Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar Page B

couldn’t even be sure that this was the real thing. As the vacations drew to a close, I began to think about this. Finally, I decided that there was nothing to be gained by putting a name to what I was feeling. Instead, I’d just get to know him better in my own way.
    I asked him out to the movies a few times. But he said he didn’t like the way Hollywood seemed hung up on a few themes: alien attacks, dinosaurs, violence, marriage. I didn’t want to see Hindi or Marathi movies and that put paid to that.
    One day, I popped him on the back of my bike and we blazed out of the city. We came off the ghats and hit the highway and coasted along. A mango tree, large and old, loomed up along the edge of the road. Next to it, a path led to some little village. It was about four in the afternoon. I parked the bike in the shade of the tree and we leaned against it. A little boy was playing in the mud. His mother was standing next to him, in brilliant colours, nail-enamel bright. Gradually, some more people arrived. An old granny type in a nine-yard sari, two or three men who looked like Warkaris in their huge turbans, that kind. And then the State Transport bus arrived and they got in. Only he and I were left.
    We hadn’t said much to each other after we’d left the city. I hadn’t climbed a tree in ages, so I clambered up until I was astride a branch. He grinned as I climbed swiftly. ‘Come up,’ I beckoned. ‘No,’ he shook his head.
    I sat there, looking at the fields, the trees, the wells. After a while, he said, over a yawn: ‘You want to say something? Why did you bring me here?’ I had been waiting for this very question, I realized. If he asked me, I could tell him.
    I told him everything. About myself, about Anubhav, about my feelings for him.
    The sun was almost at the horizon by the time I finished. I sat on the tree and spoke and he sat by the road and listened. At first, I could see his expressions as I spoke but it grew dark and then I could only hear some vaguely encouraging grunts. I rambled on for nearly an hour or an hour and a half before I tired. That he could listen without speaking for such a length of time did not surprise me.
    He only said, ‘This is like something out of Jim Corbett. Evening and the hunter up a tree and the tiger waiting below. Only this tiger doesn’t bite. Come on down.’ I came down and started the bike. When he climbed on, he put both his arms around my waist and rested his chin on my shoulder. I said, ‘Hello! I talked for hours and you’re not going to say anything?’ He began to sing, in French, I think. As we rode along the highway, now lit by headlights, he sang on. He sang into the breeze, he sang as we came into the city. He ignored the way people stared at him when we stopped for signals and he continued to sing. He ignored their mockery.
    What had I gone and done? Had I proposed to him, as the girls in college would say, or what?
4 August
    I refused to go back to the doctor. This talking isn’t helping me at all. In the last month I’ve been for ten or more sessions. That should be enough. I don’t want to be treated like a patient. I enjoy writing and for that, I have Dr Khanvilkar to thank.
    Staying here annoyed me at the beginning; then it became a routine; now I’ve begun to like it. Maushi and Kaka had wanted to adopt me. If they had, this house with its artefacts from across the world, this room in which I am now, all this would have been mine, no?
    This morning I asked Maushi, ‘If I had been your daughter and I had done something like this, would you have sent me somewhere else for a change of scene?’
    Aai was having her bath. Maushi looked at the bathroom door, took a deep breath and said, ‘I would not have sent you away. Not even if it meant keeping you in a house where everything would remind you of a man. But the decision was your parents’; they asked me if I would have you and I agreed because I knew, at some level, you were also tired of