• English - Suspense - Young Adult

    The Vanishing Filter

    June 26, 2025 - By 

    Vivek Awasthi Part 1: The Filter Nobody Posted It all began with a shimmer—not in the sky, not in the water, but on Rhea Malhotra’s face, caught mid-selfie. She was seated on her bed, hair loose, sunlight filtering through the window, giving her skin a natural glow she wished she could bottle. She’d clicked dozens of photos that morning for her Instagram story—nothing out of the ordinary. But the last photo she took shimmered in a strange way the moment she applied a filter. She didn’t recall selecting it. In fact, she didn’t even recognize it. “Etherea_03,” it read, in…

  • English - Suspense

    Pink Saree and a Political Murder

    June 24, 2025 - By 

    Maya Sharma Part 1: The Last Rally in Pink The rain had stopped just minutes before the rally began. A pink haze lingered over the Kolkata skyline, smeared with leftover monsoon clouds and political slogans painted hastily across aging walls. Shanti Ghosh, dressed in her signature pink Banarasi saree with gold-threaded lotus motifs, stood on the makeshift bamboo stage at the heart of Ward 34. Her voice, usually mellow and diplomatic, now sliced through the damp air like a blade. “We are not just mothers and wives,” she said, her voice echoing across the crowd, “we are builders, protectors, and…

  • English - Suspense

    The Eleventh Survivor

    June 24, 2025 - By 

    Avinash Chowdhury 1 The rain came down in thick silver lines as Dr. Maya Dutt stood in the old apartment’s balcony in South Kolkata, staring blankly at the street below, where the tramlines glittered like secrets in the monsoon haze. Her days had become a sterile sequence of autopsies, death reports, and the quiet hum of overhead fans in fluorescent-lit government labs, but today had broken the pattern. The courier had arrived just after she returned from the morgue—a small package, no return address, the brown paper brittle with age, sealed with a strange red wax that bore no crest,…

  • English - Suspense

    The Ink That Vanished

    June 23, 2025 - By 

    Rudra Ahuja  Chapter 1: The Pen in the Attic It was the last stall at the farthest corner of Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar—the kind of place where stories go to retire. Beneath yellowing tarpaulin sheets and towers of old files, Neil Das spotted a flicker of brass. He had walked this market a hundred times before. But this morning, the damp October air had pulled him toward the stall like a tug on a forgotten thread. A wrinkled shopkeeper sat cross-legged amidst dusty encyclopedias and cracked leather briefcases. Neil’s eyes drifted past the usual—old college yearbooks, British-era maps, a few…

  • English - Suspense

    The House on Mango Lane

    June 23, 2025 - By 

    Chapter One: The Return The monsoon clouds trailed her like a shadow across the sky as Naina D’Costa stepped off the plane at Dabolim Airport, the humidity of Goa clinging to her skin like memory. She hadn’t been back in ten years, not since the funeral of her grandfather, and certainly not since the family’s carefully unspoken fallout with her grandmother, Amelia D’Costa. Now, Amelia was gone, and Naina had returned not for sentiment but for closure—to sign papers, to meet the property agent, to photograph the house one last time before it was sold. The cab wound its way…

  • English - Suspense

    Monsoon Strokes

    June 23, 2025 - By 

    Ayesha Fernandes Part 1: The First Drop The rain came slow, like a lover hesitating at the doorstep. It began with a whisper against the rusted railing of the old apartment on Chapel Road, then picked up its rhythm like tabla fingers on taut skin. Amara stood by the half-open window, brush frozen mid-air, eyes half-lidded in thought. The canvas before her bore the beginning of a woman’s face, unfinished—like everything else in her life these days. She wasn’t supposed to paint today. She had promised herself a break. But the monsoon had this way of stirring her skin, cracking…

  • 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 - Suspense

    K Files: The Kalimpong Letters

    June 21, 2025 - By 

    Indranil Bhattacharya 1 The mist hung low over Kalimpong that morning, as if the mountains themselves were holding their breath. Colonel Rudra Sen (Retd.), now 83, stood at the edge of his moss-covered verandah, wrapped in an old shawl that smelled faintly of mothballs and eucalyptus oil. His sharp, sunken eyes scanned the hills that rolled endlessly into Bhutan and Tibet beyond, but his mind was stuck somewhere in 1962—an icy ridge, a blizzard of bullets, and a voice over crackling radio screaming for help. The kettle whistled from the kitchen, breaking his trance, and as he turned to go…

  • 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 - Suspense

    The Dockside Cipher

    June 14, 2025 - By 

    Rohan Mehta Part 1  The rains had returned to Mumbai like an old enemy. Not with the promise of relief, but the murky stench of trouble. It was just past midnight when Inspector Alisha Ranade pulled up in her rain-splashed black Bolero outside the abandoned Crawford Mills compound. Her phone buzzed again—a message from headquarters: “Body found. Possibly political.” She hated those two words. In her experience, “possibly political” meant either someone too powerful was involved or someone too disposable had been silenced. The scene was taped off by a lone constable who looked more scared than soaked. “Inside,” he…