The gas lamps hissed like impatient insects, their glass chimneys sweating in the heat. Backstage smelled of attar and dust, rose clinging to skin, chalk to cloth, old wood to everything. Someone had spilled rice water near the doorway; it had dried into a thin white crescent on the floor, a quiet moon that nobody…
Tag: fiction
The Shadow of Renko-ji
The temple does not face the street. It turns inward, as though whatever it guards is not meant to be seen in passing. Renko-ji stands quietly in Tokyo, its wooden bones darkened by years of incense and weather, its steps worn smooth by feet that have arrived carrying questions heavier than luggage. There is no…
The Tokyo Cadets
They arrived in Tokyo carrying the smell of salt, sweat, and old paper. Some had crossed oceans. Some had crossed borders that no longer existed on maps. A few had crossed nothing more than the narrow circumference of their own fear. Yet when they stood together on the parade ground, boots aligned, shoulders squared, they…
The Secret Voyage Aboard U-180
The sea does not announce itself when it decides to swallow the horizon. It simply closes in. Somewhere off the coast of Madagascar, the water lay dark and deceptive, its surface betraying nothing of the steel behemoth slicing through its depths. The submarine moved slowly, deliberately, like a thought one dares not complete too quickly….
Barry Baul
In the year 1902, when the Hooghly carried more silt than sorrow, and Calcutta still smelled of ink, indigo, horse sweat and empire, Lieutenant Barry Banks stepped onto Indian soil with a spine straightened by duty and a heart not yet bruised by history. He was twenty-seven, pale as unslept paper, his boots polished with…
Roscoe And The Others
The Lower Circular Road Cemetery woke each morning before the city of Kolkata did. Before trams clanged awake, before kettles whistled in nearby kitchens, before the first newspaper slapped against a veranda floor, the cemetery breathed, slow, ancient, and vegetal. Dew clung to marble like unshed tears. Moss thickened the edges of bevelled names on…
The Man Who Could Hear The World
Bhaskor Mollik was born on a humid summer afternoon in the year of our Lord 1900, in the narrow bylanes of Jessore, in undivided Bengal. The monsoon clouds hovered heavy above, the scent of wet earth and mango blossom swirling in the air. His first cries mingled with the drone of mosquitoes and the distant…
Bonomali’s Cathedral
A cold winter dawn lay across the St. Paul’s Cathedral grounds, in the heart of Kolkata, like a thin veil of grey. Faint mists curled between ancient tombstones and evergreen shrubs, and the air tasted of damp earth and the distant tang of dew. On one side of a narrow pathway, under the skeletal arms…
The Armenians
The whistle shrilled like a winter’s breath, sharp and cutting, in the frosty air of the Calcutta Cricket and Football Club field, better known as the CCFC. A low sun filtered through the overhead clouds, scattering gold upon the dew-kissed turf. La Martiniere Old Boys or LMOB Captain, Harrington “Harry” Devlin, full back, stood at…
Fat Mama
The wok hissed like a temple gong struck in fire. Fat Mama’s large, seasoned hands dipped the last wonton into shimmering oil, its skin puffing golden almost instantly. Steam rose, twirling into the dusky air of her drawing-room-turned-eating-house. The smell of pork, garlic, ginger, and a whisper of sesame clung to the cracked lime-washed walls,…
Weekend Stories by Trishikh 