Dreams from the Mango Tree

A Short Story by Santanu Ghose

 

While Aritra Dey and Riku Sato, like lost puppies, found a kennel—a home—in each other’s arms, somewhere far away, deep in the flat belly of India, another story was taking shape.

Fourteen-year-old Rishu—short for Rishav—dreamed Delhi dreams in his nameless village in eastern Uttar Pradesh. There was no city for over a hundred kilometres in any direction. Only green and gold paddy fields stretching endlessly under the sun, dotted with the odd neem or mango tree, and the buzz of crickets that never truly stopped.

Rishu was no ordinary village boy. He was a computer wizard. A hacker in the making. A self-taught coder who’d cracked Python scripts before he'd finished his half-yearly exams. And he had never seen Delhi.

He hung from the topmost branches of the mango tree behind his house, holding his cheap Android phone in one hand, clinging to the branches with the other. His copper-toned skin glistened under the filtered sunlight, his black shorts dusty, bare feet gripping the warm bark like claws.

This was the only spot in the village that caught a decent 3G signal.

“Daddy!” he shouted into his phone, breathless. “Yesterday you were driving through Chanakyapuri?”

His father’s voice crackled through. “Haan beta. Why do you keep asking about it? You've asked ten times! How do you even know? I haven’t told you yet where I was.”

“Because,” Rishu said, eyes dreamily scanning the open sky through the mango leaves, “it’s where the embassies are. Where people from all over the world live. I read on Google Maps. I followed your route on my tracker.”

His father, Rajendra, a personal chauffeur to an ultra-high net worth businessman, stepped away from the circle of suited chauffeurs and pantry staff on break, holding his phone to his ear. “Beta, why does it matter to you so much?”

“Because I want to go there. I want to see those flags. I want to see the people. Daddy, did you know the Japanese embassy has its name written in Japanese?”

Rajendra chuckled. “You and your computers. Hamesha kuch na kuch naya.”

Back in the mango tree, Rishu balanced himself with expert grace. This wasn’t just his network tower. It was his portal to the world. From up here, he had watched YouTube videos of TED Talks, learned HTML basics, downloaded pirated e-books on JavaScript, and watched walkthroughs of code competitions he couldn’t even pronounce.

But more than anything else, he wanted to escape. Not out of hatred for his village—but because his dreams were too big for the one-room mud hut he called home.

He spent nights coding on a scavenged second-hand laptop powered through solar panels his uncle had fixed. He learned to build bots. He created an auto-responder bot for his uncle’s kirana shop and added a voice assistant in Hinglish, which became a hit among customers.

At school, he was “mad Rishu.” The teachers ignored his questions, most of which they couldn’t answer anyway. “Computer toh hai par chalata kaun hai?” they’d mutter.

Rishu had always been different.

While the other boys in his village school scraped by with rote learning, Rishu asked questions. “Why does the moon look bigger near the horizon?” “How does a computer know what to do when you click?” “Why can’t we have a science fair in our school?”

His questions were met with either scowls or silence.

“Don’t ask nonsense,” the science teacher once barked. “Focus on your textbook. That’s all that matters for exams.”

The other children called him “Google Baba.” Some teased him for speaking strange English words he picked up from YouTube tutorials. The girls giggled when he once wrote a poem for one of them—Kajal—with metaphors about stars and galaxies. She returned it to him torn into pieces.

“You're weird,” she had said, and walked away.

That rejection stung more than he admitted. But what hurt more was feeling invisible. Misunderstood. In a school where the highlight of the week was a cricket match or a broken fan getting fixed, Rishu dreamt of satellites and string theory, of JavaScript libraries and the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.

His teachers often ignored him. Not out of cruelty, but out of fatigue. They were overworked, underpaid, and barely able to teach from the book—let alone guide a boy who asked about encryption algorithms.

At night, under the dim glow of a solar lamp, he devoured pages of translated science fiction—Asimov, Satyajit Ray’s Professor Shonku, and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. His mother would bring him warm milk and gently run her fingers through his hair as he read aloud to her from whatever had caught his mind that day.

“She never understands the science,” he would later say, “but she always listens.”

His Ma was his anchor. While the village scoffed at his habits and the teachers rolled their eyes, she never once told him to stop dreaming. She even sold a pair of her gold bangles once to repair the laptop he’d salvaged from a city junk dealer.

“Your brain is too big for this place,” she said once, folding his washed school uniform. “But remember, your heart must stay gentle.”

His father, loving but distant, worked twelve-hour shifts in Delhi. He sent money home every month, and missed every school play, every annual function. But Rishu forgave him. Because every day, like ritual, at exactly 7:15 p.m., his father would step away from his employer’s bungalow, sneak behind the servant quarters, and answer his son’s call.

“What building today, Papa?” Rishu would ask. No, don’t say, I know. I saw you drive. I have you on my tracker.

And Rajendra would describe the high-rises, the embassy gates, the roundabouts and rows of diplomatic flags like a storyteller feeding a hungry audience. “Today I drove past the German embassy. Big lion statue outside. Tomorrow, maybe Japan.”

These calls weren’t just conversations. They were oxygen.

Between patchy signals and long stretches of solitude, Rishu’s lifeline was the internet. He taught himself HTML, then Python. Then basic ethical hacking. He joined Discord servers filled with coders from Brazil, Poland, and South Korea. He wrote long Reddit posts under the handle @BanyanRootDreamer asking for advice on scholarships and competitions.

The world out there felt close. But still far.

“I’m going to leave this place one day,” he told his banyan tree once. “I’ll take Ma to a real apartment. And I’ll have internet that doesn’t depend on monsoon winds.”

He said it with fire. With faith.

Because no matter how far Chanakyapuri seemed, no matter how strange English sounded when spoken fluently, Rishu knew in his bones that he belonged to the world.

Not just the village that raised him.

But the universe that called to him from behind screens, behind poems, behind every phone call with Papa was always just a little too far away.

And until that day came, he kept climbing his mango tree.

Kept holding on with one hand, and dreaming with the other.

­­­­­Every time his dad sent him a voice note from Delhi, he would study it like a documentary. He’d ask questions about roads, zones, government buildings, diplomatic codes. He dreamed of getting into IIT Delhi—not just to study, but to arrive.

To be seen.

He imagined the day he’d step out of a cab wearing jeans, laptop slung across his back, into a glass building where people spoke in clean English and sipped bad coffee. He’d be the best coder in the room. Maybe someday he'd build the next version of Google Translate—but for heartache, for distance, for longing.

And yet, every day before dinner, he’d climb the mango tree and call his father.

Just to ask: “Kahan ho, Papa? What does it look like?”

And Rajendra, tired but smiling, always replied, “Beta, it's big. It’s clean. It’s full of foreigners. And one day, maybe, it’ll have you.”

Rishu smiled, dangling from his green perch in the sky.

And kept dreaming.

Rain in Manju Ka Tilla~ By Santanu Ghose

 

Rain in Manju Ka Tilla

~ By Santanu Ghose

The first time Riku Sato and Aritra Dey met, it was at a painfully formal corporate dinner in a central Delhi hotel ballroom that smelt faintly of old money and over-polished cutlery.

They were mid-tier executives in their respective firms celebrating the start of a new chapter in their firms’ corporate journey. Riku, 28, was from Tokyo but had spent the last three years in Bangalore. Aritra, 32, a Kolkata boy with the old-school charm of Durga Pujo pandals and yellow taxis, was now working in New Delhi.

They were assigned adjacent seats by some HR intern who probably didn’t know they were about to launch a friendship rooted in unspoken symmetry.

“Do you like Indian food?” Aritra asked with a polite grin as the first round of drinks came in, swirling his glass of Indri, an Indian single malt, touted to be a drink for the gods.  Riku was nursing his glass of Akashi 5-Year-Old sake cask.

“I do,” Riku replied, his English clear and careful, with a slight lilt of Japanese “But I like Bengali food more. Mustard fish, Ilish, to be precise. The smell reminds me of miso.”

That was the spark.

Two hours later, they were ignoring their bosses’ speeches and trading childhood memories instead. Riku told Aritra about his grandmother’s quiet Shinto rituals, the first time he learned to fold a paper crane properly, how his Otōsan, father —tall, strict, distant—taught him to tie a fishing knot before he taught him to shave. He had passed when he was 21. Riku had to drop a semester to sort out hospital bills and family papers.

Aritra shared how his Ma would wake him up on Saraswati Pujo mornings with the fragrance of sheuli phool (night queen), mild and dreamy hanging in the air, sandalwood paste and chalk powder on the floor. How he’d spent a decade in a strict boarding school in Darjeeling, where boys cried at night but never in public. His father, too, had died young—cardiac arrest they had told him –a third attack was fatal, just before Aritra could finish his law degree, a career path of his father’s choosing, a burden he did not want to carry.

Both had learned to cook out of necessity. One enjoyed, one didn’t. Both had filled that hollow space with long hours and longer commutes, slowly climbing the same kind of rickety ladder.

They exchanged numbers. Soon after WhatsApp texts and senseless forwards graduated to phone calls.

⸻

Two months later, to escape a Delhi deluge and weeklong fatigue they were sitting cross-legged on the floor cushions of a Korean restaurant at Majnu Ka Tilla, a vibrant New Delhi neighbourhood of exiled Tibetans. Rain drummed hard against the window panes. The smell of gochujang and grilled pork filled the warm, close air.

“Soju?” Aritra grinned, pouring them each a shot.

“Dangerous,” Riku smirked.

“That’s why it’s good.”

They toasted to rain, to Friday, to memories they’d already begun sharing more often than they meant to.

Riku’s cheeks were flushed, his collar slightly damp from the humidity. Aritra’s shirt clung to his back. The first bottle was empty. They lingered, because the rain refused to let up and because neither wanted the night to end.

They were well into their third bottle when the stories deepened. Layers stripped away.

“My first crush,” Aritra said abruptly, staring at his chopsticks, “was my senior at school. We used to play the flute together. I never said anything. He got married last year. I saw it on Facebook. His flute notes stayed on.”

Riku nodded slowly. Something in made his heart ached. A pain he knew too well.

“There was a boy in high school,” he said. “He was in the kyūdō club—archery. I admired how quiet he was. Precise. I lent him my umbrella one day. He returned it the next morning with a thank you note and never spoke to me again.”

A silence hung between them, soft and heavy.

“I used to think,” Riku said, “maybe I imagined it all. That I saw what I wanted to see.”

“I still do that sometimes,” Aritra said quietly. “It’s safer.”

Lightning flashed. Rain roared harder.

Something stirred in Riku. He looked into Aritra’s lowered eyes. He leaned in.

He kissed him.

A soft, unsure kiss. Quick. Warm. And full of panic.

Aritro’s eyes widened. Breath gasped. Heart skipped a beat or two.

Riku pulled back immediately. “Gomen’nasai!” he groaned. “I’m sorry, I’m drunk. It’s the soju. I don’t—Japanese sake… less… reckless… is much more dignified—I didn’t mean to.”

Aritra didn’t speak. He reached out and took Riku’s hand. It was trembling slightly.

He pulled him forward, gently, until Riku’s forehead rested against his chest. Aritra’s hands ran through his damp hair. The moment was quiet, sacred, and trembling.

“You don’t need to apologise,” he whispered, like a balm, “Not when we both wanted it."

Riku looked up, eyes searching. “You mean it?”

Aritra nodded.

Their fingers locked. There were no more words.

⸻

The rain hadn’t let up. Water slid down the frosted glass ceiling that served as the roof of the restaurant, pooling along the edges, pattering like a thousand tiny fingers. Caressing.

Inside, the warmth of grilled bulgogi and kimchi mingled with the sweet burn of Korean soju.

Riku and Aritra were cross-legged on the floor cushions, their jackets now hung on the back wall, both a little more drunk, but not on soju, a little more flushed, and perhaps, more honest than they meant to be.

“You know,” Aritra said, tracing a bead of condensation down his glass, “I hated myself for years.”

Riku turned, slowly. “Why?”

“For feeling things I wasn’t supposed to. For wanting things that weren’t in the movies I grew up watching. You grow up in a boys’ boarding school in Darjeeling, where the dorms smelt of moist wool and old books, you learn to blend in. Be invisible. Make sure your eyes don’t linger too long in the locker room.”

Riku nodded, eyes soft. “In my high school, we had silence drilled into us. Boys didn’t talk about emotions. If you liked someone, you folded it into a paper crane and hid it in your desk.”

Aritra smiled, sadly. “First time I kissed someone was when I was 19. A college fest. He was my senior. We were drunk on cheap rum and hormones. Afterwards, he looked at me like I’d ruined his life.”

“And did you?” Riku asked gently.

“I didn’t even kiss back,” Aritra said. “I froze. I hated myself for wanting it, and for being too scared to want it properly.”

Riku looked down. “First time I kissed someone was at 21. In Kyoto. A foreign exchange student. He kissed me in a temple garden. I pushed him away before anyone saw. Then I cried. I thought I’d defiled the space.”

There was a long silence.

“You ever feel,” Aritra asked, “like you’re living two lives at once?”

“All the time,” Riku said. “There’s the good son. Polite. Respectful. Career-driven. And then there’s… the one who aches. Who dreams. Who stares too long at strangers on the train.”

Aritra stared at his empty glass. “I spent years thinking it was a phase. Then thinking I was cursed. Then thinking I’d just stay alone forever.”

“And now?” Riku asked.

“Now,” Aritra said slowly, “I think I deserve someone. Not a hookup. Not a secret. Just… someone who doesn’t flinch when our fingers brush in public.”

Riku nodded, his voice quieter. “I want someone who knows what I’m thinking without asking. Someone I can pray next to. Sleep next to. Grow old next to.”

Their eyes met again. Something in the silence cracked open.

“You know what’s strange?” Aritra said. “How similar we are. Cultures apart. Yet…”

“My Tōsan, dad,” Riku said, “used to say “No” before I finished a sentence. No late nights. No earrings. No hangouts at the malls. No questions.”

“Mine too,” Aritra murmured. “No long hair. No talking back. No drama. I cried inwardly.”

They laughed.

Riku smiled faintly. “My mother never said much. But when I was fifteen, she bought me a book of haikus about love. She never said why. But she left it on my desk.”

Aritra’s eyes lit up. “My Ma used to say, ‘You’re different. That’s not bad. That’s rare. A shoulder to cry on, to lean on in your weakest moments, is what all one needs.’”

Riku raised his glass. “To the mothers who saw us.”

Aritra clinked. “And didn’t look away.”

They sipped.

Then Aritra said, more softly now, “You know that myth about the missing rib? How God made man, and then woman out of his rib?”

“I always wondered,” Riku said, “what if the rib wasn’t meant to be a woman at all? Just someone who fits. Someone who filled the quiet. The void.”

Aritra smiled. “Maybe some ribs curve toward other ribs. Doesn’t make them less real.”

They stared at each other for a moment longer.

Rain fell louder outside. Thunder cracked.

And then, without asking, without warning—Aritra leaned in.

And kissed Riku.

Soft. Hesitant. Real. This time Riku did no gasp or apologise. He melted.

His lips trembled slightly against Aritra’s. He tasted of rice wine and something deeper. Longing. Love.

Then he pulled away, eyes aglow. Yet awash with a love and acceptance that had washed away the shame that his Japanese upbringing had beaten into him.

Riku took Aritra’s hand.

Held it.

Then gently pulled Aritra forward, until his forehead rested against his chest, his shirt buttons unbuttoned God-knows-when! Aritra snuggled in like a lost puppy.

“There’s nothing to feel the way you are feeling,” Riku said quietly, running a hand through Aritra’s hair. “Not when we’re both looking for the same thing.”

Aritra looked at Riku, breath shallow. “You mean—?”

“I mean,” Riku said, “maybe the rib finally found its match.”

Their fingers laced together on the warm wood of the table.

And this time, no one looked away.

⸻

Later, in the small guesthouse across the alley, they lay on a thin mattress under a whirring AC. The room was barely lit, the yellow light pooling in soft circles.

They held each other like survivors of some long, invisible war.

“I was always scared of being alone,” Riku said, his voice muffled into Aritra’s neck.

“I thought loneliness was safer,” Aritra replied.

Their kiss now was different—slow, confident, reverent.

They undressed without urgency. Each touch was a question. Each gasp, a yes.

It wasn’t about lust. It was about recognition.

It was about finding a mirror in a stranger. A second heartbeat.

And when the rain finally stopped outside, there was still the sound of breathing.

Soft. Steady.

Together.

 

 

The Black Panther of C R Park

~By Santanu Ghose

 

 

They call him The Black Panther of K Block. Jet black from nose to tail, sleek as a freshly ironed sari, arrogant as a politician before elections. He isn’t just a cat—he is a legend. He prowls the alleys, climbs trees like a ninja, darts across rooftops like a furry Batman, and every squirrel within a five-kilometre radius has PTSD because of him.

But he wasn’t born a loner. Oh no. He was the second of four siblings, all jet black, little carbon copies of their mama. Now, their mama? A queen. Not metaphorically. Literally. One dark night she walked straight into my neighbour’s house, four kittens in tow, looked up at him with those glinting emerald eyes, gave a commanding purr that said, “You’re mine now, human.”

And that was that. The human bowed down. The kingdom was established. She took over his bed, his food, his slippers, his dignity. Her kittens? Tiny terror units. Chaos in black fur.

As the kittens grew, things changed. Mama left one morning—probably in search of a new baby-daddy for her next royal litter. The eldest kitten eloped with some slick tom from N Block. The youngest got adopted by another foolish human who didn’t realise she had been the one adopted as lifelong servant. That left two brothers: our Panther bhai and his twin.

They were inseparable. Roaming together, chasing squirrels together, running from rabid, slobbering, dumbass colony dogs together. You couldn’t tell them apart. If one was missing, the other would search until he found him.

Until one day… Panther’s brother didn’t come home.

Dinner time rolled around. Panther waited. “Bro? Oi? Where you at?” Meowed into the night. Sniffed every trail. Climbed every tree. Searched under every Maruti 800 and Kia Seltos and BMW.

The next morning, they found his brother. Squashed flat under a Mercedes.

“Ah well,” the human sighed, “At least it was a Mercedes. Not bad for a send-off. Went out in style.”

Panther didn’t care for style. He sat by the road for hours, tail wrapped around his paws, staring at the spot. His emerald eyes scanning for a brother who wasn’t coming back.

He stopped roaming. Stopped climbing. Just sat under his favourite tree, quiet as a dead leaf. The wise old crow cawed from the branch above: “Oi, bro. Life goes on. Get your fluffy ass moving.”

Panther flicked an ear. “Bugger off.”

The humans were worried. They tried everything. Milk, fish, boiled chicken (yes, boiled, the sacrilege). Nothing. Meanwhile the mice declared a bloody festival in their kitchen. Tiny squeaks of revolution echoed through the cupboards.

Then came Ashtami night. The para was buzzing. Drums, lights, chaat stalls, aunties in heavy Benarasi saris. And amidst the chaos, she appeared.

She.

Black as the night. Amber eyes that gleamed like smouldering charcoal. Fur polished like black granite. And oh—the paws. Snow white. Dainty. Perfect.

She walked in like a diva entering a fashion ramp. Meowed once. Claimed the territory. Panther sniffed the wind. His ears perked. His tail stood up like an antenna catching lost radio signals.

He approached her slowly. “Hey there, gorgeous.”

She narrowed those golden eyes. “Stay outta my face, mister.”

Panther was smitten. He trailed her all night, singing mournful ballads only a lovesick tomcat can compose. High-pitched mewls, low-pitched wails. The humans cursed from their windows.

“Ei! Shut up! We’ve got work tomorrow!”

“Kalke Nobomi! Ebaro shute debe na?”

Someone even dumped a bucket of water on him.

Still Panther sang. Still Panther panged. Still Panther pined.

~~~~~~~~~~

And then, at dawn, there they were. Strutting side by side, tails entwined, whiskers brushing. White Paws had given in. Panther looked smug. The para aunty sighed from her balcony. “Oof! Ki mishti jora re! What a romantic couple!”

Days passed. The Pujo lights came down. Life returned to normal. Or so the humans of K block thought. But no.

Soon the nights were filled with… noises. Purrs. Growls. Thuds. Moans.

“Eta bhodroloker para! This is a respectable neighbourhood!” shouted Uncle from two houses down.

“Get a room!” someone yelled.

But Panther and White Paws didn’t care. They sealed their love under moonlight, under starlight, under streetlight, under that big neem tree that had witnessed everything.

And then came the kittens. Four little black-and-white balls of chaos. White Paws looked regal. Panther looked exhausted. The humans resigned themselves to life with seven freeloading felines.

Months passed.

One night, I spotted the pair on my neighbour’s terrace. White Paws stretched, yawned, looked at Panther and said, “Darling, soon it’ll be time for me to go. The kits are growing. I must move on. You know how it is.”

Panther stared at her, eyes wide, heart sinking. “Must you?”

She sighed. “Such is the way of cats.”

He sighed. “Damn humans. I’ve been living too close to them. They’ve infected me… with… love.”

White Paws kissed his nose. “Silly boy. It’s not the humans. It’s just life, what’s love got to do with it!?”

And under the silver moon, the Black Panther of C R Park watched the love of his life disappear into the night, a soft meow fading into the darkness.

He sat there a while, tail curled around his feet. Then he stood, stretched, and leapt down into the shadows.

Tomorrow there would be mice to hunt. Trees to climb. Kittens to teach.

The jungle of K Block awaited. The Circle of Life continued.

Dhosha: A Short Story

By ~ Santanu Ghose

 

The fan above stirred the sour air slowly, mixing steam with spice, sweat with the warm tang of tamarind. The boy sat still, almost too still, watching a crisp golden crescent arrive on a steel plate that shimmered like a mirror. His mother nudged it gently toward him.

“This is Dhosha,” she said, a soft smile trying to rise on her tired face.

Not Dosa. Never Dosai. Not in this part of the city. In north Calcutta, tucked just off Bidhan Sarani near the Shyambazar five-point crossing, it had always been Dhosha—foreign yet familiar, southern yet soaked into the Bengali tongue.

The boy was ten. Or maybe eleven. At that age where boredom feels like suffocation and every "No" from a father feels like a brick in the wall. He had felt caged lately. Tightly watched. Carefully controlled. His father said no to everything—no football in the rain, no school picnics or a family visit to the zoo, no roaming in the lanes with the other boys, no racing the bicycle to the top of the road where the tram line meets his neighbourhood lane, no to laughter if it got too loud.

Maybe that’s why his Ma brought him here today.

It was just a short walk from their two-storied house—a damp, dim place in a narrow lane where the walls always smelled of last year’s rain. But today, this place with its tiled floor, its harsh tube lights, its laminated menu, felt like a passage to something bigger, something better, something newer, something or someplace far away from his cramped life.

The boy stared at the Dhosha. What was it made of? Who thought to make something like this—crispy on the outside, soft inside, with that strange, glowing yellow filling? Who eats it every day? Where do they live? What do they wear, sound like, believe in?

A single plate had opened a thousand questions; a Universe in itself.

Across the table, his mother watched him.

Her smile this time was real; faint, but real. For a few minutes, her son was not crouched under the weight of his father's rules. He was exploring. Becoming. Be-ing. Stretching his mind beyond their damp corner of Calcutta. She had given him that. If only this. She felt guilty. She felt responsible.

But as he tore off a corner of the Dhosha, dipping it carefully in sambar, she drifted.

Back to her own youth. Back to the boy she once loved with the recklessness only sixteen-year-olds know. The boy who walked miles in shirts soaked in sweat to meet her outside her hostel, on the same road, under the same lamppost, at the same time each week, when she was doing her Masters and he was doing a job and also studying LLB in Calcutta. Who brought alur chop wrapped in newspaper, sneaked into curtained cabins (it was Basanta Cabin? She tried to remember…) where all they could afford were two cups of cha.

She remembered the weight of the chop in her hand. Still warm. She had broken it in half and placed it in his palm before the waiter could return. Their fingers had touched. Electricity passed between them like a secret vow.

He had been everything then—mild, studious, gentle. A quiet boy who taught tuitions to pay for her books, her meals, her dreams. A boy who once stood like a guardian at the gate of her life.

Now he rode through the city in a spanking new white Ambassador Mark III with plush maroon leather upholstery. He was a very successful advocate of Calcutta High Court. “He is an institution in himself,” one senior advocate had told her. The little boy heard it too, as he held onto his Ma’s little finger. On his way back home from the court he would joke with his lawyer friends, mostly lackeys: “Checking out chicks through the tinted glass of the car is fun isn’t it, they can’t see you and you can see them. The price of women has never gone up in this country. All in good fun, of course” he’d say, “men will be men…ha ha!!! Nothing serious, all in good humour.” Young lady lawyers, juniors and not-so-juniors, swarmed around him like bees around the honeycomb.

Something inside her crumbled each time. She did not understand what that fully meant: He is an ‘Institution.’  All she wanted was the young man whom she loved to love her back, the boy for whom she too gave up a promising career. Because he wanted her to.

As for the little boy he did not understand what that meant either: “Your dad is an Institution.”  All he wanted was his famous father to be his loving Baba, who understood his little heart. He did not need an ‘Institution.’

Was it love, really, she thought? Or was it a conquest, masked as love? Had she fallen in love with a face, the apparent behaviour and not the man behind?

She blinked. The restaurant came back into focus. Her son was staring at her, eyes wide and dark, a question trembling in his lips.

“Ma… are you crying? Again?”

She wiped her cheek without answering.

He hated seeing her like this. Lately she cried more than she smiled. And his father—so warm and jovial outside—only wore scowls and sharp tones at home. Why was everything upside down? Why were grown-ups so confusing? Why did joy live in public and silence stalk the home?

But he took another bite. It was still warm. Still different. Still wonderful.

And she watched him, her heart a silent sculpture—frozen in grief, longing, confusion. She had once been a girl in love. Now she was a woman staring across the table at a boy who would one day be a man, and she silently begged the world: Let him be gentler. Kinder. Let him remain curious. Let him be –all that he wants to be.

They met eyes across the steel plate. For a second, no words were needed. His question, her answer, her question, his pain—they all sat there between them, warm and quiet like steam from a bowl of sambar.

Life never answered anything, she thought. It just layered questions over questions, like the folds in a paratha. And all one could do was keep chewing.

Still, today, even with all the ache, she had given her son something new.

And as he chewed, his mind wandered again—past Bengal, past Bidhan Sarani, into places where Dhoshas were everyday things and boys like him didn’t feel so small.

 

What Remains?

By~ Santanu Ghose

 

Callum’s aunt had always been strange. She lived alone on John Street, just past the edge of Worksop, in Nottinghamshire, where the town started to forget itself—where back gardens gave way to trees, and narrow terraces turned to moss-choked stone. Her house was the last on the row, its windows forever dark, as if even daylight refused to go inside.

After her body was found—split open in the woods beyond the canal, no blood, no footprints, no logic—Callum inherited the house. And with it, The Lodestone Codex.

He didn’t tell Jamie about the book at first. Just asked if he’d come help sort the place out. Jamie said yes, because Jamie always said yes when it came to Callum. They’d been each other’s constant since Year Ten (something like class 8 or 9 in India): best friends, first kisses, first fights, and something deeper after that. Something stronger.

But when Jamie followed Callum down into the basement and saw what was etched into the floor, he stopped cold.

It was a circle, nearly two metres across, carved into the concrete. Inside it, a star. At the very centre, dried blood. And beside it, drawn in rust-coloured chalk, a crude stick figure with arms bent wrong.

The basement smelled like damp stone and rot.

It was the kind of place you’d expect to find rusted tools and dead rats, not hand-drawn occult symbols carved into the concrete with obsessive pressure. The pentagram inside the circle was jagged—not artistic. Desperate. Beside it, a crude stick figure with limbs bending the wrong way.

“Tell me this is a joke,” Jamie said, his voice a whisper.

Callum didn’t answer right away. He crouched by the symbol, his fingers hovering above the jagged lines.

“It’s the same one from the Codex,” he said finally. “The Circle of Return,” almost to himself.

The book was black, leather-bound, and deeply wrong. Half the writing was in Latin. The other half—messy English notes—felt like the scribblings of someone losing their mind. Jamie had wanted to burn it. Callum had read it cover to cover.

“She was trying to bring someone back,” Callum said. “She never finished it.”

“Maybe that was a good thing,” Jamie muttered.

But Callum wasn’t listening. He was already lighting candles in the four corners of the room.

“Callum—”

“If it works,” Callum said softly, “we can understand death. Maybe even conquer it.”

Jamie wanted to leave. Every instinct screamed at him to run. But Callum was scared, hurting, and Jamie loved him too much to let him face this alone.

So, he stayed. Because love makes us stay.

JAMIE, 19, holds the torch, nervous. CALLUM, 18, crouches near the symbol, fingers just above the lines. They had found the book—The Lodestone Codex—buried in the crawl space of Callum’s late aunt’s terrace house.

Callum pricked his finger, let the blood drip into the centre of the star. He whispered the words from the book. For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the air thickened, grew heavy.

The circle darkened, like something was soaking up the light from beneath. The stick figure twitched. Not the chalk drawing—the thing beneath it, pressing up against the floor like cement was glass.

Jamie stumbled back.

A shape began to form inside the circle. Tall. Bent. Limbs too long; long limbs bent too many times. No face. Just a black shimmer where a face should be. A human shape gone wrong. It slams against the circle. The lines flicker. The lines glow.

“That’s not her,” Callum whispered; gasped.

The thing slammed itself against the inside edge of the circle. The lines flickered. Again.

Jamie grabbed Callum’s arm. “We have to stop it.” His voice hoarse and dry.

But the figure wasn’t looking at them. It was looking at the sigil beside the circle—the anchor. The stick figure. That was the weak point. That’s what the book had meant.

And then the thing smiled.

And stepped through.

---

Three days later, they were hiding in a motel near Retford, almost 10 miles from the smoking wreck of the house on John Street.

The papers blamed a gas leak. No one knew what really happened.

Jamie couldn’t sleep. When he did, he dreamed of the thing with no face—wearing Callum’s voice. Watching.

He woke up gasping, drenched in sweat. Callum sat beside him, silent, calm in that strange, shaken way people get when they’re past fear.

“I’m sorry,” Callum said.

“You should be.”

“I thought if I could understand death,” he went on, “I wouldn’t be afraid of it.”

Jamie looked at him, still trembling. “You nearly brought something through.”

“I know. And it wasn’t death I saw. It was absence. It was nothing. It didn’t love. Didn’t want. It just… was.”

Jamie pulled the sheets around them. “So, what now?”

Callum reached for his hand.

“I don’t want to chase the dark anymore. I don’t want to open doors that aren’t meant to open. There’s no book, no ritual, no power stronger than what we have right here.”

God gave us life. Not so we’d fear death— but so we’d live. Love. Be.

Jamie studied him, wary. But there was no madness in Callum’s eyes anymore. Just guilt. And something softer.

Hope.

Something stronger.

“I used to think I needed answers,” Callum said. “But I don’t. Not anymore. Life isn’t a puzzle. It’s a gift.”

“And love?” Jamie asked. “Yes, love like this… that’s the only real magic,” whispered Callum.

And he kissed him.

It was quiet at first. Then deeper. More urgent. Not an escape. A remembering. That they were alive. That love was still theirs. That even after all they’d seen, they were still here.

Jamie kissed back—deep and slow. Be-ing real. Because to ‘Be’ is to be alive.

They shed their clothes like skin they no longer needed. They worshipped each other in touch, in sighs, in murmured names. There was no magic in the room—no symbols, no books, no ancient forces. Just two boys in a motel bed, wrapped around each other like the world might end if they let go: To be alive. To feel skin against skin. Soul against soul.

To worship what they almost lost—and what they found in each other.

When it was over, they lay tangled in the warm silence, sweaty, breath slowing, hearts still racing. Quiet.

“I love you,” Callum whispered.

“I know,” Jamie replied, brushing a thumb over Callum’s cheek. “And maybe that’s enough.”

They stared at the ceiling. No shadows now. No marks. Just cracked plaster and the hum of night.

The air changed. Again. This time a breath of freshness was filling the motel room as a new dawn shone through the curtains.

Two hearts were beating as one with a fire that burned brighter and with more heat than the one that burned down the house, with enough warmth to keep the two boys warm in each other’s love all their lives.

That's what remains. 

~The End

Implode

 Implode

If only the stones could speak: the stones of the walls of the great forts or the palaces and mausoleums or the mosques of the great Mughals. Why look so far? If the four walls of our own homes could speak they would speak the same story.

And what a story would it tell? Its a story with a thickening plot of opposing traits that run through us all: A deep desire to know ourselves, and be known by someone and appreciated, to love and be loved, to create something good and nice and lasting, a longing for artistry, poetry; for benevolence, for love, for a need to trust and be trusted. But there is a spanner in the works too. A deep stain of self-destroying violence, a deeper sense of self-pity and guilt, of grudges and resentments long buried deep, a distrust and insecurity and weakness. 

What did it do to the once-mighty Mughals? Implode. The artistry in stone that they have left behind bear witness to this sorrow. What does this do to the normal, everyday common man on the street, to ourselves, our families and communities? Can it be any different? 

The more one delves deep into human history, the more one feels the need for humanity to be saved from itself, salvaged, redeemed. There is a need for us to be 'deep cleaned' and kept that way -deep cleaned. 

The other alternative is to implode! 

Suddenly

He was walking alright. Slow. Fast. Medium-paced. Walking through life and away from life. He fell. Suddenly. Unaware. Did he not see it coming? Or did he? And still allowed it thinking if it brings back that old touch, that smell, that sweat, those tears on his shoulders as he offered his handkerchief to him. Baby don't walk away. Hands touched. Held for a while and slipped away. Into the coldness. Into the aloneness. Into the void. Time passed. Times past. He forgets to forget when all he wants is to forget and get going. And yet and yet he falls again on his missing rib. And getting up and patting away the dusts of time is difficult. Very. And the heart, oh the heart, it cramps. Suddenly.