Poetry by Paromita Patranobish: ‘I learned what we / Have always known: / Continuity is the story / We tell ourselves to / Staunch the cracked / And broken skin of time.’

Photo Essay: In a visit to the Serendipity Arts Festival in Panjim, Goa, Deekshith Pai explored the political complexities of contemporary art while rediscovering his own ancestral lands.

Poetry by Kiriti Sengupta: ‘In the crematorium, / the priest asks me to / smear ghee on my / father’s skin. He ensures / the fire finds Baba luscious.’

Short Story by Ananda Kumar: ‘He saw the black hairy tops of their heads, less like decked on top of each other, and more like the Siamese version of foreheads stuck together, threatening to break skin and bleed to death, if one were to try pulling them apart.’

Fiction by Karthik Krishnan: ‘Her mother had told her that a flower-carrier never died. The flowers were a promise of life, she had said. They touched her with their perfume, imbuing her with foreverness.’

How a slow but steady collective drive is finally instrumentalizing a change in the Indian publishing landscape, giving rise to queer, Dalit, disabled, Adivasi, and other marginalized voices on the bookshelves. By Saurabh Sharma

Poetry by Kashiana Singh: ‘A canopy of desert flowers for / the darkest of his nights, marvel / of bitterroot bursting forth from / dead earth’

Observed from a lens of progressing dementia, Goldfish (2023) is a complex story of a mother and daughter’s emotional conflict, of diaspora and community, of music and joy. By Neera Kashyap

Vivek Shanbag’s novel Sakina’s Kiss (2013) features a protagonist obsessed with possession, uncomfortable in the evolving role of his masculinity, searching for meaning in a life where every answer presents a series of more confounding questions. By Karan Madhok

Creative Nonfiction by Ronald Tuhin D’Rozario: ‘And then, sometimes—only sometimes—we pull out a stack of old, old handwritten letters with multiple creases, letters exchanged in the past. We touch and re-touch the fragility of being, feeling, and loving too much, all that we once assumed that time couldn’t repair.’

At the core of Ranjit Hoskote’s latest poetry collection Icelight is a restlessness, a searching presented as a series of inward questions which never quite find their resolve; they keep going until the question itself becomes the endgame. By Vinita Agrawal

Poetry by Preeti Manaktala: ‘Sparrows line up on a hanging / electric wire in the distant // chirping and waiting to dry their moist feathers, / but the sun seems incapable today / amid the fog.’