‘Silk Route’: Sachin Kundalkar returns with a story of disappearances 12 years after ‘Cobalt Blue’

Marathi writer Sachin Kundalkar’s debut translation in English, Cobalt Blue, was published in 2013. He’s finally back after 12 years with his second translated novel, Silk Route, brought into English by debutant Aakash Karkare. In the intervening years, Cobalt Blue has become essential reading in Indian fiction. There’s a lot for a reader to cherish in it – the fine storytelling, Jerry Pinto’s accomplished translation, and a sensitive treatment of queer lives and loves in urban India. The ennui of coming of age in a middle-class home perfectly complemented the dread and excitement of acknowledging the sexual self. Kundalkar, while fiercely focusing on a young man’s liberation (and later rupture), is not dismissive of the familial forces that shape youth in India. In a culture where everything is hidden between the lines, Cobalt Blue was exceptional in its understanding of shame, guilt, and the limits of freedom in love.

In 2022, the novel got a new life with a movie adaptation. The “erotic flush of first love” was recreated for the screen with a similar dashing freshness as the shade “cobalt blue.”

From the window, to the world

With memories of Cobalt Blue still alive in my mind, Silk Route, in some ways, then, feels like the cousin who went out into the world. Much like the historic Silk Road that connected civilisations, facilitated trade, and brought the world closer, its namesake novella does something similar by tying together various characters of various nationalities and social classes with the delicate threads of love and heartbreak.

The novella starts off in Pune. We meet a young Nishikant, whose most salient feature is his love for walking. Unlike boys of his age, he has no interest in riding a bicycle and gallivanting around the city on a bus. He doesn’t mind the heat or the dust as he maps out the city on foot, remembering the exact order of the shops on both sides of a street. Desperate to hurl him into the world, his parents force him to learn to ride a bicycle, a deeply aggrieving activity, Nishikant notes, “Now everything would hurtle towards him – and then leave him – with great speed.”

As there was Anuja in Cobalt Blue, so there is Nilima in Silk Route. And just like the sibling duo in the former, here too, both Nilima and Nishikant harbour tender feelings for Nikhil. While the relationship seals Nilima’s fate in tragedy, it forces Nishikant to leave his beloved city and become an eternal wanderer.

He goes to Mumbai, where his family finds a place for him at a relative’s home. Stifled by the lack of freedom, Nishikant leaves soon after for the college hostel and boards with Shiv, a rich man’s son from Delhi. The men become lovers in the natural course of things, and Shiv opens up about his life in Delhi. A bohemian at heart, he recounts his parents’ all-consuming determination to climb up the social ranks, becoming increasingly hypocritical to their true nature.

The time with Shiv is sweet and short-lived.

In London, Nishikant meets Srinivas. A descendant of the Thanjavur royal family, he is only the second generation to have to earn a living. The royal riches long gone, Srinivas still remembers his grandfather’s desperate attempts to save them, the Frenchman who offered to help him, and the sordid scene he witnessed through a crack in a bedroom door. Srinivas is a man of refined taste and Nishikant settles into a quiet domesticity with him. With him, he’s able to revive his former self that loved to go on long walks – they discover London on foot, growing closer as they walk the wide streets together.

Upon their return to India, Srinivas obediently marries the woman his parents decided would be his wife. She gets on with his family while he remains aloof to her. The marriage, as far as he’s concerned, was doomed from the start. He continues to write letters to Nishikant while unhappily living out his days in Chennai.

Srinivas’s sudden disappearance forces Nishikant to make a journey to Chennai, come face to face with his wife, and confront his identity as a married man. As he sits in Srinivas’s bedroom talking to his wife, he is disarmed by the meticulous cleanliness of their shared space – almost clinical and in sharp contrast to their messy bedroom in London.

The trudge of time

Nishikant’s life is marked by unexplained disappearances – it starts with his sister’s death and continues with the incomplete, blacked-out letters that Srinivas writes to him from an undisclosed location. Kundalkar ends the novella with a single sentence, “To be continued.” And indeed, there are no answers to where Srinivas is, what he might be up to, or why his letters are so confounding. Nishikant, too, seems to have accepted his fate of being left behind – the initial determination to chart his own way is replaced by a quiet submission to the painful trudge of time.

Nishikant is not marked by the largesse typical of a protagonist. In fact, in most situations, he emerges as a second fiddle to the men he’s in love with. When Shiv or Srinivas appear in the scene, Nishikant almost fades from the reader’s mind as other lives unfold with a vivid clarity. Here too, Nishikant confronts an unexplained disappearance – that of the reader who is keener about a story that is not his.

Translator Aakash Karkare makes a confident debut. He successfully recreates Kundalkar’s sparse style and his mature exploration of queer love, which looks not at its excesses but the inevitable loneliness that is inherent to all forms of love. The novella reminded me greatly Sudipto Pal’s Unlove Story (translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha), which is similarly sprawling geographically and nurses hopes of happier endings despite the mess of human relationships.

As is for any excellent debut, Silk Route will inevitably invite comparisons with Cobalt Blue. Silk Route is accomplished on its own terms but Cobalt Blue has proven itself one of the greats of contemporary Indian fiction – will the second book follow suit? Only time will tell.

Silk Route, Sachin Kundalkar, translated from the Marathi by Aakash Karkare, Penguin India.