• Crime - English - Suspense

    The House on Hazratganj

    August 30, 2025 - By 

    Mohit Gupta 1 The rain had been relentless that night in Lucknow, turning the streets of Hazratganj into glistening rivers of neon reflections. The abandoned colonial mansion stood at the edge of the bustling market, a towering relic of British architecture swallowed in shadows, its façade cracked and weather-beaten, windows like hollow eyes staring into the storm. For years, the house had been whispered about in tea stalls and alleyway conversations—said to be cursed, a place where footsteps echoed in the dead of night though no one lived there, where whispers curled around like smoke in the dark. But on…

  • Crime - English - Horror

    The Perfumer of Hazratganj

    July 6, 2025 - By 

    Shamsuddin Ansari Chapter 1: The First Scent It was the smell that reached her before the crime scene did—sharp, floral, unsettlingly sweet. Inspector Ayesha Rizvi paused at the mouth of the narrow alley in Hazratganj, where the rainwater had begun to pool like slow-moving ink. The yellow tape fluttered in the humid breeze, but it was the fragrance in the air—unfamiliar, exotic—that made her stomach tighten. The dead girl lay beneath a crimson shawl, one hand stretched toward a rusted shutter, as if she had tried to knock before she died. On her chest, placed deliberately, was a glass vial…