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.