sometimes go and sit there. It is my museum of broken things.

Now that that idiot Anuja has come back alone, the whole family is absorbed in her. Until she returned, I was sure, when I sat in that room, that you had gone your separate ways. It was some weird coincidence that you had left on the same day. Anuja had been lured away by some fort, some mossy mountain ridge, some old house that had to be explored. Usually, she would tell someone and go; this time she had gone without telling anyone. I was sure that when she was done, she'd come back. That was her nature and I liked her for it. I pictured her living a free life somewhere else. ‘I should go and see what's happening with the Narmada, ‘ she'd say, ‘better than sitting at home, reading about it in the papers.' I thought she had followed the protest against the dam on the river. Or she was climbing the Waghdarwaza at Raigarh.

In the morning, my museum is lit by a golden light. When it rains, drops of water leap into the room. Some of the colours on the canvases begin to flow as if wet. Then the night air dries them.

I couldn't imagine where you had gone.

In the last week, Menden told me that Mehnaz and Abbas are thinking of closing Sunrise down. On the day you disappeared, I ran to Sunrise when evening came but you didn't. Menden said you hadn't even come for breakfast. ‘Did he say something about going to his village?' I asked. Mehnaz was standing at the counter, looking as if she were a lump of dough. She said that you had paid your bill a few days earlier.

When you come back, Sunrise will be no more. Mehnaz and Abbas are going back to Iran.

When I read you ‘Pushkala', that iconic poem by Pu Shi Rege that describes a well-endowed woman, you said, ‘Wait, I'll show you an actual Pushkala,' and you took me to Sunrise. I didn't even know we had a real Irani hotel in our city.

As we sat down on those polished round- bottomed chairs, Mehnaz appeared at the counter. She looked like a maiden of maida. I felt that Rege could well have been sitting where I was, when he wrote ‘Pushkala'.

You waved to Mehnaz. I looked at the kitchen counter. Menden was slicing loaves of bread and buttering them. I slapped your shoulder and drew your attention to the clean, sharp lines of his handsome face. You grinned and raised your eyebrows.

I said, ‘Let's have breakfast here every day.'

‘Sure. As long as there's a handsome Christian waiter and Mehnaz—a sumptuous woman, a veritable Pushkala—always ready to sit for me, what else could a painter ask for?'

If we wanted Menden to serve us, we had to get one of the four tables that were in his corner. One morning, you said, ‘When Menden comes to serve me, take a careful look. He's quite short. He has to bend over to put the plates on the table and then his cheek comes quite close.'

From that time on, we'd race each other from the signal near Sunrise to get to those chairs. Once, you plonked yourself down just before me. I didn't slow down in time and slammed into Menden. He fell over and I landed across him. Concerned, Abbas came up to help me and I winked at you.

When you return, there will be no Sunrise. Mehnaz and Abbas will have returned to Iran. Menden told me this in passing. I went home and took out a watercolour you had done of Mehnaz. When I came back with it, Abbas opened the counter flap and asked me upstairs.

The stairs were in a state of disrepair, the red carpet worn out in patches. Mehnaz served shikanjabin and Abbas and I sat at a round table in the middle room. I unrolled the painting in front of him and he sighed. ‘He has magic in his hands,' he said.

Mehnaz brought me a chair and a glass jar, the big kind in which the biscuits were stored. ‘He'd sit in this chair for ages, sketching. “You have so many chairs; sell me a couple, na?” he'd say. And he would stroke those jars when he came to pay his bill at the counter. A gift to remember Sunrise by,' she said.

I gripped Abbas's hand tight. I couldn't touch Mehnaz though I wanted to weep on her shoulder. I just smiled at her.

Menden helped me get the chair into a rickshaw.

‘What about you?' I asked.

‘McDonald's is coming here,' he said. ‘I don't think they'll hire the likes of me. And no Udipi restaurant will take me. I'll go home to Trichy. Then I'll see how it goes.'

I set the chair down in the middle of the tower room. In a corner, by the window, I placed the glass jar. In the night, when I switch on the light, the chair swims into the half-light. And a distorted reflection of the room, as if seen through a wide-angle lens, appears on the sides of the jar.

Sometimes, I see Mehnaz, the flour doll, sitting on that chair. She's swathed in a burkha now, only her flushed cheeks and blue eyes visible. I see your hand, making slashes of blue and black on a canvas. I had no idea you were so deeply connected to so many people.

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.