Short Story: The Black Dog

This short story by Debashis Chakraborty explores the psychological conflicts of a small-town cyber café owner, tracing the echoes of his past trauma against the backdrop of the collective, normalized aggression of the society around him.

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This piece is available for free reading this week

The black dog terrifies Tabun. Its coat is a glossy, varnished black, and its eyes blaze like fiery fountains of rage. Whenever anyone approaches, it barks relentlessly—a low, menacing growl. The entire neighborhood is fed up with this black dog’s thuggish behavior.

Tabun Roy, 37 years old, runs a cyber café. Technically, it belongs to his friend who has settled in Bengaluru, but this arrangement makes Tabun the undisputed king of the establishment. With a chuckle, Tabun often says, “I may not have a crown or official ownership, but does that make me any less of an emperor?” The phrase ‘crownless emperor’ wasn’t coined for nothing—it was made for people like him.

Glancing at the clock, Tabun notices it’s almost one o’clock. He mutters to himself, “Time to close up shop.” The café will reopen in the afternoon for another round of “business.”

Tabun muses that everything in this world has a name, yet this cyber café remains nameless. Locals simply call it Bapi-da’s Cyber Café, after his friend’s father, Bapi Sen, also known as ‘Dacoit Bapi’.

The older residents of Madanmohantala recount a legendary tale regarding this name. Once, when robbers struck the house next door, Bapi Sen allegedly apprehended one of them single-handedly. That feat earned him both a government job and the notorious nickname ‘Dacoit Bapi’. Mischievous folks, however, tell a different story. They whisper that Bapi was so terrified during the robbery that he bolted toward the neighbor’s gate. In the chaos, a short, scrawny dacoit, fleeing with stolen goods, collided with Bapi. Both tumbled to the ground. As neighbors rushed to the scene, Bapi instinctively grabbed the dacoit’s legs, holding on tight simply out of shock. From that moment, a coward became a local superhero.

While thinking of Bapi’s tale—a story of fear masquerading as bravery—Tabun recalls a childhood memory of his own: a dog bite.

He was a young boy playing on the neighborhood field when he hit a six off Nakul’s bowling. The ball landed in the nearby jungle, and as Tabun rushed in to retrieve it, a red dog sank its teeth into his leg. Even now, Tabun can’t fathom why the dog singled him out when everyone else was also searching for the ball.

His thoughts are interrupted as he glances at his phone. A Facebook post catches his eye: “Three solid ways to overcome fear of dogs.” He scrolls past it and clicks on another video featuring a girl he’s watched before. It’s not her words that draw him in—it’s her eyes. Today, she’s live-streaming from a rickshaw. Tabun isn’t listening to what she’s saying; instead, he’s captivated by the interplay of light and shadow on her face—a poetic dance of brightness and cool darkness. To him, she resembles a stunning oil painting from the medieval era. He imagines there’s an unspoken letter of sorrow in her eyes, one that perhaps no one has ever read.

Suddenly, that silence is broken.

Tabun hears a strange bark. It doesn’t seem to come from the street outside, but from somewhere deep within the screen, or perhaps from inside his own head. A monotonous, rhythmic sound that brings a sudden, creeping dread.

The girl’s sorrowful eyes drag a memory out of the deep recesses of his mind—an image he had seen on TV years ago during the Gulf War. A sea turned black with oil. And there, trapped in the sludge, a bird lay dying, its wings heavy and useless.

Tabun wonders, in that flicker of memory, is there a dog waiting just outside the frame? Waiting to tear into that helpless, oil-drenched bird?

The barking in his ears grows louder, consuming his senses. But as he listens, the sound warps. It is no longer the bark of a dog. It is the high-pitched, deafening whistle of missiles raining down. The air inside the small café seems to vibrate with the impact of invisible explosions.

Desperate to escape the noise, Tabun fumbles for his phone. He needs to find that girl again, to let her soft eyes drown out the sound of war. He scrolls frantically, swipes, and refreshes. But the video is gone. The feed is empty.

His reverie is violently broken by Chakkobattida, the shopkeeper next door, shouting from the street, “What, aren’t you closing up? Not getting married either? You’re living the good life!”

Tabun blinks, the sound of missiles fading into the mundane noise of the afternoon. He doesn’t quite grasp the connection between closing the shop and marriage, but he shakes off the hallucination and locks the café’s gate.

Especially late at night or during the quiet of noon, Tabun usually feels a slight fear of that black dog lurking on the street outside his house. But today, the atmosphere is different. The neighborhood is abuzz.

A petty thief has been caught and tied to a lamppost, awaiting the police. The young man’s face is swollen from the slaps he’s received from the gathered crowd. Rajada, a bank employee and amateur poet, eggs Tabun on: “Go on, Tabun, give him a couple of slaps before the police arrive. You won’t get another chance!”

Tabun freezes. He notices the black dog standing far off, silently observing the scene of the thief being roughed up. For once, the dog isn’t barking or causing a fuss—it’s eerily quiet, watching the humans bark and bite instead.

At that moment, Tabun looks at the thief—slumped and beaten—and the image of the oil-drenched bird returns. The thief, the bird, and perhaps Tabun himself—all trapped in a sludge they didn’t create.

He remembers the wound from the dog bite he had suffered as a child. Back then, the scar had looked exactly like a map. The lower part of the wound had resembled a lizard’s tail. Now, standing amidst the mob, Tabun can clearly feel blood seeping into that map once again.

On one side of this map stands a blood-stained thief, beaten by men; on the other, a dog that no longer relishes blood, watching in silence. A faint, prickling ache stirs in his chest—a heavy mix of shame and sorrow. Tabun lowers his head, turns away from the violence, and starts walking toward home. He notices the flowers swaying on the tree in front of his house. Yet, a strange exhaustion seems to weigh them down. To him, the flowers feel just as lonely as he does.

Author’s Bio

Debasish Chakraborty is a writer and oral storyteller who creates stories, poems, and plays, primarily in Bengali, with a deep focus on preserving the tradition of oral storytelling. His short story, “Water on Taro Leaf,” was recently selected for the longlist of the Fish Short Story Prize. Beyond literature, he explores diverse narratives through zero-budget filmmaking, podcasting, and independent journalism.