Cobalt Blue

by Sachin Kundalkar

When I think about my childhood, I feel the best times came before one began to seek pleasure in the bodies of others. When you’re looking for a relationship, the process weakens you. You feel you have to bear with whatever the other person wants. This is one of my basic beliefs about human nature. Each one of the people I have met has made this a little more clear.

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.

You began what you described as your accomplished solitude from that day. This term—accomplished solitude—struck me deeply. And it slowly began to dawn on you that you did not need people around you when you were painting or reading, when you were watching a film with deep concentration, or when you sat down to eat, chewing every mouthful and savouring every flavour. You made loneliness easy on yourself.

‘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.’

But when you’re not strong in yourself, anyone can tell you anything and you’ll fall for it.

We were lucky to have parents who felt blessed in having children and were willing to take all the responsibilities that came with it. And so our sense of freedom is only a rehearsal. The next generation will have to pay the price.

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

perhaps what really matters is the intensity of the time you spend together rather than the length of it.

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.