Sachin Kundalkar’s book presents a modern narrative with stylised simplicity, says Debraj Mookerjee
Cobalt Blue
Author: Sachin Kundalkar (translated by Jerry Pinto)
Publisher: Penguin, Rs 399
Unless you pinch yourself back from the disturbing narrative(s) of Cobalt Blue, you somehow forget you are reading a book in translation. Begun when the author (Marathi filmmaker/scriptwriter Sachin Kundalkar) was 20, and completed when he was 22, Cobalt Blue was published in 2006 in the original Marathi by the same name. Jerry Pinto’s 2013 translation is lucid and compelling, aided perhaps by the fact that the original is — in structure, tenor, style and content — extremely contemporary. Significantly, the story comprises two interior monologues, and is therefore not a text full of the outside world and its demanding specificities. This, in turn, makes the translation effort that much easier. It is the specificities, the idiom of the unknown and the unfamiliar that make translated works difficult to approach. Kundalkar and Pinto produce lucid prose that flows with the ease and poise of a settled river that knows its course.
The story is about the process of awakening amid a conformist milieu. A paying guest, with vague ancestry (we are told his father worked in Paris, and he was abused by his uncle, but not very much more) enters an upper caste Marathi household in Pune. Ensconced in the ‘tower’ (the room to let on the first floor of this eminently middle class home), he exerts a magnetic pull towards the two narrators of the story — the brother-sister duo whose interior monologues thread the narrative along its journey.
The first part of the story (arguably the more successful) is narrated by the brother, Tanay, who is drawn to the paying guest (PG) like a moth to light on a dark night. He is mesmerised by his smell, his detachment, his ability to connect at will and disengage without effort, his artistic talent, his uncluttered philosophy of life, his Iranian friends, and his fundamental honesty. Spending time with him both in and outside of the PG’s bed, Tanay embarks on a journey towards freedom (from his humdrum middle class background) and yet is tied down by his need for his newfound companion. The first part of the book is a monologue of lament by Tanay directed at his lover, who one day, just got up and left. But he did not leave alone. He eloped with Tanay’s sister, Anuja.
The PG’s cosmopolitanism (father diplomat, mother journalist, Parisian upbringing — Eiffel tower, fancy cheeses and all that) creates the basis for Tanay’s liberation from Marathi provincialism. Tanay has the spark in him, to be authentic and to be free, but it takes his newfound love to set him free. Who then binds him in longing by going away!
While Tanay’s story is addressed to his homosexual love, the itinerant paying guest, Anuja’s is structured around the diary she is asked to keep by her psychiatrist. Independent, fond of impromptu treks, and not so fond of the fopperies that mark the interests of many women of her age and station, Anuja too, is drawn to the paying guest. She is no more than a school girl (her brother is a collegiate), and even while she volunteers for an environment awareness NGO and seeks to find her place in the world, she, like her brother, is drawn to the strange independence, authenticity and power of the paying guest.
There is a fundamental difference between the two halves of the story, however. While for Anuja there is closure and an attempt at resolution (she lands a job, is able to recreate a world of her own, and is relatively free), Tanay merely goes away (to Mumbai) and a respectable silence is maintained over the subtleties of his coming to terms with either his parents or himself.
Kundalkar’s book does not seek to create a rich world through the architectonics (to use EM Forster’s famous term for describing the world of a literary text) of this or that. In that sense, Cobalt Blue presents a blank world. But the journey within is powerful and mesmeric. It foregrounds the importance of individual truth and seeking, pitting it against societal expectations and conformity, much in the manner of late 19th century problem plays like the early works of Ibsen (Ghosts, The Doll’s House). It is this search for authenticity, this clash between the one and the many, that sets Cobalt Blue as an intense work of fiction, good enough to hold the candle to works by more celebrated writers.
The reviewer is Associate Professor, University of Delhi