My Place Under the Staircase
Flash fiction by Shaurya Pathania: ‘It was grumpy until it greeted me, he could talk; a crab in my house, a crab in my house that could talk; and that too in standard English. I wasn’t dreaming. He claimed that he had lived there for longer than he could remember.’
Short story by Debi Mukherjee: “Unlike the little girls I see outside temples, draped in their pano bhaju’s stringing garlands of Marigolds, I dare not play with the flowers in our garden. Papa cautions me against the rows of Mogras, Shoe-flowers, Frangipanis and a multitude of others. He says that I must not be lured by a flower’s fragrance.”