• Crime - English

    The Portrait of Her Silence

    July 14, 2025 - By 

    Kiran Mehra Part 1: The Parcel Wrapped in Silk The parcel arrived on a late Monday afternoon, wrapped in fading blue silk with frayed edges that smelled faintly of mothballs and sandalwood. Advaita Roy didn’t remember ordering anything. No note. No sender. Just her name—Ms. A. Roy—written in a dark ink that had bled slightly at the corners, as if the paper had once wept. She set the package on her studio table, brushing aside paintbrushes, restoration cloths, and a yellowing file titled “Reclamation: Bengal Portraiture, 1890–1920.” Her studio, perched on the first floor of a heritage building near Kolkata’s…

  • 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…