A brother, sister and paying guest: Cobalt Blue explores transgressions of love

by Sachin Kundalkar, Translated by Jerry Pinto Editor’s Note:Love, especially love, can be a wonderful thing or an utterly destructive force, sometimes both at the same time. In Cobalt Blue, National Award winning screenwriter and filmmaker Sachin Kundalkar writes a beautiful spare novel about an unusual love triangle which isn’t even aware it’s a triangle. The Joshi family takes in a polite young artist as a paying guest. What they don’t bargain for is that both the siblings, Tanay and Anuja, will fall in love with him and when he disappears they will both have to pick up the pieces of manifold betrayals. Told through the voice of each sibling, Cobalt Blue is a glimpse into the treacherous terrain of tangled hidden relationships, both homosexual and heterosexual. Translated into English by award-winning novelist Jerry Pinto, Cobalt Blue raises provocative questions about the power of love and the many way one transgresses in its name. Here’s an excerpt in Tanay’s voice from the book courtesy the publisher Penguin Books. Join us for a Google chat on Love: The Power to Wreck or the Power to Transform with Sachin Kundalkar, Jerry Pinto and well-known publisher and essayist Urvashi Butalia at 4pm.  That you should not be here when something we’ve both wanted happens is no new thing for me. Today too, as always, you’re not here. The house is quiet. I’m alone at home. For a while, I basked in bed in the shifting arabesques of light diffusing through the leaves of the tagar. Then I got up slowly, and went down to the backyard, and sprawled on the low wall for a single moment. The silence made me feel like a stranger in my own home. I walked around the house quietly, as a stranger might. The chirping of sparrows filled the kitchen. The other rooms were quiet, empty, forsaken. In the front room, the newspaper lay like a tent in the middle of the floor, where it had been dropped. At the door, a packet of flowers to appease the gods and a bag of milk. Then I realized I was not alone. From their photograph, Aaji and Ajoba eyed me in utter grandparental disbelief. I took my coffee to the middle room window and sat down. That girl with the painful voice in the hostel next door? [caption id=“attachment_784169” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The cover of Cobalt Blue[/caption] How come she’s not shrieking about something? To savour each bitter and steaming sip of coffee in such quiet? That you should not be there when something we’ve both wanted happens is no new thing for me. Today too, as always, you’re not here. When you came into our lives, I was in a strange frame of mind. I would have been willing to befriend anyone my age. I was ready for friendship with someone who only read management books; or someone who was studying information technology; or someone who wanted to settle in the United States. Anyone. You came as a paying guest. You gave my parents the rent. You gave me so much more. Then you slipped away. Those shrill girls in the hostel next door, weren’t they keeping an eye on us? I’m now going to sit on the wall, and when my coffee’s drunk, I’m going to scrape the dried coffee off the rim and the squelch at the bottom of the mug with a fingernail and then I’m going to lick it off. When that’s done, I’m going to take off my shirt and continue to sit here. One of the fundamental rights of mankind should be that of wearing as many or as few clothes as one likes inside one’s own home. Or one should be able to wear none at all. Wasn’t the eye that the shrill girls in the hostel kept on us an invasion of our privacy, an abrogation of our rights? After a bath in cold water, you would wrap a towel around yourself and sit on the low wall, bringing with you the smell of soap. It was you who broke my habit of going straight down for breakfast after bathing and getting fully dressed. Another of my habits you broke: my daily accounts. I’d write them down faithfully. Rs 40 for coffee; Rs 100 for petrol. ‘Why keep accounts?’ you asked once. ‘It’s a good habit. You should know where you’re spending your money and on what.’ ‘What do you get from knowing that?’ I asked Baba the same question in the night. Baba’s answer was so stupid, I felt a spurt of sympathy for Aai. That night, I went for a walk and ate a paan; and I did not write down how much I spent on it. Another first.