Poetry by Kartikay Agarwal: ‘Will the last book of the last people to write books / (when all else is said) at the end just say ‘write to me’? // The wheel spins the pot to life, yet leaves no trace, / You be potter, mould life into my clay—write to me.’

Short story by Madhurjya Goswami:‘It was only after the state police’s operations were over, after the troops with sniffer dogs scoured every nook of the city, after the NDRF’s neon orange jetties sliced across the grey Brahmaputra, that the body of singer Niren Rajkhowa washed up on the banks of the river in a quiet and leafier corner of Kharguli.’

Poetry by Bunny: ‘I dip the iris in soy / and watch the dark eat the color. / Still, through the stain, I see you.’

Poem by Anju Devadas R D: ‘Ink spills like blood, / blotting the margins of her name. / Each word a bone, / each sentence, / a noose of syntax.’

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.’