Dharmatala Street is a recurring Calcutta setting in the account of Sohrabji’s rise and reversal: he first finds work there by chance, later takes charge of a bar on the same street, and is eventually seen there again in a state of desolation. Its significance lies in this compressed history of opportunity and uncertainty, with the street linking precarious work to the promise—and limits—of a successful business.

A Chance Route into Bar Work

While searching for a job in Calcutta, Sohrabji encountered a young man on Dharmatala Street who needed someone to replace him for a week. The young man had been accompanying Cynthia to a bar, waiting until a customer agreed to her fee and then giving up his seat. He warned Sohrabji not to mistake the arrangement for a lasting position or a personal attachment. The episode places Dharmatala Street at the entrance to Sohrabji’s working life in the bar trade, where employment depended on temporary substitutions and tightly defined expectations.

That arrangement belonged to a wider system in which laws restricted women’s access to many Calcutta bars unless they were accompanied. Sohrabji’s first foothold in the city came through this work as an escort, with the cost of the arrangement kept low for the women who needed it. The street is thus associated not simply with a job opportunity but with the regulations and economic pressures that shaped the bar trade around it.

A Bar of His Own

Years after losing sight of Sohrabji, Hobbs encountered him again while he was crossing Dharmatala Street. Sohrabji told him that he had left Hafezji’s bar and had become a partner in a bar on the street. Its English owner was ill and had to return to England; Sohrabji would run the business and send the owner a share of its profits. A change in circumstance had taken him from a temporary substitute’s position to responsibility for a bar of his own.

Sohrabji showed Hobbs the establishment and described it as quieter than his former workplace. The bar later acquired a reputation for good bottles that were unavailable elsewhere and for modest prices. Dharmatala Street consequently marks a period when Sohrabji’s work appeared to have brought stability and independence. His claim to conduct business honestly sits beside Sata Bose’s bleak observation, recalled by Hobbs, that a bar’s customers lose money, time, self-control, and even their sense of self while its owner profits.

Return and Reversal

The next time Hobbs saw Sohrabji, he was again on the street, now looking abandoned. Rather than explain the change in his fortunes, Sohrabji asked why people lost their minds when they drank. The encounter supplies no account of what happened to the bar or what caused his changed condition; its force comes from the contrast with his earlier confidence in the business and its prospects.

Across these meetings, Dharmatala Street becomes a thread through Sohrabji’s changing circumstances: a place of entry into insecure work, of commercial advancement, and of a later, unexplained decline. The same location that once accompanied the opening of his own bar frames the return of uncertainty, resisting any simple equation between entrepreneurial success and lasting security.