• Comedy - English - Romance

    Swipe Left for Sitar

    June 29, 2025 - By 

    Pritha Paul 1 Niharika Rao had precisely three rules in life: never eat cold idlis, never disrespect a raag, and never—ever—download a dating app. Unfortunately, on a humid Thursday morning in Bengaluru, two out of those three rules were broken. She sat cross-legged on her reed mat, sitar resting on her lap, and her forehead twitching in disbelief as her best friend Sonal leaned over with a smug smile. “Kultr,” Sonal said proudly, flashing the app’s screen. “Culture-only dating. No shirtless gym bros, just people who know who Mirza Ghalib is.” Niharika glared. “This is cultural heresy. I play raags,…

  • Crime - English

    The Idol Thief of Kanchipuram

    June 29, 2025 - By 

    Aniruddh Iyer Chapter 1: Shadows of the Bronze The morning air in Kanchipuram was heavy with a strange silence, one that usually didn’t belong in the bustling temple town. The sun had barely risen over the ancient skyline of gopurams, and the air still smelled faintly of incense and jasmine. At the revered Kailasanathar Temple, an elderly priest named Ganapathy Iyer unlocked the sanctum doors with his usual devotion, murmuring slokas under his breath, but as he stepped into the inner chamber, he froze. His breath caught, the key slipped from his trembling fingers, clattering against the stone floor. The…

  • English - Fiction

    The Sky Below Us

    June 28, 2025 - By 

    Kiaan Ray 1 They said the Earth was dead. No roots stirred beneath the dust, no rivers flowed with memory, and no horizon ever changed. In the Loftworlds, that was the gospel. Up here, above the clouds, survival didn’t depend on soil or sun, but on filters, floating engines, and fear. Aira Sen had never seen the ground—not really. But she dreamed of it, in colors her eyes had never known. The dreams weren’t hers. That much she was sure of. The day the drone fell was the day the sky cracked. Aira was lying belly-flat on a rusted support…

  • English - Horror

    The Eighth Door

    June 28, 2025 - By 

    Ishani Varma Part 1: Arrival at St. Elora’s The jeep rattled up the winding path as mist bled through the pine trees like a silent ghost. Ananya Roy pressed her forehead to the cool windowpane, watching the outline of the valley shift and disappear. Below, the Nilgiris rolled in endless folds of green-grey, but up here, only fog and silence reigned. The driver, a man of few words named Murugan, grunted as the tyres scraped a patch of gravel and caught again. “St. Elora’s ahead,” he said without turning. “Ten minutes.” She nodded, fingers curled around the worn leather strap…

  • English - Fiction

    Life in the Emergency Ward

    June 28, 2025 - By 

    Soumyadeep Dutta The fluorescent lights above flickered like tired eyelids, buzzing faintly over rows of rusting stretchers and sweat-drenched bodies. It was 7:58 a.m. when I stepped into the emergency ward of Nilratna Chatterjee Memorial Government Hospital for the first time as a junior resident. My stethoscope clung around my neck like a nervous talisman, and in my coat pocket sat a new blue notepad with clean pages—still innocent of blood, signatures, and regrets. The smell hit me first—disinfectant poorly masking urine, vomit, and something else, something warm and fleshy, like decaying hope. Patients lined up the corridor, lying on…

  • English - Fiction

    The Fifth Protocol

    June 28, 2025 - By 

    Neel Kashyap Part 1: The Minister Who Knew Too Much The monsoon had arrived early in New Delhi, but the rain did little to cool the simmering corridors of power. The South Block offices glistened under streetlights, guarded by protocol and paranoia. At 2:03 a.m., a white government Scorpio pulled into the back entrance of the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs. Inside, Minister Prabir Kundu sat motionless, his lips taut and fingers trembling over a brown leather file embossed with the Ashoka emblem. He shouldn’t have had this file. But he did. Earlier that evening, Kundu had received an anonymous courier…

  • English - Horror

    The Accountant’s Game

    June 28, 2025 - By 

    Dilip Joshi 1 The spreadsheets didn’t scream. They whispered. Subtle inconsistencies in formatting, curious repetition in transaction references, and the strange appearance of a dormant offshore subsidiary—“VKL Capital Holdings (Cayman)”—that had shown no activity for nearly four years suddenly blinking back to life with a $212 million transfer flagged under “legacy adjustments.” To most eyes at Vincent & Klein Bank, it would have passed as routine. But Tarun Vaidya wasn’t most people. A forensic accountant trained to read patterns, Tarun spent his days in the dim, soulless cube on the 17th floor of the Mumbai head office, cross-verifying compliance sheets…

  • English - Horror

    STATIC

    June 28, 2025 - By 

    One The city never truly slept, but it had moments—between the honks and the hum of late-night traffic—where the silence stretched long enough to pretend. It was during those hollow hours, somewhere between midnight and 3 a.m., that Arjun Malik sat in the rusting studio of 93.7 FM, alone but for the hum of old electronics and a faint smell of melted plastic. The station had been abandoned for years, but Kabir Mehta, his slick-talking former colleague turned nostalgia mogul, had offered him a one-man show: “Midnight Playback,” retro-themed, analog-recorded, broadcast from a tower that hadn’t seen a live feed…

  • English - Young Adult

    Layover at Midnight

    June 28, 2025 - By 

    Rajesh Agarwal 1 Mira Kaul stepped off the plane from Pune with her sketchbook clutched so tightly in her hand that the cover bent slightly at the corners, the soft paper bruised by the pressure of her restless thumb. The Bangalore Airport smelled of strong coffee, polished floors, and quiet anticipation—a place caught somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, where strangers sat hunched over phones, and neon signs cast pools of sterile light across tired faces. Her connecting flight to Chennai wouldn’t leave until dawn, which meant six long hours of wandering in a place that wasn’t quite hers, surrounded by…

  • English - Suspense

    The Third Locker

    June 28, 2025 - By 

    Chayan Ghoshal Chapter 1: The Letter The newsroom smelled of overbrewed coffee and paper dust—an aging beast barely held together by buzzing tube lights and worn-out keyboards. Subhasree Roy sat in the far-left corner, tapping absentmindedly on her laptop, staring at an unfinished draft on land scam allegations against a corporator who would likely never be touched. Her fingers paused when a slim white envelope was slid under her mug—no sender’s name, just her name in capital letters, “SUBHASREE.” She frowned, looked around, but the intern who was passing her chai had already turned away. She opened it slowly, curious.…