Fiction by Anannya Nath: ‘Prosenjit forgets to react. What would he do now? How should he talk her through this? Is this what happens once you forget about being a father?’

Poems by Shreya Sharma: ‘‘i will make for you one and a hundred popsicles in each flavour you can think of. pink bubblegum big collective miracle evening and so on.’

Poems by Shome Dasgupta: ‘take me back / to the moss and crawfish, please / Krishna—take me back to moonlit / moss and claws red like tandoori / curry, soft and savory.’

Poem by Nisha Prakash: ‘Paeans don’t hold stories of / Monkeys with ripped entrails, / Only of the one on the banner / Of the wielder of the Gandiva.’

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’