UMA: Delhi Diary

A shadow in the Yamuna's fog. A shape with too many joints on the Ring Road flyover. A missing constable, a redacted file, a city that keeps pretending none of it happened.

They are called UMA — Unidentified Mysterious Anomalies. Creatures the government has spent decades hunting, cataloguing, and hiding beneath the ordinary noise of Delhi traffic and Delhi gossip. Every one of them carries the same impossible cuneiform script burned into its flesh, in a language no one has ever traced to any human hand.

To fight them, you need power no medical degree or firing range can teach you. Power that comes from only two places — the rare, uncontrollable luck of "awakening," or the far more reliable, far more terrible cost of eating what you've killed.

Shyam Raj never wanted either. A PhD student from a small town in East Uttar Pradesh, three years deep into a thesis nobody outside his department will ever read, he's recruited overnight into DARF Team 7 — the Delhi Anomaly Response Force's most understaffed, most quietly infamous unit — after its last field researcher didn't come back from an operation nobody will talk about.

Under Captain Ananya Rathore, a twenty-five-year-old Mirage-class combatant with more kills than friends, and alongside eight restricted-level fighters who've each already lost a version of themselves to this work, Shyam is handed the one job everyone assumes will get him killed fastest: figure out why the monsters do what they do, before the people meant to stop them run out of luck.

Delhi doesn't know what's underneath it.
Shyam is about to become the reason someone finds out — one case file, one containment op, one impossible night at a time.

UMA: Delhi Diary is an original work inspired by the world and mechanics of the UMA/cryptid-hunting genre, reimagined in a Delhi setting with its own characters, agency, and mythology.