Cobalt Blue (7 page)

When you took your results and got to Seema Maushi's home, the door was locked. Bruno was lolling in the backyard. He began to bark at you. Frightened, you sat down on the staircase and waited, baking in the sun.

‘If you were locked in a room, without books, without paper or pen, okay, without electricity too, what would you do?' I asked you once.

‘Why a day? A week. A month. I'd just sit there, happy.'

Your feet were red from the burning stone when Seema Maushi's husband returned in his jeep. Inside the house, he hugged you, praised your performance and let his hands wander all over your body. This had been going on for a couple of months. When you felt his weight on your body one night, you tried to scream. He grabbed your mouth and stifled your screams.

You would wake up screaming, sometimes. When I tried to take you into my arms to comfort you, you would push me away and withdraw into a corner, seeking solitude.

He had not even cared enough to protect your certificate from crumpling by putting it into a file. After an hour, he left and Seema Maushi returned. You sat her down and told her what her husband was. You showed her what he had done to your body and then you packed your bag and went off to Mr Dixit, the lawyer. Then began a saga of college hostels and rented rooms. After you finished the twelfth standard, you asked Mr Dixit to sell the Mumbai flat, the shares, the three cars and the land near Kolhapur. Until your paintings began to sell, you would have enough to live on.

A bunch of us had gone to see a film. We had booked an entire row and occupied it, chattering and giggling. Next to me sat Monica whose mobile rang incessantly. Only the day before I had announced that we were to have a paying guest. And then Monica began to shriek. She pointed to a man in the audience and we began to laugh. He was wearing a clean white dhotar and red mulmul sadra, chappals on his feet. He had come to see the film. Alone. The man was you.

‘You went to see a film?' I asked you that evening. ‘Alone?'

For the next two years, through your first two years of college, the bitterness had not abated. Everything around you seemed odd and false. All relationships seemed temporary.

In junior college, you had no friends. In your free time, your pursuits were solitary. You would sit in your hostel room reading for hours. Or you would go for long jogs; or have a meal alone in a restaurant. On Sunday, you'd climb a hill and paint. Or play the guitar.

To put on clothes dictated only by what you felt like wearing and to go out and see a film alone was therefore no novelty. I can't do that. Even today, I need company to see a film, to look at paintings, to celebrate, even to read. For if I can't talk about the film's plot or the book's nuances to someone, if I can't listen to what they're saying, what's the point?

You're so set in your ways, so clear about your decisions, will you ever notice that it isn't necessary to be so cut and dried about everything?

Every Sunday, you would empty out the tower room. Then you'd walk about, hand on chin, looking at it. Then you'd bring each thing in again and set it down in a different place.

This relooking business infected me as well. I began to look at, to really look at, things: at leaves and at the sky, at boiled milk and at your palette, at cobwebs. Van Gogh showed me an overheated sky. Husain raced thoroughbreds at me, Seurat drew pointillist rangolis in my head, Picasso showed me many simultaneous aspects of the human face, Dali melted time for me and mysterious Anjolie Ela Menon . . .

You had a way of looking at things which seemed sharp, perceptive, cobalt blue. But when I turned my gaze on my folks, on my home, a disquiet was born inside me. With the disquiet came the questions.

In the hall, a man-sized showcase. Here a speaker, there a speaker. Here an elephant, there an elephant. A plastic flowerpot. The grocery store's free calendar, cups of an intensely floral design, Aseem's tie, a photograph of my grandparents. If all these things were to be ground together, the result would be the indeterminate green of a fungus.

In a crumpled fig-coloured T-shirt and blue jeans, you once said to me: ‘Forget about symmetry, Tanay; forget about balance.' When I complained that I had no room of my own, you said, ‘This Sunday, redo the tower room. Make it yours.' I felt a warm russet glow behind my eyes.

That Sunday when you went to Sunrise for breakfast, I began to empty the room.

When I told Rashmi about you, she said to me, ‘All of us have to give shape to our lives, Tanay. You have to choose your own design. You have to keep changing it, working with it. You have to shape your taste as well. And that means trusting what pleases you.'

It took me about forty-five minutes to finish. I liked what I had done to the room. I admired it from different standpoints. I sat down and waited. I waited until noon but still you did not come.

At one o'clock you came back carrying a sketch of Mehnaz. I was sitting on the staircase, bored, hungry, angry.

At Sunrise, you looked up and saw Mehnaz combing her hair in the window. After breakfast, you went up to ask if she would sit for you. When she agreed, you forgot about me and my version of a room of my own.

I could tell how proud you were of the sketch you were showing me. We were both intent on enjoying what we had done. After about half an hour in the room, you realized that I had changed the room around. I was rewarded with a look of approval.

Such colours, such colours. When you breathe out, I see red and yellow flashes in front of my eyes. When we're in the bath together, surrounded by a surfeit of steam, it's a misty blue. When the sun is shining and we look at each other from a distance, and we smile, it's white, a shining white. If I'm talking to someone and mention you, my face changes, it's a dark blue. Dark brown when I call out to you; peaceful green when you call out to me.

How could anyone believe that you did not love me? Right up to the time you left, you did not change the way I had organized the room.

At the meeting, Arindam looked up from the register and a real smile burst across his face. ‘Alone?' he asked, looking past my shoulder. I shrugged.

There were some newcomers at the meeting. Samuel was also alone, who knew why? The chair next to him seemed symbolically vacant, but that might have been because I was feeling lonely. The people around me seemed a little strange; again, I had not felt this way at the first meeting.

Arindam began the proceedings by reading a story. It was set in a port and it was about a love affair between the son of the owner of a ship and a poor worker on board the ship. Forty years later, Christmas night, New York, crowded pub, young man sees poor worker drunk and desolate . . . something like that. No one was really paying attention to the story, which described, and quite beautifully too, what might go on in your mind if you were suddenly presented with a living embodiment of your past. After the story was done, the newcomers were introduced to the group.

It seemed as if a whole platoon of gym-toned bodies had descended on the spot. Many of them were sporting rings in their left ears. I remembered some of them from the station road. I was amazed at Arindam's diligence. There was to be a conference in Mumbai. There were obstacles to be surmounted, permissions to be sought, an antagonistic press and the usual bunch of Sanatan dharmi right-wingers to be dealt with. Arindam began to talk about our rights. He was to be a delegate at the conference. He wanted to be briefed on the issues. The conference website was to be inaugurated . . . Two young men who had been eyeing each other made their way out together.

‘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.