• Crime - English

    The Silk Bazaar Murders

    August 10, 2025 - By 

    Meher Afroz One The night in Chowk bazaar was unusually still, the usual sounds of late-night chai vendors and distant azaan fading into an uneasy silence. Narrow lanes twisted between century-old havelis, their carved wooden balconies casting long shadows under flickering streetlamps. The warm smell of cardamom and fried samosas lingered faintly, but in one particular lane, the air was heavy with something else — dread. At the far end stood Rashid Ali’s loom house, a modest workshop known among weavers for its perfection in the rare “shadow work” chikankari stitch. Tonight, however, the place seemed frozen in time, the…

  • Crime - English

    Code Name: Lotus

    August 8, 2025 - By 

    Sayan Chanda Chapter 1: The Breach The rain had been falling over Delhi like a shroud, soft but relentless, turning the city into a hazy reflection of itself. Inside the Cyber Crime Monitoring Cell, the fluorescent lights hummed over rows of analysts, their eyes glazed and fixated on flickering data streams. At exactly 2:17 a.m., an alert blinked red on the mainframe—an unauthorized data access breach from a Level-4 secure server housed within the Research and Analysis Wing. The room froze. The breach wasn’t a foreign threat; it had originated from a local IP in Noida, cloaked under multiple VPN…

  • Crime - Hindi

    नीले जंगल का साया

    August 8, 2025 - By 

    आरव सिंह ठाकुर भाग 1: पहाड़ की पहली चीख धुंध सुबह की खिड़की पर जम चुकी थी जैसे किसी ने रात भर चुपचाप रोते हुए आंसुओं से शीशा धो डाला हो मलाणा घाटी में सूरज का उदय हमेशा देर से होता है लेकिन उस दिन उसकी रौशनी जैसे खुद डर गई थी गांव के ऊपर जो नीला जंगल फैला था उसके बीचोंबीच एक चीख गूंजी थी जो इंसान की नहीं लगती थी पर इंसानों की दुनिया में ही गिरी थी सुभाष ठाकुर अपने लकड़ी के मकान की छत से धुआं निकालते चूल्हे की ओर देखते हुए उस आवाज़ को महसूस…

  • Crime - English

    The Tattooed Witness

    August 8, 2025 - By 

    Aparna Thakur Chapter 1 – Blood on the Hills The storm came down like a curse upon the hills, lightning tearing jagged lines across the charcoal sky as the wind screamed through the cedar trees of Dharamshala’s outskirts. Rain lashed against the windows of an old guesthouse nestled precariously on a rocky slope, its pale stone façade flickering in the electric light like something pulled from a fevered dream. Inside, the air smelled of damp wood, old secrets, and the faintest trace of blood. At the top of the narrow staircase, in Room 5, Dev Rana’s body lay sprawled across…

  • Crime - English

    The Dancer’s Last Bow

    August 7, 2025 - By 

    Devika Ashwin 1 The sky above Varanasi was a dusky canvas streaked with saffron and indigo as the Ganga Mahotsav reached its crescendo. On the ghats, thousands had gathered—devotees, tourists, connoisseurs of music, all drawn by the promise of an unforgettable evening. Meera stood behind the thick curtain of the open-air stage, adjusting the pleats of her crimson costume. The scent of jasmine mingled with sandalwood as the sounds of a shehnai drifted from the main ghat. Tonight was supposed to be historic: Guru Radhika Sinha’s final public performance, a symbolic passing of the torch to Meera, her most devoted…

  • Crime - English

    Operation 84

    August 6, 2025 - By 

    Rajat Vardhan 1 The banquet hall of the Trident Hyderabad buzzed with soft conversations and clinking glasses as some of India’s top defense scientists gathered to celebrate an internal milestone — Phase 2 clearance of Project Vajra. Among the crowd, Dr. Ranjan Mehta, lead propulsion scientist, raised his glass without much enthusiasm. His eyes drifted often toward the large digital clock above the dais, almost as though he were waiting for something. It was just past 9:30 p.m. when he excused himself from a conversation, stepped outside for some fresh air, and collapsed near the rose garden, clutching his chest.…

  • Crime - English

    The Burning Ghat

    August 5, 2025 - By 

    Vijoy Menon Part 1: Ashes That Speak The smoke rose like a slow, coiled prayer — grey and indifferent, curling against the dimming sky. At Manikarnika Ghat, the fires had no time to rest. One pyre faded, another was lit. Wood cracked, bones whispered, and the Ganges swallowed the silence of the dead with the same patience it gave the living. The priests moved like phantoms in ochre robes, their hands blackened with ghee and soot. No one cried here. Grief had long since turned into muscle memory. Devkant Mishra stood by the edge of the river, his white dhoti…

  • Crime - English

    Bylanes of Dadar

    August 4, 2025 - By 

    Nikhil Vartak 1 The morning rush at Dadar station had already peaked by 8:15 AM—porters yelling over the screech of arriving locals, chai vendors navigating through tired office-goers, and the ever-present static of platform announcements blending into the Mumbai noise symphony. Sub-Inspector Tanya Naik stepped onto Platform Three with the weariness of someone who hadn’t finished her first week in the city. Her boots made a dull thud on the wet concrete, and she blinked slowly at the wall of commuters parting around a huddle of constables near a shuttered tea stall. The rain had left the platform slick and…

  • Crime - English

    The Algorithm of Blood

    August 2, 2025 - By 

    Animesh Goshal 1 Rain tapped against the glass façade of the luxury high-rise in Salt Lake Sector V like a nervous code, rhythmic and unrelenting. The building, all chrome and precision, belonged to the future—monitored by Kolkata’s flagship surveillance system, DRISHTI, with retinal scans at the entrance and predictive movement sensors embedded in the hallway walls. But on the twenty-third floor, inside apartment 23-B, silence reigned. The air-conditioning hummed softly as a pool of blood soaked into a pale grey rug beneath a woman’s head. Her body was untouched, her limbs arranged unnaturally straight, but her right eye socket was…

  • Crime - English

    The Puppeteer of Howrah

    July 30, 2025 - By 

    Souradeep Dutta 1 Rain drummed steadily on the rusted iron roof of Subhro Dutta’s apartment in Shibpur, blurring the already smudged cityscape outside the window. The walls inside were yellowed with smoke, time, and neglect, just like him. He sat in his old cane chair, a half-filled glass of Old Monk dangling loosely from his hand, watching the flickering television news bulletin like a man watching ghosts dance. “Another body discovered in Howrah Maidan area,” the anchor was saying, tone flat, professional, unaffected. But what made Subhro sit up slightly wasn’t the death—it was the image that followed. A photograph…