The Black Panther of C R Park~By Santanu Ghose

 

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

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

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.

When

When

When your pheromones have left my blanket, but somehow the whiff of your sweat lingers on,

When all that remains is a distant memory and I don’t miss you anymore so much,

When a faint constant pain wells up in my being and says, “I miss, oh I miss that warmth and that which we called love”

My heart tugs me and gives me a hug and says, “I still love you, and always will.”

Contemplating, Loving and Living...

When we contemplate on the obedience we obey Christ with it has to be out of sheer Love. We abstain from something or we partake of it --it all has to be acts of love: that what seems right for us to do or right to us to do or not do. 

We mustn't lump it onto others, though, saying, "You must all also do thus and thus..."

This presupposes that we need to be in God's presence. We need to be  with God at all times --all the time: rain & sunshine, light & darkness, day & night, the highs & the lows --through it all. 

How do we practise the presence of God? Do we work up an emotion? Conjure up God!? Yes and No.

Yes --because, yes, in all our relationships relating to everyone we do work up some emotions when we let our minds turn to them. This is not because they are not there, as if they are not real people, but all the more because they are real people and we have spent time with them. And same it is when we think of God. 

No -- because, no, we do not need to work up our emotions or work ourselves up to feel God's presence as if he is not a real person. God is very real and very much a person and very much present even when we do not feel anything or even think of him. All we need, like with any person in any of our relationships, think of God --we feel the highs or lows of emotions towards him does not matter. Let's remember who he is to us and how he has been all that to us, and how we have been with him. Let's remember the walks we have been having with him till now. He is with us.