Poetry by Kashiana Singh: ‘Flushed body of a zombie, burnt silk of raging worms / beholder of lost labyrinths, embroiderer of membranes’

Fiction by Chitra Gopalakrishnan: ‘Ganika is, of course, what I chose to call myself. Others in the town called me a woman of the court. Or a woman of the night.’

Fiction by Jigar Brahmbhatt: ‘Their office was fixed in time, no different from any other office: the neat partitions, cold furniture, and glass, glass, everywhere. Like a simple rule to add two numbers, the office was never going to change. Only the folks playing table tennis seemed ephemeral, like shapes made of fumes.’

Poetry: ‘I want to weave lavender flowers into my hair / love my mother, whose anger / is a withering flower / decomposing to memory / in ash burn lavender.’

Poetry: ‘I placed my parents on a bench / And refused to let the sunset / Dawn upon their lives.’

Poetry by Kiriti Sengupta: ‘Death pauses verdict; the authority mars evidence. / The doomed is put on the pyre; rallies slit through / the silence.’

The collection Awaaz: Voices of Govandi has emerged from the need of the people of Govandi to reclaim the narrative about their neighbourhood, and carve out their own future. Here is an excerpt from the collection. Edited by Nisha Nair-Gupta

Poetry by Vrinda Bansal: ‘I am rage and blasphemy, God in a dungeon, / a domesticated wolf, the brain of a terrorist party / I am your grandmother’s birthday party and a child’s funeral, / a barrel of kerosene’

Poetry by Smita Agarwal: ‘The dahlias grow hawa mey— / off the air, we’d say / Down steep ravines / into which the monsoon // munificence would flow’

Fiction by Neera Kashyap: ‘The next week he, Paltu, joined the moulis. To gather honey, to pay off debts, to induce his mother to eat two meals again, to oil her hair, to soap her body, to close the door to their hut. For his father had gone, and would never return.’

Poetry by Gopi Kottoor: ‘And then, the sip / From the spoon / That’ll soon become memory, / That slowly drawn inward kiss’

Poems by Sayan Aich Bhowmik: ‘I have been told the entire cosmos of our being / Hair, skin, Tissues / Renew themselves. / The old ones dissolving in air, without pain / Much like ice melting on the kitchen shelf.’