Cobalt Blue: A Novel

Sachin Kundalkar

2016. g. aug. · New Press, The

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Now a film from Netflix India, this memorable novel confronts issues of sexuality in a changing society through a love triangle between a brother, sister, and their family’s lodger

Recently adapted into a stunning Netflix film, Cobalt Blue is a tale of rapturous love and fierce heartbreak told with tenderness and unsparing clarity. Brother and sister Tanay and Anuja both fall in love with the same man, an artist lodging in their family home in Pune, in western India. He seems like the perfect tenant, ready with the rent and happy to listen to their mother’s musings on the imminent collapse of Indian culture. But he’s also a man of mystery. He has no last name. He has no family, no friends, no history, and no plans for the future. When he runs away with Anuja, he overturns the family’s lives.

Translated from the Marathi by acclaimed novelist and critic Jerry Pinto, Sachin Kundalkar’s elegantly wrought and exquisitely spare novel explores the disruption of a traditional family by a free-spirited stranger in order to examine a generation in transition. Intimate, moving, sensual, and wry in its portrait of young love, Cobalt Blue is a frank and lyrical exploration of gay life in India that recalls the work of Edmund White and Alan Hollinghurst—of people living in emotional isolation, attempting to find long-term intimacy in relationships that until recently were barely conceivable to them.

Par autoru

Sachin Kundalkar is a novelist, playwright and filmmaker who won a National Award for Best Screenplay for the film Gandha in 2008. Jerry Pinto's debut novel, Em and the Big Hoom, won the 2012 Hindu Literary Prize, and his novel Helen won a National Film Award for Best Book on Cinema. They both live in Mumbai.