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.