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.’

Personal Essay by multidisciplinary artist Ravi Modi: ‘Truth, I came to realise, is fluid, shapeshifting, dusty, incomplete. It never arrives whole. It gathers slowly, the way vision does, through fragments and adjustments. Much like my own sight, truth is always in the process of becoming.’

Poems by Prahi Rajput: ‘the surviving curiosity / in descendant’s narrative is wrested from a ticket & one welcomes / the other through its foreign / door/translating displacement & dialect’

Fiction by Armaan: ‘Your jersey is all sweaty. And your shorts too. It’s stinking up my room. Take it off. / Dilawar’s eyes turned to the door. He felt like if he ran through it, nobody would find him. All he had to do was run.’

Poetry by Gopi Kottoor: ‘And why after that sun-dusked rainbow / Turned our eyes colour-blind // Why is it that your footprints in the dark, / Still lead me to that secret altar’

Poem by Anju Devadas R D: ‘They say the river hums here, / but no one sings along. / In this village, silence grows / like moss on every wall.’

Personal Essay by Kinjal Sethia: ‘Some lanterns burned outside this huddle of bhajans and stories. As kids, we kept close to the elders. It would be hauntingly dark outside this circle, and we pretended to conjure witches waiting in the inner rooms or imagined that the screech of the fruit bats was the call of the spirits.’

Poems by Saurabh Suman: ‘in the music that declares the arrival of autumn— / the evening breeze caressing / almost dried-up leaves, / trembling as they cling to the stem’

Fiction by Labiba Alam: ‘Nandita’s arrival in our lives was similar to a new season dawning upon the hills. It was a slow, effortless glide, almost organic. It looks as if it had always been there, only we had begun to feel its newness by degrees.’

Poetry by Sukrita Paul Kumar: ‘the golden sheen on the pines / beckons the waves of the grey ocean / and the silver arrows dart forth in unison’

Poems by Abhilipsa Sahoo: ‘Once, I was a little bird slowly blooming out of the warm embrace of the nest to learn the taste of first flight, believing that distance was proof of growth. Now I’m just plainly tired of being the burnt-out lamp on my parents’ windowsill’

Flash Fiction by Nagireddy R. Sreenath: ‘We don’t talk about the silence between us: the missed birthdays, the calls that went to voicemail, the distance that grew while neither of us looked directly at it.’