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….
Tag: short story
The Radio That Roared
The radio arrived in the village like a rumour. No one could remember exactly who had brought it, only that one evening it was there, sitting on a wooden stool in the corner of the schoolteacher’s house, its dark casing catching the last light of day. It was not large, nor ornate. Its knobs were…
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…
From Cana To The Coconut Coast
When dawn flared on the Persian horizon, it splashed salmon and gold across restless waters, and there, between fierce waves and trembling light, stood Thomas Cananeus, his fingers wrapped around the battered wheel of his ship, his heart still clinging to the echo of burning homes and frightened faces. It was the fourth century, sometime…
Invisible Footprints
They carried a carton wrapped in old newspaper, the dull thud of shoes on stone echoed in the narrow lane as the young couple and their teenage daughter climbed the stairs of their small rented room in the Bhowanipore area of Kolkata in 1990. Outside, the morning brooded with humidity, and the smell of damp…
The Valley Of Thundering Hooves
The dawn fog of 1850 clung to the Imphal valley like a half-remembered dream when Lieutenant Joseph Ford Sherer first heard the thunder of hooves. It came faint at first, like a heartbeat rising through the mist, then nearer, stronger, until the ground itself seemed to breathe beneath him. He drew rein, his mare snorting…
Taj Of The Raj
The monsoon-misted dusk of September 1943 softened the edges of Victoria Memorial’s white marble dome. Once pristine, the edifice now stood muted beneath the grey Bengal skies. Its shining Makrana marble slowly wrapped in shadows, and its great bronze angel atop the dome, almost invisible in the gathering gloom of wartime blackout. At the height…
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…
Weekend Stories by Trishikh 