Poetry by Nikhat Jonak: ‘How petrified she is to see him bawling with bolted eyes. / A lullaby materializes in air; she thinks she missed the miracle.’

Poetry by Karan Madhok: ‘couldn’t i unsign the social contract, / a sunbathing vampire, a genie unshackled, / a pair of eyes that awake to starry nights painted / on the bedroom ceiling?’

Poetry by Pragya Dhiman: ‘Now, I find apple water in the showers when I / breathe through my mouth, its taste nostalgic, / my mind prepares a child’s orchard’

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.’

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

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.’

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.’

Personal Essay by Ajay Patri: ‘Sometimes I like to imagine a parallel universe in which my brother stayed. In this universe, I continued playing cricket after school, continued following the sport with the fervour of most of my compatriots.’