While the family is crushed by Anuja’s act, Tanay grieves his own loss alone. Kundalkar creates in Tanay a deeply tragic character. It is only after their elopement that Tanay realises that he was being cheated on with his own sister. She coaxes her lover to run away with her.
Tanay is a homosexual who after casual encounters thinks the paying guest is the permanent relationship he is looking for. Their family is a regular conservative Maharashtrian one living in a city. And both sketches are wrong because neither Tanay nor Anuja really understands why he left them. One way of understanding this book is as two character sketches of the same man. From the memories of Tanay and Anuja, he appears in part scarred and in part enlightened in part free of emotional trappings and in part so afraid of it that he always has to run away. The man they both fall in love with does not even have a name. It is just two failed relationships and both happen in a bubble ostensibly untouched by the other. The peculiar situation is fertile for twists and turns, but there is none. Like all good novels, it is hard to pinpoint why it works. In the first half of the book, Tanay remembers his betrayal, and in the second, Anuja. The book is about two people-Tanay and his sister Anuja-who have a secret relationship with the same man, the paying guest in their home. But Sachin Kundalkar, the author of Cobalt Blue, creates something extraordinary out of what appears to be outlandish. That is a formula Indian English writing is adept at, but which inevitably ends up being self indulgent. It is a book with the barest of plots and one grand ambitious idea. Indian writing in English rarely ever matches the gems of vernacular literature, such as this Marathi novelĬobalt Blue is the kind of book that affirms why literary fiction in Indian English is a shadow of what vernacular literature has been churning out with such finesse (and so little profit) for decades.
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