Pandit Pankaj Pandey had been waking at the auspicious hour of 3:00 AM for as long as he could remember. Long before the swelling roar of the city fully stirred from its dreams. On this particular winter morning in 1984, as the faint chill of mist clung to the crumbling rooftops of Banaras, he rose…
Tag: story
Baburam
The sun was soft gold over a teeming park in Kankurgachi, North-East Kolkata, early 1980s, but to galloping fitness freaks, vegetable‑laden housewives, wandering loafers, fish‑loving babus with bags of silver‑scaled Hilsa, and children skipping along, the heart of the day was held in a mystical man’s hypnotic melody. Baburam sat cross‑legged on a frayed grass…
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…
The Heart That Brought The Elements Home
The sun, half-awake and already burdened with guilt, broke through the grey of the clouds like a spotlight, unwanted, but necessary. On the corner where a labyrinth of roads met, a barefoot boy of perhaps seven squatted beside the traffic light. The asphalt hissed under him, but he didn’t flinch. His skin was caked in…
The Last Yellow Knight
The city of Kolkata had just begun to close its eyelids. The clock tower at Esplanade yawned past midnight, rain flirting with the edges of every lamp post, swaying shadows on water-logged streets. The storm had been brewing all evening, first in the skies, now in the hearts of those still wandering the city’s underbelly….
Mardini
A flash of lightning revealed the silhouette of an eight-foot giant, standing like a mountain, unaffected by the thundering storm that lashed his unusual and coarse, dark-grey skin. He moved with unfathomable stealth, speed, and agility against the backdrop of flashing dark and silver streaks created by the light and shadow of the raging tempest….
The Harmonium’s Melody
It is 1980, a contrasting era of political turbulence and cultural vibrancy in the bustling city of Calcutta in the Indian subcontinent – a boiling cauldron of various races, religions, and philosophies. A twenty-year-old man with a pair of unusual light brown eyes peers down at a broken bellowed instrument through the murky glass of…
Ogni
Have you ever tried to burn paper or a dry leaf with a magnifying glass? Have you ever tried lighting a fire out in the open, in a desolate desert, on the icy surface of a frozen landscape, in the unbroken wilderness, beside a murmuring stream, somewhere high up on a mystic mountain, in a…
The Inverted Ashvattha
Not so long ago, in a pretty little village quaintly nestled in the bosom of nature, occurred a phenomenon most extraordinaire. Back in the day, ‘Sonarpur,’ literally meaning the ‘land of gold,’ was just another unassuming farming coterie in the rural hinterlands of the South 24 Parganas district of the state of West Bengal in…
The Greatest Gift To Mankind
A solitary speck of a shadow emerged from the mists that kissed the infinite still waters reflecting the crimson sky. Starlight travelling a distance of more than a hundred million kilometres across the cold expanse of space peeped from behind the horizon, gently bending to the spin of Earth to bestow on this water world…
Weekend Stories by Trishikh 