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

Poetry by Anandi Kar: ‘Sometimes, a name / Slips through / the sieve of the heart / and it quivers inside / like hair covering the red face / of a tiny child’

Poetry by Antara Mukherjee: ‘I dig / Into my memoir platter / where shrouded instructions / wrestle with unhealed wounds.’

Poetry by Chintan Girish Modi: ‘For every night of stolen sleep / every moment of crushing despair / every taste of I can’t do this anymore’

Poetry by Urmi Chakravorty: ‘Hope glistened on the peaks afar / while the russet dunes of chinar leaves / formed a gentle duvet for our fiery yen.’

Poetry by Nikhat Jonak: ‘How petrified she is to see him bawling with bolted eyes. / A lullaby materializes in air; she thinks she missed the miracle.’

Poetry by Karan Madhok: ‘couldn’t i unsign the social contract, / a sunbathing vampire, a genie unshackled, / a pair of eyes that awake to starry nights painted / on the bedroom ceiling?’

Poetry by Pragya Dhiman: ‘Now, I find apple water in the showers when I / breathe through my mouth, its taste nostalgic, / my mind prepares a child’s orchard’

Poetry by Paromita Patranobish: ‘I learned what we / Have always known: / Continuity is the story / We tell ourselves to / Staunch the cracked / And broken skin of time.’

Photo Essay: In a visit to the Serendipity Arts Festival in Panjim, Goa, Deekshith Pai explored the political complexities of contemporary art while rediscovering his own ancestral lands.

Poetry by Kiriti Sengupta: ‘In the crematorium, / the priest asks me to / smear ghee on my / father’s skin. He ensures / the fire finds Baba luscious.’

Short Story by Ananda Kumar: ‘He saw the black hairy tops of their heads, less like decked on top of each other, and more like the Siamese version of foreheads stuck together, threatening to break skin and bleed to death, if one were to try pulling them apart.’

Fiction by Karthik Krishnan: ‘Her mother had told her that a flower-carrier never died. The flowers were a promise of life, she had said. They touched her with their perfume, imbuing her with foreverness.’

Poetry by Kashiana Singh: ‘A canopy of desert flowers for / the darkest of his nights, marvel / of bitterroot bursting forth from / dead earth’

Creative Nonfiction by Ronald Tuhin D’Rozario: ‘And then, sometimes—only sometimes—we pull out a stack of old, old handwritten letters with multiple creases, letters exchanged in the past. We touch and re-touch the fragility of being, feeling, and loving too much, all that we once assumed that time couldn’t repair.’

Poetry by Preeti Manaktala: ‘Sparrows line up on a hanging / electric wire in the distant // chirping and waiting to dry their moist feathers, / but the sun seems incapable today / amid the fog.’

Personal Essay by Ajay Patri: ‘Sometimes I like to imagine a parallel universe in which my brother stayed. In this universe, I continued playing cricket after school, continued following the sport with the fervour of most of my compatriots.’

Fiction by Neera Kashyap: ‘“My friends say this is dirty blood,” she said. “That’s why nobody talks about it, not even our mothers. Not even when there is pain. My mother says not to eat this and that, says I have to be careful now, dress modestly, not talk to boys.”’

Fiction by Kanya Kanchana: ‘Have you ever considered what it takes to make a goddess appear from wood and stone? My uli does not make a single false stroke.’

Poetry by Anushri Nanavati: ‘September is penned in the black ink of loss: / the carcasses of a thousand spiders / strung together, legs locked, tumbling / in tandem’

Fiction by Urmi Chakravorty: ‘She lived in a community where a woman could cement her position only after she bore children. Without a biological offspring, her worth was limited: she was like another supermarket product, destined to be discarded after a brief shelf life.’

Poetry by Sunil Sharma: ‘The moment // compresses the competing / time-zones and geographies; // unites the widely-apart views / into / a single landscape of converged / colours.’

Fiction by Samruddhi Ghodgaonkar: ‘When my foot slipped, I felt a familiar sense of suspension, the weightlessness of a social pariah, a suspension that now waited with a terrible consequence.’

Poem by Tejaswinee Roychowdhury: ‘My roots changed course / the day I started stuffing words / back in dictionaries’

Poem by Ankit Raj Ojha: ‘North Indian colleagues treat me as equal, / yet the demeaning bhaiye surfaces often / when they speak of Biharis not me.’

Fiction by Aarushi Agrawal: ‘She couldn’t believe this was happening to her—these conspiracies, these trending hashtags, all playing out in real life. There was no need to engage. By now, Vaani and Aaqib were walking as briskly as the woods would allow.’

Fiction by Divy Tripathi: ‘Suddenly, a new hunger arose inside. A desire for instant retribution enveloped him, a sudden need to right this particular slight. “I am not your servant,” he said. “Talk with respect.”’

Personal Essay by Babli Yadav: ‘Ten minutes into our ride, we land upon this road patch with grave signs of purple. Hundreds of fallen fruits of an old jamun tree, squished, squashed, and beaten by the dance of the July winds.’