• English - Travel

    Side Roads and Stories — A Family Travelogue

    June 17, 2025 - By 

    Shubho Basak Chapter 1: Before the Sun Rises The house was still half-asleep when the alarm rang at 4:30 a.m. The only things fully awake were the bags waiting by the door, the thermos of tea mom had packed the night before, and my younger brother’s overexcited energy that somehow ignored the hour. Outside, the world wore a blanket of mist, soft and shivering, like it didn’t want to be disturbed. But we were already up, wide-eyed and ready to chase a road that didn’t yet have a name. This wasn’t our first trip as a family, but it was…

  • English - Romance

    Where the Heart Belongs

    June 17, 2025 - By 

    Madhabi Mukhopadhyay The Home and Her Silence The wind rustled through the neem trees beyond the boundary wall, carrying with it the distant chants of a protest—not loud, but insistent, like the cry of a bird refusing to leave the sky. Meera stood by the open window, the carved wooden shutters pushed aside, her fingers resting on the brass handle like a thought she had not quite committed to holding. Outside, the world moved. Inside, time waited. She had grown accustomed to silence, not as absence but as presence—thick, lingering, almost breathing. Their home, an old zamindari bungalow on the…

  • English - Fiction

    The Pivot Point

    June 17, 2025 - By 

    Piyush Jha Founders and First Breaths The early morning drizzle of Bangalore clung to the cracked pavement of HSR Layout as Aarav Dev brushed aside the steam from his chai and stared at the blinking cursor on his MacBook screen. His co-founder, Neel Roy, sat across the room, legs tucked under him, mumbling code like mantras under his breath. The rented two-bedroom apartment doubled as their office, home, and war room. The seed of their startup—an AI-driven local commerce aggregator—was barely a sprout, but already the roots were clawing through sleepless nights, pivot pitches, and unpaid electricity bills. “We need…

  • English - Fiction

    The Memory Archivist

    June 17, 2025 - By 

    Rukmini Ghosh  1 The hills of Shimla were cloaked in monsoon mist, the kind that seemed to creep into your very bones and whisper secrets from forgotten winters. Raina Mehta stood in the fading light of her grandmother’s colonial bungalow, perched on a quiet slope near Chhota Shimla, its dark green shingles weeping rain and its iron gate groaning with age. The house was a time capsule, untouched since Meher Bano’s death two weeks ago, and filled with that strange aroma of old paper, mothballs, and rose attar that always lingered in her grandmother’s sari folds. Raina had arrived from…

  • English - Suspense

    The Crimson Lotus

    June 16, 2025 - By 

    The First Bloom The body was found just after dawn, lying sprawled in the middle of a crumbling courtyard in North Kolkata’s Ahiritola. A shriveled banyan tree stood sentinel over the scene, its roots crawling like veins across the red bricks. A milkman had stumbled upon it first, his cries waking the neighbors before the police could cordon off the area. ACP Ishaan Roy crouched next to the corpse, his sharp eyes tracing the placement of the limbs, the faint smudge of red near the mouth, the cuts too clean to be spontaneous. A fresh lotus flower, blood-soaked but otherwise…

  • English - Fiction

    The Man Who Painted Rainbows

    June 16, 2025 - By 

    Rhea Mukhopadhyay Chapter 1 The city had forgotten how to breathe. Its skyline was a jagged monotone of dull stone, concrete ribs pushing upward into a sky that had been the same color of ash for seven years. Seven years since the last rain. Seven years since the clouds had parted in anything but a lifeless smear. No thunder, no lightning, not even the scent of petrichor. Just stillness. Grey had settled like a parasite into everything: the windows of apartment blocks, the uniforms of the Bureau, the faded billboards with slogans that had lost all meaning. Grey had leached…

  • English - Fiction

    Flavours of the Forgotten Lane

    June 16, 2025 - By 

    Abeer Khurana The Man with the Empty Tiffin Every day at exactly 2:15 p.m., after the lunch crowd had dispersed and the oil had cooled in the karahis, a man in a faded brown kurta appeared at the entrance of Parathewali Gali with an empty tiffin and a look that was hard to read. His beard was trimmed but uneven, his eyes carried the weight of too many forgotten memories, and his slippers had long lost the war with the cobbled Old Delhi stones. He never ordered from the menu. Instead, he would quietly lean into the counter of the…

  • Comedy - English

    The Great Indian Flatmate Hunt

    June 16, 2025 - By 

    Kabir Banerjee One Mihir Sen’s life had always hovered somewhere between barely-functioning adulthood and low-key disaster, but even he didn’t expect to be evicted on a Sunday morning because of a bag of popcorn. It had started innocently enough. The flat was silent, his flatmate Advaith was off at one of his weekend silent retreats in Coorg, and Mihir, in his red checkered boxers and a Bob Marley T-shirt that hadn’t been washed in a week, decided to reward himself with a Netflix binge and some butter popcorn. But fate, as always, had other plans. The microwave had conked off…

  • English - Travel

    Echoes in the Silence

    June 16, 2025 - By 

    Kirit Thakur Chapter 1: The sky above Mumbai was a thick grey shroud as Arjun Sen stood beside the smoldering pyre, his hands clenched loosely around a copper urn still warm from the priest’s touch. The funeral had been quiet—his mother silent behind dark glasses, a few distant relatives murmuring awkward condolences—but Arjun barely registered any of it. His father’s sudden death from a cardiac arrest had stunned him into a kind of passive numbness. Only the sound of the fire crackling in the crematorium pierced the quiet of his thoughts. He’d never imagined this moment coming so soon, and…

  • English - Non- Fiction

    The Bench by the Banyan

    June 16, 2025 - By 

    Amit Bhattacharya 1 I arrived in Pune on a Thursday morning, the kind of morning where the sun rises reluctantly, peeking through gauzy clouds like a child waking from sleep. The railway station buzzed with quiet urgency—porters dragging luggage, chai vendors chanting their rhythmic calls, mothers herding children in half-sleep, and the occasional clatter of metal from the stalls that never really closed the night before. I stepped out with a small suitcase, a laptop bag, and a mind still echoing with boardroom jargon and Slack pings. After seven years in a Bengaluru tech firm, I had resigned with no…