lets-sumita

[lets-sumita]

He peered through the keyhole. Nothing but silence and the slow, slow spin of the lone ghungroo from the ceiling.

[lets-sumita]

This post is dedicated to positive male mental health.

[lets-sumita]

Her name was Naira. Aarav kept noticing her. At a small bookstore in Bandra, flipping through an old Urdu poetry collection. At an underground Sufi music gathering, eyes closed, lips barely moving to forgotten verses.

[lets-sumita]

He was the culinary mystic, the one who spoke of food not just as sustenance but as a language of the soul.

[lets-sumita]

Aarav had never been good with goodbyes. The weight of departures clung to him like the final note of an unfinished melody. He grew up in a house where parting was a wound never quite healed—his father’s...

[lets-sumita]

Peepal Ka Tree Folklore

He glanced again toward his own bathroom window, where the little peepal plant stood defiantly green.

Morning sunlight slanted into the colonel’s bungalow as two steaming cups of chai sat on a low table. The veranda was adorned with hand-carved wooden panels and Madhubani paintings, giving the military outpost’s residence an air of artistic warmth. Inside this pristine, artistically rich household, a young soldier knelt respectfully on a jute mat. He had come for his daily report – but today his…

[lets-sumita]

Bheetar Ghorer Aalo

I no longer wish for answers. I have lived a life of my own making. I have written my name in ink, not in gold.

Calcutta, 1991 The monsoons arrived early that year. Outside, the rain drummed against the tin roofs, flooding the narrow streets, soaking the yellowed pages of newspapers left in shopfronts. Inside her small apartment, Mrinalini sat at her desk, wrapped in a thin cotton shawl, her hands weaker than before, but steady. She knew she did not have much time left. And so, with ink-stained…

[lets-sumita]

Under the Peshawar Sky

A year later, they were married in that same haveli where they had once danced under the festival lights. The city turned out to celebrate them—poets, chaiwalas, musicians, artists, neighbors, and strangers who had become family.

Azaan wasn’t supposed to be in Peshawar. His firm in Multan had sent him to oversee a high-profile restoration project—a rare decision in a world obsessed with glass-and-steel buildings. An old estate in the heart of the city, once home to poets and traders, was finally getting the care it deserved. That’s when he met Meher. A documentary filmmaker, she was working on a project about…

[lets-sumita]

The Last Dance at Café Sifr

And in the quiet corners of the world, in cities and towns that no longer remembered their names, there were nights when the air carried a faint rhythm, the ghost of a melody no one could place.

The night folded itself around the city like a velvet cloak. The cobbled streets, slick with rain, shimmered under the dim gas lamps, leading wanderers to a place that did not exist on any map. Café Sifr. A secret whispered between poets, lost lovers, and those who chased the edges of dreams. It was not a place one found—it was a place that found you. Inside, the air was thick with the scent…

[lets-sumita]

Unsent Messages

Naina scrolled absently through her phone, past stories of candlelit dinners, soft-focus selfies, and captions dripping with love-struck giddiness. The city outside pulsed with the ritual of Valentine’s Day—bouquets clutched in hurried hands, delivery riders balancing heart-shaped balloons, restaurants booked out weeks in advance. She had forgotten about the date until her colleague mentioned it…

[lets-sumita]

The Monkess of Power

She did not say more, and he did not press. But something in the air had shifted. Stillness is not the absence of movement. It is the presence of something deeper. Aarav looked at Anita Chaudhary and knew he would not write the article he had planned.

Aarav had met many powerful people in his years as a journalist—CEOs who measured their worth in numbers, politicians who filled rooms with noise, men who mistook control for leadership. But the woman sitting before him, Anita Chaudhary, IAS, was different. She was dressed in a crisp handloom saree, draped with the kind of effortlessness that only discipline allows. Her hair was neatly tied…

[lets-sumita]

Some Men Are Like That

It was past midnight when Ayaan found himself standing in the small hallway outside Aarini’s room. The door was slightly ajar. He could see her curled up, asleep, her stuffed rabbit tucked under one arm.

It had been three months in Mumbai, and Ayaan already felt the walls closing in. The routine—the same overpriced coffee, the same meetings, the same playlist that once felt fresh—was now a slow suffocation. He could feel the itch in his bones. It was time to go. That night, he packed light. One backpack, the essentials. He’d leave before dawn, before he had to explain, before things got messy.…

[lets-sumita]

The Syed of Byculla: The Last Perfumer of Mumbai

That evening, as the call to Maghrib prayer echoed through Byculla, Aarif stood in the doorway of Seher & Sons, watching the sky turn from gold to indigo. He closed his eyes. The city smelled of rain, of sea salt, of sandalwood burning in some distant home.

Part I: The Inheritance of Fragrance In the heart of Mumbai’s Byculla, where the air is thick with the scent of cardamom, rain-drenched earth, and the salt of the sea, stood a small perfumery—Seher & Sons. It was not a grand shop, nor did it have golden signboards like the modern fragrance boutiques in Colaba. But if you walked past it, you would stop—because its air carried the memory of a…

[lets-sumita]

Lahore Express

And so, Café Sifr took shape—not as a mere establishment, but as a sanctuary of sound and silence, chaos and calm. It would be the kind of place where weary travelers found their second wind, where... Read more

The wind carried a scent of salt and cinnamon, a whisper of lands far away, yet deeply rooted in the soil beneath her feet. Noor stood at the threshold of what would soon be Café Sifr, her dream stitched into the very fabric of the universe, waiting to unfold. Lahore had always been a city of stories. Its streets bore the echoes of Faiz’s verses, the murmurs of the Ravi’s waters, and the sighs…

[lets-sumita]

Gul-e-Sahar: A Song Between Sand and Sky

The mood was intimate, modern, yet ancient, like something borrowed from time itself.

The desert stretched like a sleeping beast, golden under the last flickers of daylight. A breeze whispered through the dunes, carrying grains of sand that settled into the folds of Persian rugs laid haphazardly around the set. This wasn’t a regular Bollywood shoot—there were no choreographed sequences, no forced glamour. The mood was intimate, modern, yet ancient, like something borrowed from…

[lets-sumita]

A Journey Through the Fragments of a Forgotten Soul

And this time, she whispered back: "I have found my way home."

Prologue: A Call From the Past In the silence of a desert night, under a sky dusted with a million stars, Amina closed her eyes. She had always been haunted by a peculiar longing—a whisper in her soul that called her toward an unknown past. It was neither nostalgia nor memory, but something deeper, something inexplicably hers, though beyond her reach. Tonight, as she lay in her dimly lit…

[lets-sumita]

Drift

The city was a machine—grinding, pulsing, demanding. The neon lights blinked without pause, the roads stretched endlessly, slick with rain and indifference. The world outside moved with a certainty Reva could no longer grasp. She sat by the café window, staring at nothing and everything, her mind a labyrinth of thoughts she couldn’t voice. She wasn’t lost. No, that would have been easier. Lost…