Short story by Harjot Banga: ‘How dirty were the hands that designed those temples? Hands that counted the opium profits in the warehouses of Calcutta, honeyed and lethal with dust? Hands that fixed the cables that drained Burmese rice while the Hooghly teemed with corpses.’

Poetry by Neera Kashyap: ‘The light sputtered back; her frame froze. / A crow sliced over her head, cawing noisily, / flapping free of the remains of the day.’

Fiction by Zeyaur Rahman: ‘Hira stands near the edge of the clearing and watches the light change. The village does not arrange itself around their return. It continues, with the same economy of movement he has learned elsewhere.’

Poetry by Carol D’Souza: ‘Before the tabla taal of inevitability / kicks in the apocalypse, the first few bars / of this blue ghazal are clear notes / of what could have been.’

Essay by Srishti Sharma: ‘Love has a stinky feeling… It comes around only once a year. You can try all you like to recreate it, inject it, grow it in laboratories, package it better, sell it faster, but it will still smell and taste odd. It resists standardisation.’

Poetry by Ayaan Halder: ‘And then the browning milk that has gushed into his shoes, and mine,  / Carries us over / To someone else’s pyre. / The wind, by then, has ravaged his leaf.’

Fiction by Sanchalika Das: ‘I thought to myself that the god in heaven is just a child playing with clay, throwing it around with disregard and then picking it up with the intention of throwing it again with utter delight. The clay loses and gains in this process.’

Poetry by Parismita Kakati: ‘When they burn me by the river, my pyre ignites / with smoke that rises thick and not sandalwood sweet / A stench grapples the air, reeking of desire / like overripe fruit splitting under its own weight.’

Personal Essay by multidisciplinary artist Ravi Modi: ‘Truth, I came to realise, is fluid, shapeshifting, dusty, incomplete. It never arrives whole. It gathers slowly, the way vision does, through fragments and adjustments. Much like my own sight, truth is always in the process of becoming.’

Poems by Prahi Rajput: ‘the surviving curiosity / in descendant’s narrative is wrested from a ticket & one welcomes / the other through its foreign / door/translating displacement & dialect’

Fiction by Armaan: ‘Your jersey is all sweaty. And your shorts too. It’s stinking up my room. Take it off. / Dilawar’s eyes turned to the door. He felt like if he ran through it, nobody would find him. All he had to do was run.’

Poetry by Gopi Kottoor: ‘And why after that sun-dusked rainbow / Turned our eyes colour-blind // Why is it that your footprints in the dark, / Still lead me to that secret altar’