Anindita Dhor Arrival at Chandipur Aarohi Sen leaned back against the worn leather seat of the old Kolkata-to-Chandipur bus, trying to shake off the fatigue of the journey. The bus had rumbled through endless paddy fields, the green stretching to the horizon under a heavy monsoon sky. Rain pelted the metal roof, drumming a restless rhythm that seemed to seep into her bones. She could feel the chill in her fingers despite the thick woolen sweater she had thrown over her shoulders. The village of Chandipur appeared suddenly, as if emerging from a fog. Mud-streaked paths wound between tightly clustered…
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Arjun Mehta Chapter 1 – The Final Departure The storm came in without warning, the kind of Mumbai monsoon that split the city into islands of survival. Streets drowned, taxis stalled like dying fish, and yet the lifeline of the city—the suburban trains—kept moving, dragging weary commuters through sheets of rain. At Churchgate station, the loudspeaker was already crackling about delays, though no one really listened. People had learned to treat delays like background noise, like the endless vendors selling umbrellas at triple their price. But on that night, when the rain lashed glass windows and lightning turned the platforms…
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Anik Roy Chapter 1 – The Passenger List The call came just after midnight, when Delhi’s power grid seemed to hesitate in the humid air and the fan above Rhea Mukherjee’s desk spun on with a wheeze. She had been staring at the blinking cursor of a half-finished article, something forgettable about municipal corruption that her editor had already threatened to cut, when the unknown number appeared on her phone. The voice on the other end was muffled, unsteady, as though the caller was speaking from inside a tunnel. “You cover railways, don’t you?” the man asked. Rhea straightened in…
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Rishabh Sen Gupta Episode 1: The Vanished Trekkers The forest had been restless that week, or so the villagers of Rajabhatkhawa said, though none of them would put it into words when Kavya Dutta asked, notebook in hand, recorder tucked away in her bag. They shook their heads, muttered something about elephants straying too close, or fog that refused to lift, or roads washed out by sudden rains, but no one mentioned the three trekkers who had vanished two weeks ago on their way to Buxa Fort. The police had filed their usual report, search parties had trampled through the…
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Arjun Nair Part 1 – The Arrival The train screeched into Netarhat station just before dusk, scattering a few sleepy dogs off the tracks. Meera Joshi stepped down with her rucksack, adjusting her glasses against the thick blanket of humidity that clung to the air. She was thirty-two, a wildlife biologist with years of fieldwork behind her, yet this place carried a silence she had never felt before. The sal trees stretched in dark rows beyond the station, their shadows already deepening with the falling light, as if the forest had secrets it was unwilling to share with newcomers. A…
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Arvind Kashyap Part 1 – The Case Begins The rain had been coming down on Kolkata for three days straight, the kind that didn’t wash the city clean but left it sticky and smelling of wet dust, fish, and petrol. Arjun Sen sat in his office above a shuttered sweet shop on Bentinck Street, nursing his fourth cup of watery tea and wondering whether he should pawn his old Nikon camera. Once, he had been the man behind front-page scoops, the journalist who broke the stories others were too scared to touch. Now he chased cheating husbands through dimly lit…
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Arvind Sen Episode 1: The Vanished Widow It was on a sultry September afternoon that I first heard of the case that would change the course of my modest career. The ceiling fan in my small office on College Street turned sluggishly, stirring the stale air, and I was almost dozing over a week-old newspaper when the phone rang. The voice on the other end was brittle, lined with suppressed panic, and unmistakably aristocratic. “Mr. Sen? This is Mrs. Chaudhuri of Alipore Lane. I need your help. My sister-in-law has disappeared. No one believes me, but something terrible has happened.”…
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Daniel Arora The Signal The rain fell over Berlin in needles of silver, slicing through the pale light of the streetlamps that lined Friedrichstrasse. Adrian Cole stood beneath the brim of his hat, collar pulled high, the cold seeping into his gloves as if the city were testing him. The hour was late—too late for pedestrians, too early for traders—and yet the radio in his pocket had whispered something that forced him out of his safe flat on Krausenstrasse. A signal. Shortwave. Three dots, two dashes, then silence. The kind of sound that could tear apart whole governments if interpreted…
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Aarav Mehta At 02:17 a.m., my phone rang with the same number that had stopped calling me eight years ago, a ghost of ten digits branded into the inside of my skull, and by the second ring my ribs felt like a locked drawer someone was rummaging through; I swiped, whispered “hello,” and heard only the soft clicking of a line held slightly open, air carrying the distant hum of traffic and a faint three-note whistle that I recognized from a forgotten Kolkata monsoon when an informant named R—had told me you could train a bird to return home but…
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Arjun Mehra I carried my boxes up the third-floor because the lift wheezed and stalled and there was nobody to complain to at nine at night. The landing bulb blinked, giving the corridor a feeling of breathing, and my new door, 3B, looked like a mouth that had forgotten how to smile. I wanted anonymity: an unremarkable building, a small deposit, closed doors until my thoughts stopped arguing with the past. The lock turned cleanly. The rooms smelled of old paint and last year’s rain, dull enough to feel like starting over. Across the landing stood 3A. Curtains drawn, a…