• English - Suspense

    Delhi’s Fog

    August 31, 2025 - By 

    Kaustabh Ahuja Chapter 1 Winter 2025. Delhi lay shrouded under a gray, choking blanket of smog, a toxic haze so thick it swallowed the city whole. The usual morning bustle of Chandni Chowk—hawkers setting up their stalls, bicycles weaving between the crowd, the faint aroma of parathas sizzling on iron griddles—was muted, filtered through the oppressive gray. Visibility was no more than five meters; familiar buildings, ancient havelis, and neon signs disappeared into an opaque whiteness. Pedestrians coughed violently, their scarves drawn up to cover faces, eyes squinting through the haze, wary of every step. Amid this chaos, a man…

  • 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…

  • Crime - English

    The Alipore Ledger

    June 13, 2025 - By 

    Ishaan Roychowdhury 1 It started on a Wednesday, just as the first rains of June swept across the city like a waking god shaking off centuries of sleep, drenching Alipore’s colonial bungalows and whispering down the serpentine lanes that remembered secrets better than people did. ACP Ira Basu stood beneath the broken awning of the old Watchtower Lane police outpost, watching as constables cordoned off the site of yet another murder—this one more grotesque than the last, the body splayed like a crude offering on the steps of a crumbling cemetery wall, the eyelids meticulously removed and placed on a…