Personal Essay by Diyaa Jyothilal: ‘For the first time in my life, I would feel beautiful. I felt like a girl. I felt like I was worthy of becoming a woman one day. I spent hours staring into my bathroom mirror, gaping at my reflection, and imagining myself on the cover of Vogue.’

Poetry by Carol D’Souza: ‘it pools around my ankles most days / But now, onwards! To the elixir of evening tea’

Personal Essay by Andal Srivatsan: ‘That air is now hardened, rancid, antediluvian. It permeates through the fabric of all communities today. It hovers, egomaniacally, over some of us who want nothing but love and harmony—both excruciatingly evasive.’

Poetry by Vikram Kolmannskog: ‘here where the pressure is high / yet you remain so very sensitive, // here where you find the grassy, gritty origins / of humility and humanity.’

Fiction by Rijuta Pandey: “Anyway, when your life depends on a thread, you learn to weave anything out of it. You can weave even the blue sky.”

Fiction by Adrija Chatterjee: ‘For twenty-eight consecutive days, there had been no phone call from Oli’s house, from Ravti. You understand how the grave the situation is, an already unelectrified village, perhaps now shrouded in some unimaginable stillness.’

Poetry by K.S. Subramanian: ‘Let me not do a U-turn of my neck / to see the past, skill sets that / lost their spell in time, high hopes / Slithering down a slippery slope’

Poetry by Mary Tina Shamli Pillay: ‘Often dreams / Collide but they swiftly / Comply, dusting sorrows / Off their wired feet’

Personal Essay by Deepak Sridhar: ‘You have arrived at the footsteps of Indian uncle-dom when, watching someone in the public sphere do something of note, you think to yourself: “That could have been me.” In my case, the “what-if” pursuit was stand-up comedy.’

Poetry by Sunkara Gopal: ‘From elsewhere, the wind breaks into a room, turns the pages, / Writes four sentences. / The song, somewhere born, dismantles the silence.’ Translated from Telugu by Jyothsnaphanija

Photography by Sk Suhana Mohammad: The topsy-turvy lives of fishing communities by the Rupnarayan River in West Bengal, who have drawn strength from kinship and tradition for generations.

A personal story of music and brotherhood: “Kau had also bought me the album before he left the country. Even though he would come back soon, it would turn out that us living apart in different cities would be a feature—and not a bug.” By Deepak Sridhar