• English - Young Adult

    The Last Locker

    August 27, 2025 - By 

    Maya Kapoor The Key in the Notebook The day it happened was one of those sticky afternoons when the corridors of Crestwood High smelled faintly of chalk dust and disinfectant, and my hands were still ink-stained from the chemistry exam I had nearly failed. I remember because the bell had just rung, scattering students like restless birds, and I was still sitting in my seat, stuffing my calculator and a half-finished answer sheet into my bag, when something thin and metallic slipped from between the pages of my notebook and clinked against the floor. At first I thought it was…

  • Crime - English

    Shadows of Betrayal

    August 27, 2025 - By 

    Daniel Arora The Signal The rain fell over Berlin in needles of silver, slicing through the pale light of the streetlamps that lined Friedrichstrasse. Adrian Cole stood beneath the brim of his hat, collar pulled high, the cold seeping into his gloves as if the city were testing him. The hour was late—too late for pedestrians, too early for traders—and yet the radio in his pocket had whispered something that forced him out of his safe flat on Krausenstrasse. A signal. Shortwave. Three dots, two dashes, then silence. The kind of sound that could tear apart whole governments if interpreted…

  • English - Suspense

    The Silent Bells of Goa

    August 27, 2025 - By 

    Aarav D’Souza Part 1 – The Drummer’s Son The monsoon had begun to soften the air of Goa, the heavy rains washing the red earth until it gleamed like polished stone. Coconut palms bent with the weight of wind and rain, and the Mandovi River ran fuller than before, carrying with it the murmurs of villages and the silence of temples that had once echoed with songs. In one such village, hidden away among groves of jackfruit trees, a boy named Ananta sat with his father’s old drum resting on his knees. The drum was no longer played in public.…

  • English - Romance

    Festival of Colors

    August 27, 2025 - By 

    Mayukh Pandey 1 Aarav stepped out of the dusty bus as the late afternoon sun poured its golden warmth over the narrow lanes of his hometown. The air itself felt different—charged with excitement, fragrant with gulal and marigolds, humming with the rhythm of dhols being tested for the upcoming celebration. Everywhere he looked, the streets had transformed into canvases of anticipation: shopkeepers arranging pyramids of powdered colors in brass bowls that shimmered like jewels, women stringing garlands of orange and yellow flowers across doorways, children chasing each other with premature splashes of water from their pichkaris. The town he had…

  • English - Suspense

    The Indigo Map

    August 27, 2025 - By 

    Ananya Dutta The Letter That Wouldn’t Fade The parcel arrived the way August rain arrives in Kolkata—suddenly, without apology. Brown paper had drunk a little water and dried into puckers; a twine knot sat like a small clenched fist in the middle. The return handwriting was unmistakable: forward-leaning letters, each one as if braced for a sprint. Mira Dutta had buried her grandfather two months ago, and yet here he was again, tapping her shoulder from the past. She slit the paper with a steel ruler and lifted out a flat wooden folder polished by long use. A note lay…

  • English - Travel

    Clay Lamps of Joy

    August 27, 2025 - By 

     Part 1 – The Departure The train screeched out of Howrah station, its wheels clattering like a restless animal tugging at chains. Rhea pressed her forehead to the cool window glass and watched the sprawling iron bridge dissolve into a maze of warehouses, smoke, and rust-colored walls. Behind her, the compartments were thick with the smell of fried luchis, boiled eggs, thermos-tea, and the constant drone of people talking, bargaining, gossiping as if no one on the train was a stranger. She hugged her sling bag tight, inside which her camera and notebook waited. A photo-essay project, her professors had…

  • Crime - English

    The Tea Estate Murders

    August 27, 2025 - By 

    Anurima Ghosh 1 The train wound its way through the steep curves of the hills, the rhythmic clatter of wheels fading into the hush of the morning mist. Detective Satyen Chatterjee leaned against the window of his compartment, watching the world blur into shades of gray and green. Darjeeling, with its colonial houses perched like watchful sentinels and the endless rows of tea bushes stretching into the fog, had always held for him a curious mixture of charm and melancholy. This was no leisurely visit, however. The summons from the Darjeeling police was urgent: a murder had been discovered in…

  • English - Horror

    The Hollow Village

    August 27, 2025 - By 

    Aarav Sen Episode 1: The Wrong Turn The air thinned as the trail rose, a slow, needling cold that found the seams in jackets and the cracks in bravado. Rhea Banerjee kept her camera slung against her ribs like a warm heart she could press to; every few minutes she paused to frame a ridge, a smear of cloud, the ant-line of pilgrims far below. Aditya Malhotra walked ahead with his hands in his pockets and that steady, skeptical pace that made him look like he was measuring the mountain and finding it slightly overrated. Tara and Naman, their friends…

  • English - Suspense

    The Silent Courtyard

    August 26, 2025 - By 

    1 The taxi crawled through the labyrinthine lanes of North Kolkata, its honking lost beneath the tangle of tram bells, rickshaw wheels, and street vendors’ cries. Anwesha Chatterjee pressed her forehead against the window, staring at a city that was at once familiar and foreign. She had grown up here, in fits and fragments, spending summers in her father’s ancestral home before moving to Delhi for college and then her law career. Now, at twenty-eight, she was returning not as a visitor but as heir, summoned back by her father’s death. The car pulled up before the massive wrought-iron gates…

  • English - Romance

    The Unwritten Hours

    August 26, 2025 - By 

    Maya Arora The rain had been falling since afternoon, coating the windows of the office with a restless sheen. Ananya sat at her desk staring at the spreadsheet that refused to balance itself, the numbers running like water in her mind, slippery and without form. Outside, the glass tower of Connaught Place glowed with rain-washed neon. She should have been heading home by now—her husband, Arindam, would already be waiting, the television on, dinner reheated by the house-help, a routine that had long solidified into something resembling safety, or perhaps imprisonment. But instead, she lingered, scrolling through meaningless columns, waiting…