Mehak Jamal’s Loal Kashmir (2025) is a witness, a tender archive of what it means to love in a region of conflict—how intimacy reshapes itself around checkpoints, how longing endures without signal bars, how the heart insists on ordinary joys in extraordinary times. By Shivani Patel

In his multigenerational saga A Person is a Prayer (2024) Ammar Kalia weaves together several characters, each struggling, yearning, and often failing to find clarity in the shadows of their predecessors. As with many internal struggles, they persist in silence. By Shivani Patel