I am the girl, complete in the garb, Of others’ vehemence, But mostly my own.

Your love is like a maze, Frayed, worn carpets everywhere, Libraries of dust gathering thoughts, Mulling like old, old wine.

Burrowed deep in the substrate. She taps my face with warm fingers And says- Look, let’s go pick blueberries And eat them raw...

Being in love should be like floating, There should be enough salt in the heart.

In every verse that inhabits your mouth, Like a stranger, asking for directions In the lanes of an intimate city Littered with cramped shops, Streetlights glimmering in latent desire In your weak, wary eyes.

Let your pen unravel what I write So carefully contrived, And all my words, You colour them grey.

I only want the green I feel. The green And your waifish frame. Stairs will never be the same again.

In this no man’s land I’ll build Myself a home. Isn’t that what we all look for?

Which border do I cross, I wonder? Where can I pack my home?

What this novel does superbly is that it takes its readers smack in the middle of village life and raises a few questions that continue to remain relevant after almost eight decades of freedom from the colonial yoke.

In this personal memoir of the bloody civil strife, "Stories the Fire could not Burn", Hauzel documents the bloody civil strife and massacre that tore through Manipur in 2023, and whose fire still rages, away from the mainstream nationalistic jingoism.

Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, in his second novel "The Menon Investigation", takes the trope of the detective novel but infuses it with a serious rumination on the nature of systemic corruption existing in the state and civic institutions.

Megha Majumdar’s timely tale, "A Guardian and A Thief", ponders the issue of memory and survival, of people and places, of food and the earth that yields it, or fails under duress to meet our needs.

Volga’s novella On the Banks of the Pampa, translated deftly by Purnima Tamireddy from Telugu, is situated in the milieu of the mythological era of the Ramayana, but is very much a text of the present times.

She likes things to have meaning. She is used to a clock in every room at her house and the absence of it here is almost a wilful suspension of time.

She routinely boarded a bus and when the bus conductor asked her the name of her stop, she gaped at him, fighting with her memory. But all she could recall was a lane full of shady trees, the angry gulmohar, the vibrant palash, the tall coconuts and all the varieties of ixora that dotted the many gardens there.

Today I chopped it into tiny pieces along with a large tomato, a capsicum, four large green chilies because I need spice back in my life, and a large onion. I threw a generous knob of butter in the frying pan and tempered it with whole cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and a pinch of dried fenugreek leaves.

Bambi hugs the soft animal of her body, her skin dreaming of love...

This flash fiction of a so-called godwoman unmasks the underlying hypocrisy, selfishness and the greed for power and control.

She always finds his voice like warm water. Never boiling, no. It has a nice warmth to it without ever being tepid. She closes her eyes and breathes in his voice even though it mostly sounds like distant babble to her right now. It smells like sunshine on the grass.