Cobalt Blue (8 page)

Another photo I found in the debris of Baba's room raid.

Today, I told Dr Khanvilkar that I seem to have made only bad decisions. My life was not the way I wanted it to be. I told her that I thought I was going to have to live one of those fraudulent lives I saw around me.

To which she said, ‘Are you the only one who wants to live differently? Those who choose to live differently must suffer the consequences. They must take the pain their decisions bring. Anyway, you're still young. Why should you accept defeat?'

I wonder if I should believe what she says. But when you're not strong in yourself, anyone can tell you anything and you'll fall for it.

Today, I also looked at myself in the mirror: swollen face, dark circles under sunken eyes, white tongue, hair like nylon to the touch. My face tells of the side effects of the drugs they're giving me.

At that moment, I wanted to end it all. I did not feel I could go on. I went into Sharayu Maushi's bathroom and opened a bottle of eau de cologne and drank as much as I could in a single gulp. My mouth and throat began to burn; I dropped the bottle which fell and broke. I couldn't even swallow; it came out again. This was failure piled on failure and I sat down in the middle of the glass and the intense smell and began to wail. Sharayu Maushi and Aai came running to see what was going on. Aai took in the broken bottle and began to rain blows down on me. I gritted my teeth and took her blows. Sharayu Maushi interposed herself. Aai tried to push her away and said, ‘You want to die? If we can hurt you so much, why did you come back? Go now, find some other man and elope with him.'

Then she began to weep. My leaving must have hit her hard. I think she needs a psychiatrist more than I do.

But her weeping caused a fresh storm inside my head. I thumped off into the hall and put on the television. A woman was singing a bhajan. I raised the volume until it drowned out the world and locked the door and sat there, barely listening. I did not open the door until Baba came in the evening. He gave me a lecture about my duties. Aai decided that we would stay in Sharayu Maushi's house for a week. My sentence begins tomorrow morning. I told Baba, ‘Don't worry. I'm not about to commit suicide. I don't have that kind of courage. If I did, would I have come back?'

He listened, his face like stone, like cold stone.

‘Right,' he said and then added: ‘Until the time you get married, you will behave yourself according to the house rules. You will obey. We gave you your freedom and we saw what you did with it.'

I slapped my forehead and walked off.

My finger had been hurting since the afternoon. When I looked at it carefully, I saw a sliver of glass embedded in the skin. I took a needle and slowly, carefully, drew it out.

Dr Khanvilkar suggested that I write a diary. Why is she so interested in my life? Because she's being paid to be interested, right? Otherwise why would she tolerate me sitting there, my face contorted, blabbering away for an hour, every other day? If my parents sat there instead of Dr K, they might learn something about me and we'd save a lot of money. But they don't want to hear any of this. They want it wrapped up, put away, forgotten. As you might take a car to the garage, I was brought to Sharayu Maushi's house. To be repaired.

I'm not sure I can write every day. I told Dr K that. I also told her that I wasn't about to share what I wrote with her. To which she said in a honeysweet voice, the kind you hear those announcers use on the radio, ‘Write whatever comes to your mind. What you feel now. What you felt then. It doesn't matter if you don't write every day.' I wasn't paying much attention.

Thinking brings more questions to the surface. My head begins to hurt because no one has any convincing answers. Why did this happen to me? And when everything was going so well, why did he vanish? Did I do something wrong? Or did he feel nothing for me?

They've sent me here, far away from home, to Sharayu Maushi's house. For a change of scene, they say. She and Aai are going to keep an eye on me. I hate it here. They behave as if I'm some kind of mental patient. And then, it's an odd place: far from the city, no trees, no gardens, just an expanse of plots and half-built bungalows. The house bakes in the afternoon sun. I toss and turn, wondering if it's a frying pan I'm lying on. I don't look out of the window. It's supposed to be the monsoons but the sky is clear. My head swims. Aai sits with Sharayu Maushi, crying over spilt milk. I'm tired of crying. When I finished school, I thought I had grown up, I thought I had become independent. I felt I could stand on my own feet. Now I'm a child again, a helpless child.

When I realized he was gone and I decided to come home to my mother, nothing was clear. In a trance, I packed. Half the clothes were his. As were those on my body. I set out to burn those clothes when Sharayu Maushi stopped me and took them away for the gardener's son. The result? Those very clothes kept crossing my line of vision. I complained to Sharayu Maushi who gave the boy a month's leave.

Tanay has changed. The other day, he acted very strange. He said he had come to see me but most of the time he just sat there, saying nothing. Then he went to the cupboard, opened my bag and took out the olive-green T-shirt and left. Like the gardener's son, he's going to be wandering about in those clothes too.

They punish me with their silences. I keep telling the doctor this.

One morning, I woke up and looked around to find him missing. He hadn't returned even after I'd made myself some tea. Afternoon came but he didn't. His cycle was gone too. I shoved my feet into slippers and went to look for him. The library, I thought. No. The seashore? No. The streets? Nowhere. By evening, I began to feel lonely. Had he left a letter? I tumbled everything out of the cupboard. His bag was gone. Also some of his clothes. Other things too. That's when it hit me: he had left me. I had not eaten, I began to feel dizzy. I found that I had two hundred rupees in my pocket. In one of his trouser pockets, I found another fifty- rupee note. I had dinner and returned to sit on the steps with the door open.

Nothing.

Next day. Nothing.

I began to get frightened. There had been nothing to warn me. In the past few days, he had taken to sleeping on the floor alone but we had not fought or anything like that. I asked the few acquaintances we had made if they had seen him. I described him to those we did not know. Such a small town but no one had seen him. In the evening when I returned to the room, I began to feel dizzy again. I did not have the nerve to tell the police. I tried instead to figure out what had happened.

Bag? Gone.

Personal stuff? Gone.

Clothes hanging on the wall? Gone.

Had he planned this? What was I to do?

Finally, I got up and packed. The rent for the next two months had already been paid but that didn't matter. I didn't know where to go. I hadn't much money left. As I put on my shoes, I realized I would have to go home to my parents. Where else?

I sat down to think about it. It took me all day. Where could he have gone? Would he return? I kept looking for reasons. I tried to remember exactly what he had said, the precise words he had used in the days before his departure. But I could find no clue to his behaviour.

I had never spent so much time thinking about someone else. I hadn't even thought about an issue in this sustained way. I was impulsive; if I felt like it, I would do it. I had once been a climber. In the heat of the afternoon, I would drag myself up narrow footpaths to the top of a hill. Keeping fear at bay, I would scramble up steep hillsides, often with the help of ropes. When the group arrived at the top, huffing and puffing, everyone would take a breather and stop to admire the view. Not me. I would walk to the very edge of the summit and look down as the wind screamed around my ears.

From there, the villages and fields look like they belong in a picture, the jagged edges of the mountain framing a burning sun. Then I would suddenly be filled with a great joy and my mind would say, ‘You want to. You know you do. What is there to hold you back? Jump. What you feel now, what you want now, that's all there is. Jump. Just jump.'

If truth be told, Aai and Baba should not have felt so bad about my going away with him. I had done it before, left, I mean. Usually, I would tell them and go. This time I had not told anyone and left. That was the only difference. Otherwise, I had always planned on leaving.

How long could I have stayed in this world of Aai's religion and her swamis, her rituals and fasts; this world of Baba's, he who was always afraid of what ‘they' would say; this world of marriage and children and aunts who performed the Mangala Gauri ritual to signify their happiness with their married state, and cousins who organized rose-giving competitions on Valentine's Day? I messed up my first escape attempt. I wonder if there's something wrong with me.

For the first time, Aai took some time to try and talk to me and be my friend. What she wanted to tell me, I had learned from books and from the conversations and experiences of my friends. I listened, keeping my face blank. I wonder why she had never tried this before. The strange thing is that she never tried to do the same thing again. It was a game she played with me for a single day. She was ashamed and she wanted to hide her shame. Once you try something hypocritical, you can never sound convincing again.

Until yesterday, I thought I was feeling better. But in the afternoon, my limbs began to feel heavy and I felt alone again. The future frightened me so much I began to cry. I did not know what was going to happen to me. I felt that everyone must be laughing at me. My head began to fuzz over. Sitting in a chair, I began to cry copiously. I wept on and on until my breath began to catch in my throat. Then I went and locked myself in my room and continued to cry. Sharayu Maushi realized something was wrong; she began to bang on the door. I didn't move. She went on banging for half an hour. I grew tired, physically tired of crying. It was only when poor Sharayu Maushi climbed a ladder to peer in at the window that I got up and opened the door. She gave me some pills and put me to bed and drew a sheet over me. I stuffed a handkerchief into my mouth to stifle my sobs.

I remember his mood, the day we left home together. He didn't seem excited or anything. I said, ‘Hey, let's get this straight. I'm the one who's leaving home. But you're the one with the long face.' When I went up to his room with my haversack, his paints and brushes were packed, his canvases rolled up. When I knocked, it took him a while to open the door. I remained standing on the staircase. I felt sure that Baba would not go to the police for fear of a scandal. After a trek to Mudumalai with our ecobuddies, he was going to take me to Pondicherry. And after that? Neither of us knew. Finally he came out. He didn't lock the door.

I didn't look back but he kept turning around to catch a glimpse of his room. At around three, we left the city on the general compartment of a train, crowded in with hundreds of other people. At the campsite, he kept drawing that room, again and again.

Returning from the doctor, I told Aai to tell the rickshaw driver to take us via the college. (These days, I have only to ask.) When college came into view, I felt a great sadness. I had dropped out. I had lost a year. I saw Neha and Amrita going in. I thought of calling out to them. Anubhav's Honda was in the parking lot. Had he found someone else?

I should call them all, one by one.

I poked my head out of the rickshaw. On both sides of the road, huge hoardings. On the hoardings, huge faces. On the faces, huge smiles. Day and night, rain and sun, they would smile and smile and smile. Their monstrous faces seemed to be mocking the little people, the real people, who walked beneath them. Soft drinks, newspapers, petrol, television serials, soap: every billboard had the same huge smooth faces. I drew my head back into the rickshaw.

Today, the phone rang four times in the afternoon. When I picked it up, no one answered. I shouted ‘Hello, hello,' but the person hung up. It rang again immediately. I picked up the phone and ran out to the terrace. In a soft voice, I said, ‘It's me, Anuja. Talk to me. Where are you? No problems, no? Come and see me soon.' Once again, he hung up.

The third and fourth time, silence. I was waiting for the calls, standing on the terrace, my gaze anxious and unseeing. Then it stopped. No more calls. The floor began to singe my feet. I walked into the house and the darkness swamped me. I felt the house swing about my head. I couldn't see anything. I waited it out, holding on to the back of a chair. Then, with hesitant steps, I went to my room and dropped on to the bed.

Once I had gone to Rajgad in the wee hours of the morning and come back by rickshaw. The driver didn't have change so I shouted to Aai and picked up my haversack. That's when he turned up with two ten-rupee notes in his hand.

‘I'm the new paying guest, ‘ he said, ‘if you don't mind . . .'

‘You've just proved you're the paying guest,' I said.