Cobalt Blue

by Sachin Kundalkar

Watching me wake up one day, you asked, ‘Why those frown lines? This look of pain?’ Once when I watched you wake up, you had the same frown. You said, ‘When one gets up, there’s a moment when everything looks odd and strange.’

Can a single day bear the burden of so many random firsts?

How did I acquire those habits? Perhaps that’s what happens during the forging of a relationship: if nothing else, you adopt some of the other person’s habits. It makes you feel those small adaptations, those adoptions, make him one of you.

‘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.’

As for him, he might well have been born the day he arrived to stay with us, for he never talked about his past.

Why do we judge relationships only by their age? Why is it that only a long-lasting relationship may be called successful?

Sometimes, we act on instinct, as so many Indian children did when reading Enid Blyton’s descriptions of midnight feasts. Far better to dream up what a scone is, far better to let it explode in a million flavours on your tongue than to look it up and discover its somewhat quotidian doughiness.

Tanay says things again and again, as if he wants to reassure himself, as if repetition will fix what has happened in his memory. Once you get used to this, you realize that this is how we grieve, how we remember, in the present tense and in the past, all at once, because the imagined future must now be abandoned.