• English - Romance

    Twenty-One Winters Later

    June 22, 2025 - By 

    Payel Sen The Return to the Hills The chill in the Darjeeling air always brought back memories for Atanu. As the toy train screeched into Ghum station, the soft drizzle on the windowpane blurred the world outside. He was forty-two now, with streaks of grey in his once-black hair and lines around his eyes that time had carved silently. A literature professor from Kolkata, he had returned to Darjeeling after two decades for a seminar. But deep inside, he knew it wasn’t just the seminar that drew him here. It was a name he hadn’t spoken aloud in years. Maya.…

  • English - Suspense

    The Secrets of Sinhagad

    June 22, 2025 - By 

    Amitav Jadhav Chapter 1: The Secrets of Sinhagad The road to Sinhagad Fort curved like a sleeping serpent, wrapped in mist and memories. As Riya Joshi’s car climbed the last stretch, her phone signal faded, and with it, the last threads connecting her to the buzzing city below. She rolled down the window. The crisp wind of the Sahyadris filled the car, carrying with it the scent of wet stone, forgotten battles, and something else—something metallic and raw. It was supposed to be a simple assignment. A freelance journalist with a reputation for chasing obscure stories, Riya had been tipped…

  • English - Comedy

    The Bachelor Who Hired a Mother

    June 22, 2025 - By 

    Abhinav Sinha Chapter 1: Burnt Toast & Burnt Out Samar Bajaj had never seen a toaster explode. Until now. It was 7:42 AM on a perfectly miserable Monday morning in Bangalore. The rain was coming down like an overachiever, and Samar, dressed in a bathrobe and one sock, stood frozen in horror as his third toaster of the year smoked like a bonfire for ants. He had tried to toast one slice of bread. Just one. But somehow, smoke had poured out, the fire alarm had shrieked awake, and his cat—who wasn’t his cat but kept showing up—leapt out the…

  • English - Travel

    Monsoon Letters from Kerala

    June 22, 2025 - By 

    Ria Bhattacharya Part 1: Landing in God’s Own Country It was just past noon when our flight dipped beneath a curtain of clouds and revealed a lush, endless green below. From the window seat, Kerala didn’t look like a state—it looked like a watercolor dream. Patches of paddy fields, snaking backwaters, tall coconut palms waving lazily, and a brief glimpse of a red-tiled rooftop—a warm welcome to God’s Own Country. As we landed in Kochi, a light drizzle greeted us, the kind that smells of wet earth and sea breeze. It wasn’t hot, just humid enough to make your shirt…

  • English - Travel

    The Misadventures of the Mukherjees

    June 22, 2025 - By 

    Subhasish Ghosh Chapter 1: The Itinerary of Dreams (and Doom) If there was one thing Mr. Subhash Mukherjee believed in more than government bonds and early morning power yoga, it was planning. So when he announced the “long overdue” family road trip from Kolkata to Bhutan, his Excel sheet was already color-coded, laminated, and tucked into a blue plastic folder titled ‘Mission Mukherjee: Himalayan Harmony 2025’. His wife, Jaya, barely looked up from her WhatsApp group of Probashi Ladies with Recipes when he declared this at the breakfast table. “You want us all to travel together? In one car?” she…

  • English - Non- Fiction

    The Final Objection

    June 22, 2025 - By 

    Neelesh Arora Part 1: The Widow in Red The rain had begun at dusk, steady and indifferent, as if the city hadn’t just lost one of its most powerful women. Meher Singh lay sprawled across her marble floor, the crimson pooling around her head like a rose wilting in reverse. Her silk robe, the color of old rubies, glistened under the dim lights of her Walkeshwar apartment. The cordless landline still hung off the hook, mid-call to someone who’d never answered. Detective Inspector Jayant Rawte had seen worse in his years with the Mumbai Homicide Bureau, but something about this…

  • English - Young Adult

    The Summer of Disappearing Stars

    June 22, 2025 - By 

    Pankaj Desai Chapter 1: The Retreat Begins The hills looked the same, but Noor Rahmani knew better. The sky above them—wide and velvet blue—stretched out like memory itself: vast, layered, unknowable. The bus rumbled to a stop on the gravel slope, its brakes sighing like an old friend weary from another year’s journey. Noor stepped out, inhaling the sharp scent of pine and the faint tang of burnt diesel, and tried to shake off the strange weight that had been pressing against her chest since the previous night. The retreat grounds spread before her, a patchwork of stone cabins, wooden…

  • English - Travel

    The River That Remembers Everything

    June 21, 2025 - By 

    Pranab Sinha Chapter 1 The compartment rattled like an old memory — uneven, persistent, and vaguely nostalgic — as the Doon Express cut its way through the northern plains, carrying Digvijoy Guha through the thick, velvet silence of early morning. He sat by the window in a second-class sleeper, wrapped in his rust-coloured shawl, watching the countryside smear into a painter’s blurred stroke. A flask of lukewarm tea trembled slightly on the steel fold-down tray beside him, untouched since Saharanpur. Above it, tucked into the mesh netting, a book of poetry by Agyeya and a leather-bound diary silently waited to…

  • Comedy - English - Travel

    The Great Kolkata Picnic Blunder

    June 21, 2025 - By 

    Soumitra Deb 1 It was a lazy winter Sunday in south Kolkata—the kind where the sun was gentle enough to soften the edges of reality, the kind where even alarms gave up and let people sleep a little longer. In the modest Ghosh household of Lake Road, Mr. Biswajit Ghosh was already up by 7:30 a.m., fully dressed in his house kurta, socks on, and sipping tea while reading The Telegraph, shaking his head every five minutes at something he claimed was “kintu bipodjonok”. Purnima, his wife, had just started preparing luchi-alur tarkari when she heard a firm clearing of…

  • English - Horror

    The Tamarind Curse

    June 21, 2025 - By 

    Malabika Roy 1 Dr. Madhurima Sen had never heard of Adiganahalli until the envelope arrived—unmarked, yellowing, and sealed with an old wax crest that had nearly dissolved into the paper itself. Inside was a legal note handwritten in Kannada, barely decipherable, informing her that a small parcel of ancestral land and an attached cottage had been passed down to her name through her maternal grandmother’s side. Curious more than anything else, Madhurima contacted the village registrar. The man on the phone sounded both surprised and reluctant. “You can come,” he had said slowly, “but don’t expect anyone to welcome you…