Vikram Chandra's story "Dharma" is set in Bombay, India, and revolves around Major General Jago Antia, a senior officer in the Indian Army. Jago Antia has built up a legendary career in the military and he is universally admired and respected by the junior officers. But when he resigns from the army because of an incurable "phantom" pain in his leg that had been amputated twenty years earlier, he returns to his empty family home in Bombay. There he discovers that he faces a test quite different from those he is used to encountering in army life: the house is haunted, and Jago Antia must somehow face up to the ghosts of his past.

Chandra uses this premise to tell a modern ghost story while at the same time providing an intriguing twist to the venerable ghost story genre. "Dharma" is a story not only about ghosts. It is also about duty (which is roughly what the title "Dharma," an Indian word, means), acceptance, and the peculiar ways in which past and present interact in the mind of a single individual.

First published in Paris Review in 1994 and included as one of five stories in Chandra's collection, Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), "Dharma" is an unusual contribution to the growing body of Indian literature written in English that has been published over the last two decades.