Un bar es como un banco en que pierdes cualquier cantidad que deposites

“Un bar es como un banco en que pierdes cualquier cantidad que deposites” is the bar-owner’s bleak accounting of what drinking consumes: not only money, but time, character, self-control, childhood happiness, and even the soul. In Hobbs’s recollection, the metaphor turns a familiar place of expenditure into an institution that takes deposits from its customers and makes one person—the owner—its beneficiary.

The Bar as a Bank

Hobbs recalls Sata Bose’s full formulation: «Un bar es como un banco en que pierdes cualquier cantidad que deposites: ya sea tu dinero, tu tiempo, tu carácter, tu autocontrol, la felicidad de tu infancia, y hasta tu alma. Todo queda borrado. Pero una persona saca beneficio de ello, y esa persona es el dueño del bar. El dinero que otros gastan queda depositado en su banco.» The list moves from the measurable to the irrecoverable. Money is only the first deposit; the bar also absorbs capacities and parts of a life that cannot be returned as cash. The owner’s gain rests on the customers’ accumulated losses.

A Quotation Passed Along

The saying reaches the reader through several voices. The narrator meets Hobbs, who admits he did not know Sohrabji well before seeing him that day. When the narrator remarks that Hobbs is turning Sohrabji into a novelistic hero, Hobbs answers that every brick in the hotel hides a novel. He then resumes his story and introduces the bar maxim as something Sata Bose once told him. Its authority is therefore conversational and remembered, not presented as a detached rule: Hobbs even says that old age makes people garrulous and that quoting others feels like an illness.

The Saying and Sohrabji’s Change

The recollection leads into Hobbs’s account of Madan, whom he had not seen for years. They meet again on Dharmatala Street, where Madan approaches quickly and takes Hobbs’s hands. He tells him that he has left Hafezji’s bar. Asked whether he had quarrelled there, he says that God has smiled on him and that he has opened his own bar. Placed beside that turn in Madan’s life, the maxim acquires an edge: the bar is both a site where customers lose themselves and a business from which its owner benefits. Hobbs does not say when Madan became Sohrabji, leaving the change of name—and the intervening years—part of the story still hidden.