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…
Tag: history
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…
Whispers Of The Unholy Trinity
It all began with a shriek, a siren slicing through the silent night. The people poured into the streets, faces pale in the ghost-light of fires. The air smelt of cordite and singed wool. Mothers clutched children to their bosoms; men ran with buckets, their steps slipping in soot. Somewhere, church bells tolled once and…
Elephants Beyond The Horizon
It was a smouldering dawn in May over a battlefield strewn with thunder and ruin, 326 years before the birth of Christ on the banks of the river Jhelum, which the Greeks called Hydaspes. The plain was littered with shattered armour and half-buried bodies, the metallic stench of blood heavy in the humid air. In…
Unseen Lines – The Haque and Bose Story
The monsoon had just lifted above the Calcutta sky of 1896, leaving behind a smell that was half ink, half sweat, and half the ghosts of mangoes gone to rot. Inside a narrow room of the Anthropometric Bureau, located in the British colonial Writer’s Building, ceiling fans creaked like lazy sentinels, and the light from…
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,…
Last Cup For The Day
The market slept beneath an ink‑black sky, Burrabazar’s labyrinth of lanes silent at 1 AM. A pallid moon hung low above shuttered shops, warehouses looming like sleeping beasts. Rickshaw wheels rested, bamboo handcarts fitted with truck tyres stood stacked one after the other, piles of cloth lay dormant, and only an occasional distant clang of a…
Chitey Dakat And Commander Chakrapani
A moonless night smothered the dense forest in velvet darkness; not even a single star dared pierce the sky. Deep within this wild, an old temple – its idol of Goddess Durga made from the wood of the Lilac or Margosa Tree, commonly known as Neem, glowing in vermilion paste and smeared with blood –…
Tarok
The unbearable cries of men being force-fed through rubber tubes inserted in their throats surpassed the sounds of the roaring waves of the mighty Bay of Bengal lashing on the rocky northern shores of Port Blair, the capital city of Andaman and Nicobar Islands on a summer night in 1933. The screams came from within…
Weekend Stories by Trishikh 