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…
Tag: writing
Bandook Gali
Some stories arrive softly. They do not announce themselves. They wait. Bandook Gali – A Fiction Drawn from the Margins of History, began with a name that lingered longer than expected. A lane crossed often, rarely questioned, in the city of Kolkata in India. A sense that the past had left behind traces rather than…
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….
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…
What Remains: A Life Practised Carefully
Some stories arrive loudly. This one arrived by sitting down and waiting. For years, many of you have walked with me through short stories on StoryNook. Stories that travelled through forgotten histories, unnamed griefs, quiet courage, and lives that rarely ask to be remembered but deserve to be. This book grew out of that same…
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…
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…
Weekend Stories by Trishikh 