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

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.’

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.’

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

At the core of Ranjit Hoskote’s latest poetry collection Icelight is a restlessness, a searching presented as a series of inward questions which never quite find their resolve; they keep going until the question itself becomes the endgame. By Vinita Agrawal