In 1980, Makhdumpur was the sort of town that seemed to have been left halfway between two centuries. It sat in the Magadh country between Jehanabad and Gaya, though Jehanabad was still part of Gaya district then, and nobody in Makhdumpur cared much for the distinctions made by maps in distant government offices. The town…
Category: Short Stories
Short Stories from India.
Five Doors
The monsoon of the year 1215 smelled of wet laterite and crushed tulsi. Beneath a tamarind tree at the edge of a ruined courtyard, an old man sat listening to the rain strike the leaves. He was one hundred and twenty years old. His hands, spotted and thin as dried bel leaves, still remembered the…
Centuries Between Breaths
The jungle had spent nearly two centuries reclaiming the temple. Sea winds drifting in from the Bay of Bengal had carried salt into its stones, banyan roots had crept into tiny cracks and slowly split sculptured pillars apart, while monsoon rains had washed away staircases where pilgrims once climbed with folded hands and whispered prayers….
Last Watch on the Ridge
By sunset tomorrow, the ridge would belong either to Kumbhalgarh… or to the dead. The thought lingered in Bhairav Singh’s mind as the last glow of the sun slipped behind the jagged shoulders of the Aravalli hills. Evening gathered slowly over Kumbhalgarh, filling the valleys with deep blue shadows while the highest ridges still caught…
The Tail Lamp Never Died
The shrill whistle rose above the sleeping plains before dawn, long and melancholy, drifting over dew-soaked fields where the silhouettes of palm trees stood like silent sentries against the paling eastern sky. Beyond the station lamps, a goods train waited with the patience of a beast that knew no hurry. Forty-seven wagons stretched into the…
Queen Beneath the Water
The first thing the traveller noticed was the silence. Not the silence of emptiness, but the silence of something that had watched centuries pass. The afternoon sun blazed over the plains of Gujarat. Dust drifted across the road like faded silk. Parakeets screeched from neem trees. Somewhere beyond the fields, women sang while drawing water…
Ashes That Refused to Die
By the time the third gate fell, the smell inside Chittorgarh Fort had changed. For months the fort had smelled of siege: boiled grain scraped from bronze vessels, horse dung drying beneath the winter sun, oil burning through sleepless nights, and men whose armour had not left their bodies for weeks. But after the third…
The Woman in the Auction Portrait
On certain monsoon evenings, Russell Street still remembers the British. Not through flags or statues, but through smell. The smell of wet teakwood rising from cracked staircases. Damp velvet curtains holding decades of cigarette smoke. Polish melting slowly from mahogany tables beneath tired yellow bulbs. The faint medicinal odour of old paper that has survived…
Chintu Chimney
The city woke before the sun did. In the narrow gullies of colonial Calcutta, dawn did not arrive as light. It arrived as sound. The clatter of wooden wheels over cobblestones. The hoarse cry of chai sellers stirring boiling leaves into tannin-rich darkness. The metallic clang of tram tracks stretching awake. And somewhere beneath all…
Weekend Stories by Trishikh 