The Steeping
A middle-aged, moustached, sighted dahibara vendor in a pale shirt and shoulder-cloth reaches to serve a green sal-leaf cup beside a brass pot of buttermilk and a tray of fried bara; in the foreground a smiling uniformed schoolboy holds up a small copper coin with a central hole, at a masonry school gate in warm golden light.
Plate I

DispatchesCuttack — 20 November 2005

Bhogirath, the dahibara maker

Raghu Dahibara's death carries a chemist back fifty years to the Cuttack school gate — and to a blind octogenarian who can still explain, in his own way, why the taste will not come back.