• Crime - English

    Tea and Blood

    August 31, 2025 - By 

    Roshan Lama 1 The mist clung heavily to the slopes of Darjeeling that morning, veiling the tea gardens in a silvery pallor that made everything look otherworldly. The Caldwell bungalow stood aloof on its rise, a relic of colonial grandeur with its sloping roof and wide verandah, but something about its silence felt wrong. It was the watchman Hari Das who first raised the alarm, his shaking hands pointing toward the half-opened door where the lamps still burned from the night before. Inside, Richard Caldwell, the formidable manager of the estate, lay sprawled across a Persian rug in the drawing…

  • Crime - English

    Shatranj Ke Khiladi 2.0

    July 26, 2025 - By 

    Mayurakshi Sharma 1 The monsoon had painted Lucknow in sepia — wet alleys shimmering under rusted streetlights, the scent of damp earth clinging to the city’s bones. Zoya Rizvi sat on the floor of her small apartment in Hazratganj, hunched over a half-broken laptop and sipping over-steeped chai. The newsroom she once called home had shuttered six months ago; now, freelance gigs and occasional bylines were all she had to show for her stubborn honesty. She was finishing a piece on encroachment near the Gomti when her encrypted ProtonMail pinged. The subject line read simply: “1994. Truth rots slowly.” Attached…

  • Crime - English

    The Last Guest: Fadeproof Files

    June 20, 2025 - By 

    Ayan Chakravarty Chapter 1 morning, slipped quietly under the door of Veena Rajput’s modest Shimla cottage as if it were just another electricity bill or property notice, though nothing about it felt ordinary. The envelope was thick, creamy-white, sealed with a dark wax emblem embossed with a crest she hadn’t seen before—a snowflake enclosed within a circle of thorns. Her instincts stirred, the way they used to in her active service days when something about a clue didn’t quite fit. The note inside was written in elegant, slanted calligraphy: “Detective Veena Rajput (Retd.), You are cordially invited to Snowcrest Manor…

  • English - Crime

    The Last Passenger

    June 12, 2025 - By 

    1 The rain hadn’t stopped in twelve hours. It came down in long, dirty sheets, soaking the streets of Mumbai in a miserable, sticky silence. Neon signs flickered through misty glass. Puddles pooled over cracked footpaths. And somewhere between the dripping lamp-posts of Andheri East and the rust-red gates of Lokhandwala, a yellow-black Premier Padmini taxi came to a halt—and never moved again. That was the only fact the police could agree on. They found the taxi parked awkwardly on a side street near DN Nagar Metro Station. The driver’s side door was ajar, rain pooling in the footwell. The…