Poetry by Suhana Bhattacharya: ‘i measure distance / not in miles / but in the way my mother says “beta” / over a lagging call / where her voice arrives before her breath’

Short story by Ayaan Halder: ‘I could feed my children chicken and rice for a week, without having to shout at them for not wanting the fried bhendi they’ve been eating for the last three days. I could cover half a month’s rent with that money, for god’s sake! And you spend it on a wretched T-shirt that doesn’t even bear the colour of the sky?’

Short story by Khadija Rehman: “Some flowers bloom even when they shouldn’t. This one grows in cracks, drains, broken walls. Shameless little thing. You can forget about it, and it’ll still be there tomorrow.”

Personal Essay by Jahnavi Gogoi: ‘It was obvious that the word “Militant” was not etched on anyone’s face. My mother kept saying it, late into the night, as if to convince herself that Lohit now had blood on his hands.’

Poetry by Siddh Dutta: ‘Her hours went into my becoming, / cruel it feels now / to realize how freedom can vanish without chains. / How may one choose a cage / and call it duty?’

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.’