Short story by Vishnu Bagdawala: ‘Sometimes, I would lie in bed waiting for the tears to come. Sometimes, I would wonder how it was strange that we needed to sleep in order to be awake for the rest of our lives. Until the day when, like my grandfather, we fall into an eternal sleep.’

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.”

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 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.’

In her translation of Gujarati literary giant K.M Munshi’s “Ek Patra,” Rita Kothari uses language to reveal not just the story, but the hidden realities of the lives inhabited by the characters. By Rohee Dholakia

Short story by Madhurjya Goswami: ‘You ask yourself a question: How does a fallen airplane look? Does it look like a pigeon squashed to the ground, its neck askew? And the hot, unplastered room answers: well, you’ve got to see it yourself.’

Short story by Parthosarothy Mukherji: ‘“This is not a Miss Bum Bum contest,” Ash declared to his reluctant collaborators. “This is dignity through exposure. Democracy through anonymity. Art for the masses—by displaying their asses.”’

Short Story by Soham Guha: ‘She will not know the scent of freshly sown grass, the fragrance of blooming flowers, the sound of breaking waves, the songs of birds, the hymns of cicadas, the taste of ripening mangoes, the warmth of the earth. She will never know her home like me.’

Short story by Aditi Dasgupta: ‘Families didn’t merely eat; they communed with their past. Meals were tapestries woven from memory, where each ingredient carried the weight of ancestors, where every bite was a step into history.’

Fiction by Sarthak Sharma: ‘I caught no more reflections. Soon enough, I smelled cattle. The truck moved away from Praznath. In my rush, I had carried the old T-shirt, carrying with it the dust of my home.’