February 23, 2026. Fairfax County, Virginia. It is 5 in the morning and it has been snowing. A young police officer, Nicholas Brazones, is walking toward an apartment building in the suburbs. Dispatch has told him almost nothing: domestic assault, 2 victims. He has handled these calls before. You show up, you separate the parties, you take statements, you file a report. Most of the time, the situation has already cooled by the time you arrive. Most of the time, nobody is actively dying when you open the door. This is not most of the time. What Nicholas is about to walk into, what his bodycam is about to record, is a scene that the Fairfax County Police Chief will later describe as "beyond imagination." A scene he will call a "bloodbath." This is the story of a family that came to America from Nepal looking for a better life, and found something no one could have predicted on a quiet suburban street in Virginia. This is the story of the Thapa family.

April 2006. Pramod Mahajan is 56 years old. He is the organizational brain of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The man who brought the BJP into the digital age. The man who brokered the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance that conquered Maharashtra. The man who organized Advani's Ram Rath Yatra. The man who, as India's Telecom Minister, helped put a mobile phone in every Indian's pocket. Corporate India courts him. Delhi's power corridors bend around him. He is being spoken about, in hotel lobbies and drawing rooms across the capital, as a future Prime Minister.

And for the last 6 months, astrologers have been calling him. One after another. All of them with the same warning: your life is in danger. From someone close to you. An insider. Pramod Mahajan ignores every single call.

On April 22, a Saturday morning in Mumbai, Pramod sits in his Worli apartment with the morning newspaper. The doorbell rings. It is his younger brother Pravin. He is let inside. Tea is offered. And in 15 minutes, the most powerful political operative in India is on his living room floor, 3 bullets in his body, asking one question to his brother-in-law Gopinath Munde on the phone: "Mee asa kay gunha kela ki Pravin ne mala golya marlya?" What crime had I committed, that Pravin shot me?

Every year, on a Thursday in December, the best badminton players in the world, from China, Indonesia, Japan, Denmark, arrive in Lucknow to compete in a tournament. Flags go up. Stadiums fill. A name echoes across the announcer's PA system, repeated hundreds of times over several days, until it becomes just background noise to the people who have heard it their whole lives. That name is Syed Modi. What the crowds in those stadiums rarely talk about--what the gleaming trophy and the BWF World Tour branding don’t mention--is that Syed Modi was twenty-five years old when two men shot him dead outside a stadium gate in Lucknow on a July evening in 1988. He was India's greatest badminton player of his era. He was a Railway employee's son from a sugar mill town nobody had ever heard of. He was a husband who was betrayed. He was a father--of a two-month-old daughter he would never see grow up. And then, one evening, he was a body in a pool of blood. This is the story of Syed Modi. And it is also the story of everything India let get away.

Welcome to Chai & Chithi, a segment where we read some of the scariest, most terrifying, and most haunting stories that YOU send in to us. In this week’s episode, we’re reading:

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West Chester, Ohio. A clean, quiet suburb where Indian families build their “American dream” one grocery run, one school pickup, one festival at a time. But on April 28th, 2019, that dream turned into a crime scene. Inside a single apartment, four adults from one Indian family were found shot dead— not together, but scattered like someone had moved through the home with purpose. A woman on the kitchen floor. An elderly aunt lying in the hallway. A mother-in-law in the living room. And the father-in-law inside a bedroom. There was no broken door. No struggle loud enough for neighbors to hear. Just a story that would shock an entire community and embroil a state. This is the story of the Westchester quadruple murders.

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On a quiet evening in September 2006, something horrifying happened in the small village of Khairlanji. By morning, four members of a single family were gone — and the village was silent. At first, the story seemed unclear, almost deliberately so. But as details slowly surfaced, the crime revealed something far darker than a simple act of violence. What happened in Khairlanji wasn’t just brutal — it exposed wounds that ran deep within Indian society, and sparked outrage that would shake an entire state. This is the story of the Khairlanji Massacre.

It's 10 p.m. on May 16, 2012, and Havelock Town pulses with the electric hum of Colombo's nightlife, a cold breeze from the Indian Ocean fans across Sri Lanka’s capital city. Inside El Greco nightclub, Wasim Thajudeen, 27 and built like the rugby captain he is—broad shoulders and an easy smile—holds court at a corner booth. The clock ticks 11:30 p.m. "Gotta bounce, lads," he says to his friends. Hugs ripple through the crew; a chorus of "Drive safe!" and "Text when you're wheels-down!" fades as he weaves out in his black BMW X5. Nothing about that night appears unusual. There are no warnings, no raised alarms, nothing that suggests it will end any differently from countless other nights in Colombo. But something happens that night. Wasim never makes it to the airport the next morning. He never boards his flight. He never leaves the city. This is the story of Sri Lanka’s golden boy, a national rugby star. This is the story of Wasim Thajudeen.

On an October night in 1974, Stanford University was quiet in the way elite campuses often are after dark—orderly, confident, almost untouchable. Students slept behind locked doors, bells stood silent, and the church at the center of campus felt like the safest place imaginable. Inside that church, a young woman sought nothing more than solitude, reflection, and rest. And by morning, she was dead. What investigators found was disturbing, ritualistic, and completely at odds with the image Stanford projected to the world. There were no signs of forced entry, no clear suspect, and no immediate explanation for how violence had entered a sacred space so easily. Questions remained for decades, until one development—long after most had stopped looking—changed everything. This is the story of that one pristine university church, that one night, and that one woman locked behind its doors who never made it out alive. This is the story of Arlis Perry.

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In the mid-1980s, families across North Kerala began dying inside locked homes, attacked while asleep, with no signs of struggle and no witnesses. This episode unpacks the Ripper Chandran case — the fear that gripped entire districts, the investigative blind spots of the time, and the moment India was forced to understand serial crime for the first time.

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Welcome to Chai & Chithi, a segment where we read some of the scariest, most terrifying, and most haunting stories that YOU send in to us. In this week’s episode, we’re reading:

Watch Daldal: https://www.primevideo.com/detail/Daldal/0KUJKS3SFBKRU9K87JENILIPYC

To send us your scary stories to read, write to us at staydesi [at] thedesistudios [dot] com.

For extra episodes, early access, silly bloopers, subscribe at: https://www.patreon.com/thedesistudios or join our YouTube family https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnbfV0YvrxWMq3h0hmo13Jg/join

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A moonless night in the Rocky Mountains. January 6, 1982. Snow has been dumping for hours over Colorado as temperatures plummet. Far above the ski lights of Breckenridge, on a remote mountain pass, tragedy had already begun. That night, in the cozy bars of Breckenridge, as locals were huddling together to seek refuge from the storm, little did they know that two members of their community had just vanished. This is the story of that snowy night, that otherwise peaceful town, and those two victims tied together by a single clue. This is the story of the orange sock murders.

00:03:35:23- chapter 1 SOS IN THE ROCKIES

00:13:06:16- chapter 2 ANNETTE IS MISSING

00:31:10:18- chapter 3 DEAD ENDS

00:41:50:16- chapter 4 THE GENEALOGY GAMBLE

00:51:47:23- chapter 5 DAY IN COURT

For extra episodes, early access, silly bloopers, subscribe at: https://www.patreon.com/thedesistudios

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