Poetry with a Gun to My Head By the Periyar river, I paused my work, telling myself it was for field research, for a book, for Christmas, but really it was to breathe. On its banks, I watched the river move with an almost careless...

Stories of the Watched, the Vanished, the Dead In “A Mouse’s Saga,” Agnibarathi narrates tyranny through the tiny, audacious world of mice, reminding us that violence often lives most viciously inside the smallness of domestic space. The story carries an echo of Art Spiegelman’s MAUS...

As readers, we have the privilege to enter spaces ordinarily closed to public eyes. The creative nonfiction essay admits us into these testimonial rooms, doubling the force of witnessing itself. How many of us would speak if we were certain of being listened to? What...

To witness is not simply to see; it is to stay present when turning away would be easier or safer. In an age of accelerated forgetting, where suffering is erased as quickly as it is reported, witnessing becomes an ethical act, a quiet form of...

Time stretches and contracts according to what it is asked to hold. To witness, then, is to remain present, to stay with what unfolds, even when language gives way to silence. The works gathered under this year’s theme, Witness, dwell in that staying. They attend...

What does it mean to be present and bear witness? What are we choosing to acknowledge in the act of witnessing - and what are we choosing to shelve and forget when we unwitness? To see is to witness is perhaps not always so. Yet,...

Greetings! Dear Readers, Wishing you all a very Happy New Year 2026. May this year bring you good health, enriching travels, authentic connections, and fulfilling food. Our theme for this issue was ‘Witness’. I suppose the theme, Witness, prompted our submitters to formulate, analyse, close-read,...