In times of stress and anxiety, why do many of us choose the familiarity of a ‘comfort watch’—of familiar shows, plotlines, and characters? Raj Darji explores a sense of loss among abundance.

Poetry by Goirick Brahmachari: ‘Your absence floats in / Within my house of shadows, / And stale miseries, / Broken windows; breezing in / Lost islands of fog and snow.’

Flash fiction by Shaurya Pathania: ‘It was grumpy until it greeted me, he could talk; a crab in my house, a crab in my house that could talk; and that too in standard English. I wasn’t dreaming. He claimed that he had lived there for longer than he could remember.’

Manu Pillai, the author of Gods, Guns and Missionaries, speaks to Amritesh Mukherjee about history beyond monochromatic brushstrokes, the highs and lows of social media discourse, Hindu plurality, and some recommended books.

Poetry by Ajanta Paul: ‘If Bangla is the resonance / of raindrops on the soul / English is the petrichor / of poetry that emanates from / the rain-moistened earth / of my being.’

Poetry is a prayerful medium to explore complex, living concepts. Just as fruit falls from the bough to decay within earth and feed the tree, Rajorshi Patranabis’s presents the ritual of cyclical love and devotion in his new collection. By Dustin Pickering

‘Your book felt like the scent of passing months, layered with flowers, rain, spring and autumn—a scent that reached into the city’s deep burrows.’ By Sufia Khatoon

Fiction by Mandira Mitra Chakraborty: ‘I try not to behave like my mother and accept a session of pedicure without making it about civilization and its discontents. I am in no hurry to die, but I shall go quietly when He comes.’

Photo Essay by Abin Chakraborty: ‘Kolkata is a kaleidoscope: turn your gaze and a new pattern will emerge. What you wish to see is therefore a combination of what you want to see and what your gaze is capable of perceiving.’

Jaideep Ahlawat again portrays Hathi Ram Chaudhary in the second season of Paatal Lok, the haggard cop whose memory serves both as a crime-solving device and as moral code to leave no life unforgotten. By Karan Madhok

From the fantastical to socio-psychological, comedic to gory, Nivedita Dey traces the diverse trends and the masters who shaped the genre since its appearance in the late-1940s.

Deities like Shitala represent a specific premodern response to disease. Paromita Patranobish explores what Bengal’s pox goddess could teach us about social ethics in Anthropocene times.