The Dollmaker’s Surgery

In the relentless downpour of a Mumbai monsoon, where millions of faces blur into a tired crowd, one man has decided to fix the city's sorrow, one stitch at a time. Raghav is not your typical monster; he is a quiet, elderly neighbor who believes that sadness is a structural flaw in the human design that requires a surgical correction. Inside the damp, soundproofed walls of his decaying Bandra bungalow, he transforms the weary and the lost into his "eternal guests"—living, breathing dolls whose mouths are surgically sewn into permanent, unwavering smiles and whose eyelids are severed so they can never look away from the joy he forces upon them. When the cynical Inspector Kabir Rathore follows the fading trail of a missing delivery boy to Raghav's doorstep, he expects a routine investigation, but instead walks into a suffocating nightmare of antiseptic and silence. "The Dollmaker's Surgery" is a visceral plunge into psychological horror that explores the terrifying thin line between an artist's passion and a madman's butchery, leaving readers to wonder if the friendly uncle next door is hiding a museum of agony behind his own gentle smile.