Poetry by Goirick Brahmachari: ‘Love is like the wild lilacs, white / Apple trees over green meadows, / Riverstones I have walked over / For years— splattered, irate, broken.’

Short story by Madhurjya Goswami: ‘You ask yourself a question: How does a fallen airplane look? Does it look like a pigeon squashed to the ground, its neck askew? And the hot, unplastered room answers: well, you’ve got to see it yourself.’

Poetry by Vinita Agrawal: ‘The valley hums every summer— / the murmur of a year’s worth of wounds. // It seems nature remembers / what we’ve have tried to bury.’

Poetry by Devika Mathur: ‘Curtains fall from dawn to dusk. / A river to see her face. / Shining clouds bring flowers to her. / An admirer of nightingales and lanterns.’ 

Personal Essay by Namrata: ‘Language is meant to bring us closer. To help us say: I see you. I want to understand you. I care enough to learn your words. And when we turn language into a line in the sand and use it to exclude, to shame, to assert dominance, we forget its most sacred purpose: to connect.’

‘However, the happiness was short lived. Soon there was a knock on the door and all hope of love was lost for them. Ayush’s family had informed the police that their son had gone missing for a few hours, and they suspected he had been kidnapped by militants.’ By Arshi Javaid

Short story by Parthosarothy Mukherji: ‘“This is not a Miss Bum Bum contest,” Ash declared to his reluctant collaborators. “This is dignity through exposure. Democracy through anonymity. Art for the masses—by displaying their asses.”’

Poetry by Paromita Patranobish: ‘A comet catches fire, she knows / It is her plexus exhaling / The ghost of trauma, / This is the closest she will / Come to maternity’

Creative Nonfiction by Shivangi Mishra: ‘The street neatly divides the forest landscape into two almost symmetrical halves, but would the creatures of the wild adhere to road etiquette? In the human world, boundaries bespeak identity, and boundaries help masquerade.’

Short Story by Soham Guha: ‘She will not know the scent of freshly sown grass, the fragrance of blooming flowers, the sound of breaking waves, the songs of birds, the hymns of cicadas, the taste of ripening mangoes, the warmth of the earth. She will never know her home like me.’

Short story by Aditi Dasgupta: ‘Families didn’t merely eat; they communed with their past. Meals were tapestries woven from memory, where each ingredient carried the weight of ancestors, where every bite was a step into history.’

Poetry by Jyotish Chalil Gopinathan: ‘Pressing my ear to the ground / straining to hear / the universe speak. / The faintest tremor / of the butterfly wing’