#BookReview ; Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar

A paying guest seems like a win-win proposition to the Joshi family. He's ready with the rent, he's willing to lend a hand when he can and he's happy to listen to Mrs Joshi on the imminent collapse of our 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. The siblings Tanay and Anuja are smitten by him. He overturns their lives and when he vanishes, he breaks their hearts. Elegantly wrought and exquisitely spare, Cobalt Blue is a tale of rapturous love and fierce heartbreak told with tenderness and unsparing clarity.

Cobalt Blue is originally a book written in Marathi by Sachin Kundalkar, translated into English by Jerry Pinto & published by Penguin India. Sachin Kundalkar is a novelist, playwright & film-maker. He won the National Award for the Best Screenplay for the film Gandha in 2008.  Jerry Pinto’s debut novel, Em and the Big Hoom won the 2012 Hindu Literary Prize.

Cobalt Blue is a story about an ordinary traditional Marathi family of 5 people living together in Pune. Things get complicated when a new tenant moves into their house as he is to study art from an institute nearby & 2 siblings, the sister Anuja & the younger brother Tanay fell in love with him. The tenant, though a loner has peculiar attributes which attracts people towards him. As Tanay continued to spend more time with the tenant & comes close with him, Anuja gets introduced with him. With time she forms a special bond with him which Tanay didn’t understood. Then one day she ran away with the tenant without informing anyone leaving Tanay heartbroken. But his isn’t the only heart that gets broken. Get this book here to know the full story,

I heard great things about this book from my friends since a long time & it had been in my TBR since then. As I picked it up for my Pride Month read, I was keeping my fingers crossed for it to be an enjoyable read & now get why my friends raved about this book. The book basically has 2 parts, the first one is the story from Tanay’s POV & the second is Anuja’s. Both the characters are extremely believable, our unnamed paying guest has been portrayed brilliantly. He is a man who will intrigue you, no matter what & if a book comes out with his story, I would surely read it. Though the plot does include the stories of other people but our mystery man does indeed overshadow them. I will also lay emphasis on the diversity of stories present in our regional languages & only because we don’t know the language, we miss out a lot. Jerry Pinto has done a phenomenal work translating it by not diluting the emotions at all. The cover is intriguing, the language is easy & the title of the book is genius. A must read!