Sujan Ganguly 1 The rain had just begun to tap lightly against the wrought-iron balconies of Ballygunge’s aging colonial mansions when Ayesha Dutta was last seen. It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon in late July, and the streets of the upscale South Kolkata neighborhood glistened with monsoon stillness. Ayesha, seventeen and self-possessed beyond her years, had told her mother she was going to visit a friend to discuss a school literary project. Instead, she walked into the ivy-covered gates of Ananda Apartments — a five-story heritage building, once home to freedom fighters and now to retired bureaucrats, eccentric artists, and…
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Tarun Roy Chowdhury 1 Priyajit Sen always felt something breathing beneath the skin of Kolkata—a slow, unseen pulse carried by the rusted tramlines, the cracked facades of colonial buildings, and the tangled mess of alleyways where stories clung like moss on old bricks. At sixteen, he had grown used to slipping away after school, sketchbook in hand, to wander the city’s hidden veins. It was on one such humid afternoon, when the smell of wet books and tea leaves hung thick over College Street, that he stepped into a dusty secondhand bookstore tucked between a tea stall and a shuttered…