Free Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar Page A

listening. I did not open the door until Baba came in the evening. He gave me a lecture about my duties. Aai decided that we would stay in Sharayu Maushi’s house for a week. My sentence begins tomorrow morning. I told Baba, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not about to commit suicide. I don’t have that kind of courage. If I did, would I have come back?’
    He listened, his face like stone, like cold stone.
    ‘Right,’ he said and then added: ‘Until the time you get married, you will behave yourself according to the house rules. You will obey. We gave you your freedom and we saw what you did with it.’
    I slapped my forehead and walked off.
    My finger had been hurting since the afternoon. When I looked at it carefully, I saw a sliver of glass embedded in the skin. I took a needle and slowly, carefully, drew it out.
12 July
    Dr Khanvilkar suggested that I write a diary. Why is she so interested in my life? Because she’s being paid to be interested, right? Otherwise why would she tolerate me sitting there, my face contorted, blabbering away for an hour, every other day? If my parents sat there instead of Dr K, they might learn something about me and we’d save a lot of money. But they don’t want to hear any of this. They want it wrapped up, put away, forgotten. As you might take a car to the garage, I was brought to Sharayu Maushi’s house. To be repaired.
    I’m not sure I can write every day. I told Dr K that. I also told her that I wasn’t about to share what I wrote with her. To which she said in a honeysweet voice, the kind you hear those announcers use on the radio, ‘Write whatever comes to your mind. What you feel now. What you felt then. It doesn’t matter if you don’t write every day.’ I wasn’t paying much attention.
    Thinking brings more questions to the surface. My head begins to hurt because no one has any convincing answers. Why did this happen to me? And when everything was going so well, why did he vanish? Did I do something wrong? Or did he feel nothing for me?
    They’ve sent me here, far away from home, to Sharayu Maushi’s house. For a change of scene, they say. She and Aai are going to keep an eye on me. I hate it here. They behave as if I’m some kind of mental patient. And then, it’s an odd place: far from the city, no trees, no gardens, just an expanse of plots and half-built bungalows. The house bakes in the afternoon sun. I toss and turn, wondering if it’s a frying pan I’m lying on. I don’t look out of the window. It’s supposed to be the monsoons but the sky is clear. My head swims. Aai sits with Sharayu Maushi, crying over spilt milk. I’m tired of crying. When I finished school, I thought I had grown up, I thought I had become independent. I felt I could stand on my own feet. Now I’m a child again, a helpless child.
    When I realized he was gone and I decided to come home to my mother, nothing was clear. In a trance, I packed. Half the clothes were his. As were those on my body. I set out to burn those clothes when Sharayu Maushi stopped me and took them away for the gardener’s son. The result? Those very clothes kept crossing my line of vision. I complained to Sharayu Maushi who gave the boy a month’s leave.
    Tanay has changed. The other day, he acted very strange. He said he had come to see me but most of the time he just sat there, saying nothing. Then he went to the cupboard, opened my bag and took out the olive-green T-shirt and left. Like the gardener’s son, he’s going to be wandering about in those clothes too.
    They punish me with their silences. I keep telling the doctor this.
    One morning, I woke up and looked around to find him missing. He hadn’t returned even after I’d made myself some tea. Afternoon came but he didn’t. His cycle was gone too. I shoved my feet into slippers and went to look for him. The library, I thought. No. The seashore? No. The streets? Nowhere. By evening, I began to feel lonely. Had he left a letter? I tumbled everything out