Poems by Kashiana Singh: ‘meanwhile, you stir life / into us, our faces cupped / in the folds of your / turmeric stained / hands – / held by a firm wrist / draped / in a beaded rosary’

‘I simply mean: our image of forever / Is not forever, the way a painting / Of an ocean is not wet.’

The pandemic presented fraught challenges to our connections with the rest of humanity, the people and acquaintances in our world. In her personal photo-essay, Sufia Khatoon attempts to forge links with the strangers with whom we share our breaths.

Short story by Aishwarya Khale: ‘When I thought about the past, I thought about memory. I wondered if Mr Shinde would forget us, like shattered dolls collapsing through the broken chambers of his mind.’

Personal essay by K. S. Subramanian: ‘For the first three months of severe lockdown everyone was getting used to the eerie silence on the roads and the breeze blowing with an inherent message—stay put where you are.’

Poems by Rahana K. Ismail: ‘they say you could / map out migration by how / games change hands—hands tiny in hope, / searching a piece of it in the other’.

Poems by Anuradha Vijayakrishnan: ‘One imagines the other in the empty place at the table, walking / through a blazing sunlit door / or leaving silently, melting into absence.’

Poems by Srividya Sivakumar: ‘In my seditious soul, sparrows flit in and out of red-tiled houses. A dry river watches my family offer prayers. A kitten scares my aunt senseless.’

In his 2021 short documentary, Amal Shihabudeen poses questions of belonging and identity to the uneven balanced faced by migrant labourers in Kerala.

Reading Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree in the Lade Braes, Scotland. ‘The poetry of trees is, after all, about agency—the act of breaking, rending, repairing, citing through metaphor. But what agency do trees hold?’

Poems by Kashiana Singh: ‘a lacquered / summer that lacks / rivulets waiting for / gods to decipher us’

Poetry by Karna: ‘You know my ancestors’ history / and say I am the anomaly in your / clean galaxy.’