Cobalt Blue Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    Once when I came up to the tower room in the middle of the night, you said, ‘Would you mind sleeping downstairs? I want to be alone tonight.’ Hurt, I turned to go. You saw this, perhaps, and you said, ‘If you want to chat a while, stay for a bit.’ I couldn’t bear your pity but I sat down anyway and found that my sense of belonging had evaporated. I said, ‘Oh, is that the way it is?’ You laughed and shrugged. You threw open your arms and hugged me close and stroked my back for a while. Then you let me go and said, ‘Go, get some sleep.’
    Disappointed, I came back to the house. I hoped you’d at least be at the door but when I looked up the light in your room was out. I said to myself: Don’t disturb him. Enough. He wants to be alone.
    I called Anuja. Cursing, she came and opened the door.
    ‘What is it? What happened?’ she asked. I said nothing and went in, locking the door behind me. ‘Where did you go?’ she kept at it. ‘Upstairs?’
    I nodded.
    ‘Don’t go and wake him up in the night. His eyes hurt sometimes because of his work.’
    In my head I thought, why is she taking your side?
    I snapped, ‘No need for lectures. Go to sleep.’
    ‘Hey, why are you fighting with me?’ she said and rumpled my hair.
    Insult added to injury. When Anuja put out her light, I opened the door and went upstairs again. I was about to knock on the door when I looked in at the window. You were sleeping on the floor, a sheet covering your body. You looked like some homeless person sleeping on a railway platform. I thought: Enough.
    I didn’t want to wake someone else up so I sat on the steps. And then a couple of firecrackers leapt into the sky and burst. They lit up everything for a moment and then went silent. Suddenly, from all four sides, crackers began to go off. Young men began to run down the road, roaring. From the hostel, someone shouted, ‘Hey, Sonal, Shamita, we won, we won!’ The screams and shouts almost drowned the sound of the crackers.
    Slowly, everything settled down again. I could hear you coughing inside your room. I came to look in at you but you had turned on your side. I wanted to call to you, wake you up, ask you why you had turned me out. Perhaps if we talked things over, I wouldn’t feel so bad. What do you mean, you want to be alone? It’s me after all, so what’s all this about privacy? How can you suddenly start behaving like this? What do you think of yourself?
    Then you turned over again and once more I could see your face. I looked at you and I could do nothing.
    Two days after you left, as he was drinking tea, a thought occurred to Baba. He got up and asked Aseem to come with him upstairs.
    ‘And what are you lot up to?’ Aai asked as she came into the courtyard.
    I had been lying around doing nothing but I got up too and followed him. Baba opened the cupboards and began to throw their contents on to the floor. For a moment, Aseem was frozen, watching Baba go berserk. Then he too began to throw things around.
    Many of the things they were treating so savagely were mine but they didn’t know that. The upstairs room is still that way: books on the floor, canvases shredded. Blue paint has dried on the floor where a bottle broke. The lampshade you fashioned out of handmade paper is torn. I sometimes go and sit there. It is my museum of broken things.
    Now that that idiot Anuja has come back alone, the whole family is absorbed in her. Until she returned, I was sure, when I sat in that room, that you had gone your separate ways. It was some weird coincidence that you had left on the same day. Anuja had been lured away by some fort, some mossy mountain ridge, some old