Cobalt Blue

by Sachin Kundalkar

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.

I have started to feel that the friends you make in school, the ones you’ve known forever, begin to turn into fossils. They merge into their families, losing all identity. You don’t know the new ones as much as you should. They can fool you.

Why must I put time stamps on everything? I thought of his dateless diary, the book in which he trapped memory. It was a beautiful book; I think he had covered it himself with some cobalt blue khadi cloth he had bought. He would write in it, sitting on the floor, his knees drawn up to his body, as a child might do his homework. Once I sneaked up behind him to see what he was writing. It was a ‘to do’ list.