I walk nowhere in particular.
Time still runs past me, late for something else.
Every corner asks for attention,
vendors counting coins like prayers,
the sea repeating what it cannot fix.

Slowness here is a private rebellion.
Even stillness must learn to multitask.
To be present is to miss three calls,
ignore the future tugging at my sleeve,
and sit with the ache of wanting nowhere else.

Bombay teaches this gently, then again, not at all -
that the now exists, briefly,
between two honks,
between arrival and survival.

Rooted in slowness, Khushboo Jain documents, journal and compose across film, photography and sound.

Khushboo Jain is a photographer, visual content creator, and multidisciplinary artist based in Bombay, India. With a background in digital content production and a deep passion for storytelling, Khushboo’s work seamlessly blends documentary realism with conceptual imagination. Her photography, films and writings often explores themes of identity, introspection, and the intricate relationships between the human body, mind, and the spaces we inhabit.

Khushboo’s work has been recognised in exhibitions and publications, reflecting her dedication to pushing the boundaries of visual and auditory expression. Whether through the lens of her camera or the layers of sound she creates, Khushboo remains driven by a desire to explore the inner conflicts, connections, and calmness that define the human experience.

A friend of mine once called you seedha, noting how you ran in a straight line from one end to the other. She wasn’t wrong. Though you are a city now, I remember you as a small town. A town so old and yet so young.

In my memory, you are also a funny town. You craved the slightest bit of attention and lit up whenever you got it. You always smelled of fresh tea leaves and open paddy fields, went to bed at nine, and I never stopped teasing you about your littleness - your narrow market streets, your tiny airport and the modest buildings you passed off as apartments. Oh, how small you looked from the Ferris Wheel every summer, draped in flickering green and yellow lights!

The littleness that I resented once is the littleness I miss now.

You seem a bit more grown up every time I return - with a shiny new building, a fresh flyover or brighter streetlights. Yet time still stands frozen for you in certain hushed corners: in the British-era court buildings and in the centuries-old, dilapidated Assam-type houses where people continue to live or work. And then there are corners whispering stories from a forgotten time, like the Mitha Pukhuri–Sweet Pond (believed to have earned its name when Ahom soldiers, after eating Amla, tasted its water and found it unexpectedly sweet). Looking back, I realize how these stories were strewn all around you, and we grew up walking past fragments of history every day.

Funny how I look for you everywhere life takes me. That’s the way with small towns, I guess. They teach you to leave, convincing you that staying back would be a mistake. And when you do leave your little town in hopes of a better future, you keep looking for pieces of your tiny town in quiet corners of a bustling city. Sometimes, I can spot you in foreign places. In the slant of light filtering through a canopy of green, in the solitude of a cheerful golden shower tree by the road, and even in the sweet smell of the parijat flowers scattered on a serene hilltop.

On some days, my mind travels back to one of our many trips past your verdant tea estates, overlooked by the silhouettes of distant blue hills. For a moment, time folds in on itself, and I’m a kid again with bobbed hair in our old blue Wagon R, squeezed into the front seat with my brother, since the fight over it was futile. Deuta is at the wheel, driving calmly and admiring the way light plays with the shade trees, while Ma sits alone in the backseat, complaining occasionally about the wind messing her hair.

But of all things, I mostly think about your green. I remember Namti looked yellow, but you always felt green. It gets green here where I live now when it rains, but it is a different shade altogether.

And I think there will always be this dream that someday, maybe someday while driving around the countryside of a small town I haven’t been to yet, my daughter will recognize you in the green we pass by. She’ll probably scream- elated- and point her tiny fingers at it, not necessarily for me but for our furry dog in the backseat, who would bark in equal excitement.

I think I’ll always be in a certain kind of love with you. Hopefully, she’ll be too.

Urbija Goswami is a Pune-based writer from Jorhat, Assam. Although she works in technology, she remains deeply drawn to literature, spending her spare time reading and occasionally dabbling in creative writing. Her work often explores themes of love, loss, friendship, memory, and nostalgia for the warmth and quiet simplicity of her hometown and the landscapes she grew up in.

Notes:
Deuta- Father in Assamese

Ahom- The medieval dynasty that ruled Assam for nearly 600 years.

The setting sun swallowed by the gushing sea.

On one side I see the rock on which you sat,

The governor from his distant terrace was enamoured

By that view. Even after two hundred years

Between you and me, this once coastal village

We, the descendants of the half-caste dancer, the offspring

Of forbidden love, raid this western shoreline with rainbow

Kites in mid-year pride, a testament to your resolve;

We, the adopted of this coastal town, the unborn from your

Narrow streets, tugged at your heavy breasts and

Grew to be your sons; we, the boys of this sea-viewed school,

The consecrated of the doubter and inheritors of gifted land,

Grew to love the arts. Perhaps where my heel sinks

In the sodden golden is where we found pride

And love and growth that made us who we are.

I see a toddler holding tight to his mother’s hand –

Jumping over morning millipedes on narrow

Asphalt roads. Houses of the eighties tower

Over him while the three-storeyed Ivory Inn stands

Tallest of them all. Passing through sun’s orbits,

This child changes hands for new-found awkwardness

Of love in the dingy shade of Hotel Road,

Leading to the epitome of impermissible love.

The street is lined with gem stores and craft stores

That call on tourists for high prices. Outside,

Angular women stand in darkening streets

Awaiting clients to start their day, while tuk-tuk men

Find more comfort in doubled fares for blonde hair

And small grams of Kerala greens –

Illegal sales to the young.

Twenty years have passed since morning millipede

Escapades. Like soggy paddy fields disappeared

One by one, eighties houses are torn down

For ocean-view apartments for the cosmopolitan.

Shoulder to shoulder, between two Blue Oceans,

The stubborn house hunches. Breathless. Sightless.

He sits in arrogance considering which protest sign

To put up next.

I find myself between the two train tracks, wondering

Which I should take to leave this home I adopted –

On one side lie the sandy shores of my innocence,

On the other stand the sky rises of my youth.

Thalassa keeps calling me – low woes of abandonment.

This coast from which Lakdasa left, leaving us

With angry verse against colonial rule which

Birthed your spirit and stole your heart

For which you died.

This coast which bore the waves of spite

In eighty-three as Tilly’s ashed to the ground,

Leaving ghosts in children’s minds

On a golden coast of love.

This coast at which they threw a hundred million rupees

For expansion and drowned the rock on which he saw you.

Strange sand stood where familiar moss had gathered,

But you, perhaps out of anger at being forgotten,

Fed each new grain each time it roared.

This coast to which irate residents frequent

To clean the waste which flows into your abode

So they like you can wallow in the setting sun.

In this shore lies the story of you and me. Our love, our pain,

Our fear, our resolve – the one you died for and I still endure.

But as I think of the darkness of the tunnel between

Your well and his cellar, the forbidden love that was

Exposed, taunted and punished – a love frowned upon

Yet echoed stories of our childhood, a town named for

Remembrance, a celebration of your misery,

I turn to the new world and see you bid farewell

With a dance to the rhythm of the night wind.

Oshanthaka Cabraal is a teacher of English based in Berkshire, England. His poems and short prose appear in Primrose Road Poetry, Third Space, and Perera-Hussein Publishing House. Upon Leaving Mount Lavinia, from his debut poetry collection Reading Palms (The Jam Fruit Tree, 2025), is an epistle to Lovina Aponsuwa. The poem weaves together personal memory and collective history, tracing the coastal Sri Lankan town where he grew up, named after her.

Because how do you pass a station without

Thinking about the memories you made at each?

Borivali reminds me of trips

Because all trips begin and end there

It’s where I’ve picked people up and dropped them off

It’s where we pack snacks from

Before beginning a long journey

So it reminds me

Of the excitement you feel

Right before you leave town

Of “where is this road going to take me?”

Ram Mandir reminds me of the first rose I took for someone

And never gave it because she didn’t show up

But I didn’t give it to anybody else

I stood at the door while the train passed

The under-construction station

I let the rose slide out of my hands

And onto the platform

I never looked back

Vile Parle reminds me of college

From reminiscing about how anxious I used to be

When talking to girls

And how futile I thought education was

To realizing, that’s where I fell in love with psychology

But it also reminds me of a friend I lost

How I got off here to meet her one Christmas

And a year later, to say goodbye forever

Bandra reminds me of ambition

Because I’ve never gotten off here

Unless I had something inspiring to do

It’s always a conference, a workshop,

A cafe to work from

But it also reminds me of the time

When a stranger decided to ruin touch for me

For a long time

I ran when I got off

A 14-year-old knew no better

And now I suddenly also think

Of those countless trips to Mount Mary

Monsoon drives thatI’ve treasured so much

Churchgate reminds me of love

Because it falls the furthest for me

And if you are from the suburbs

You’ve only ever gone to Churchgate

For something or someone you really loved

Why else would you take that journey?

My love is measured

Shahen (he/him) is a therapist, language editor, and workshop facilitator. He loves that psychology has evidence-based research and academic editing has rules, but life in general has neither. That’s how poetry finds a place in his world, helping him make sense of what he, despite his education and professional training, fails to comprehend.

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The compartments are dustier than ever at this hour.

Greasy sandal prints, tail ends of twisty rice chips,

and a plum hair clip lie exhausted

across the seats.

Rosary-and-sukha-bhel lady

turns her face away from the window

and for a blinking second, I see the bright,

perhaps Goan face that

must have cracked it’s share of hearts

a decade ago.

A bucket of suburban night tumbles in

through the window, wrapping the air

in a whiff of onion, green chilli, aamchur

tossed carelessly together.

As if on cue, the bald baby on

black veil-woman’s lap

sneezes. Someone laughs at his snotty nose,

and a wave of girlish chatter breaks out.

“Baby idhaar dekh, kaunsa jyada suit karega?”

I look at one aunty,

dangling two fake silver pendants

from both hands,

and begin to tell her how local train silver

probably washes off under the tap,

but rosary lady (who’s finished her sukha bhel

by now), black veil woman, and

ring-pendant-bechne waali all say

“Wo wala best hain!”

almost together,

pointing at completely different chains.

:Pudhil station, Santacruz

Our laughter drowns out what must be

the final announcement to slip out of

this nightly bubble called

Ladies’ First Class.

Sohini Das Gupta is a former journalist, trying to move through her 30s with the humour of the Fool—wicked playlist in tow. When she's not writing for a living, she loves writing on life and its many sillies.

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Morning in Kwara always finds me before I am ready.

The sun peeks through my curtain like a nosy neighbor,

the kind that knows when you’re awake before you do.

The roosters in my compound have no respect for sleep;

they crow like prophets with urgent news,

and the smell of burning firewood drifts in

from Mama Titi’s kitchen next door.

She’s already pounding yam for breakfast,

her pestle rising and falling like a heartbeat.

This is my daily overture

a chorus of life and survival,

a rhythm that binds us all whether we want it or not.

Sometimes I stand by the window and watch

as the morning smoke curls over zinc roofs,

rising like prayers too tired to reach heaven.

There’s something beautiful in it

something that belongs only to people

who have known both hunger and laughter.

When I step out, the red dust greets me first,

clinging to my sandals,

marking me as part of this soil.

At Oja-Oba, the market hums with life

women calling, children darting between stalls,

men haggling as if words alone could stretch their money.

The peppers glisten like rubies,

and the tomatoes, bruised yet proud,

remind me of us: flawed, but full of color still.

I stop at Mama Kudi’s stall for stew ingredients.

Her hands smell of pepper and soap,

her laughter is rough but real.

She tells me the cost of onions has risen again,

then shrugs with that quiet resignation

that has become the anthem of the poor.

Still, she jokes. Still, she sells.

Still, she calls me fine girl

and tells me to write her into my book one day.

So I do. Every day, in small ways.

But not every morning in Kwara tastes of joy.

Some days, the sky turns the color of wet ash,

and the city feels heavier than usual.

I dread those days

when the generator refuses to start,

when the tap runs dry for the third day in a row,

and the radio hums with promises

from politicians who have never walked our streets.

I dread the faces at the junction

young men with eyes too old for their years,

their dreams shrinking like cloth left too long in the rain.

There is a silence in their laughter,

a kind that only poverty can teach.

Yet even in those moments, Kwara refuses to die.

It glows quietly

in the orange sunset over Asa Dam,

in the evening call to prayer from Oloje,

in the harmonies of church choirs

that rise like incense from Sango to Taiwo.

There’s beauty here,

but it hides inside the cracks of things

in the way children kick plastic balls down muddy streets,

in the scent of roasted corn

that softens even the hardest day,

in the music of Yoruba, Hausa, and Fulani tongues

dancing together in the market air.

I love those evenings the most.

When the sun dips behind the palm trees

and Ilorin begins to glow like a secret,

I sit outside with my notebook,

listening to the city’s pulse.

From afar, a talking drum answers the muezzin,

and laughter spills from a buka down the road.

Men gather by kerosene lamps

to debate the world in pidgin wisdom

they call it “gist,” but it’s philosophy,

and I write their words down

like treasures too precious to forget.

Sometimes I walk to Tanke,

where students fill the night with noise and dreaming.

Their voices are wild with hope,

their futures unwritten,

and I envy their innocence.

They believe the world is still listening;

I once did too.

Still, I find myself hoping with them

hoping for a Kwara where streetlights work,

where hospitals heal,

where education doesn’t depend on luck or connections.

But hope here is complicated.

It comes wrapped in hardship,

and sometimes it feels like holding smoke

beautiful, but impossible to keep.

Still, I wake each morning and choose it again,

because what else is there?

Even the poorest farmer in Malete

plants with faith that rain will come.

I dream of the days I haven’t yet lived

when the roads will be kind to our cars,

when Mama Kudi will no longer measure peppers with worry,

when children will drink from taps, not wells,

and when art will not be a luxury.

I dream of standing on the bridge at night,

watching lights dance on the water below,

and knowing that my home has finally arrived

at the future we’ve been promised.

Until then, I keep walking.

Through dust and prayer,

through noise and laughter,

through poverty that humbles and beauty that redeems.

Kwara is not perfect,

but it is honest.

It shows you its scars and still dares you to love it.

And I do. Every day.

I love the people who smile through struggle,

the streets that remember my footprints,

the sky that forgives my complaints,

and the quiet grace that hides behind every hardship.

Kwara is the place that teaches me to wait

for rain, for change, for miracles.

And even when the waiting hurts,

it’s also where I learn

that survival itself can be a kind of poetry.

So I write,

not to escape,

but to remember:

that beneath the cracked walls and tired dreams,

this place still beats with life

fierce, fragile, and unforgettable.

And in every dawn,

in every dusty, golden dawn,

Kwara whispers again:

“Live. Hope. Write.”

Solape Adetutu Adeyemi is a professional with a Bachelor's degree in Microbiology and a Master's in Environmental Management. She is a researcher, a consultant,a passionate environmental sustainability enthusiast and a talented award winning creative writer, with her works published in esteemed journals and magazines, including Writenow Literary Journal, TV Metro, Poetry Marathon Anthology, the Guardian newspaper, the Kalahari review and the Indiana review among others.

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I was seven when my mother and my dadi decided to visit Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s mazar. It was my first time leaving the only world I knew. We climbed into a Chingchi. I sat between them, two soft walls smelling of soap and sweat. The vehicle rattled through alleys, then roads, then something wider than roads. I kept waiting for Orangi to return behind the next turn. It didn’t.

Under the underpass the city felt like a throat swallowing us. Dark. Echoing. Endless. Then the light opened and Karachi rose in front of me like a story someone forgot to tell children like me. Glass. Concrete. Blue shining off windows. Buildings so tall they looked like they were trying to touch something far away. I didn’t have words for any of it.

Ammi saw my mouth open and closed it with one sentence. We are in Iran.

And I believed her.

We were from Iran. That was the only faraway place I knew. A place held in stories and photographs and the way my grandmother said certain prayers. So I sat there, seven years old, convinced I had crossed a border without even noticing. Convincing myself that the city was not Karachi because my Karachi was drains and cattle and heat and the sound of women arguing over who wasted the water. This place was too clean to be ours. Too tall. Too bright.

At the mazar I carried that belief like a secret. I watched men tying threads to the lattice. I watched women press their foreheads to the marble. Everything smelled like salt and perfume and smoke. I thought this is what Iran smells like. I thought this is where my ancestors prayed. I thought I was walking in the footsteps of people who existed long before I arrived.

I kept looking around trying to recognise something. A word. A sign. A face. Anything that would tell me my mother was telling the truth. I didn’t find it. But I found something else. A feeling I didn’t have a name for then. A kind of widening. As if the world stretched further than the edges of Orangi. As if the map inside me had suddenly grown.

On the way back we climbed through the same maze of buses and rickshaws and Chingchis. Each transfer shrinking the city again. Each turn tightening the world. By the time we reached home the buildings had disappeared behind smoke and dust. The sea was gone. The mazar folded itself back into legend. And I returned to my street believing I had gone to Iran and come back before dinner.

It took years to realise that trip wasn’t about Iran at all. It was about Karachi. The real Karachi. The one most people in Orangi only hear about in someone else’s stories. The Karachi that feels like a different country because sometimes it is treated like one.

Cities change in strange ways. They grow taller and louder and colder. They build walls and underpasses and flyovers exactly where memories used to be. But sometimes the change happens in you first. Sometimes the city you thought you knew cracks open for one second and shows you its other face. The one made of glass and coastline and a sky that actually looks blue.

I think about that seven year old often. The boy who thought Clifton was Iran. The boy who believed the world could be crossed in a Chingchi ride. The boy who didn’t know that cities can hold entire nations inside them. Rich and poor. Holy and broken. Salt and dust.

Maybe Karachi has always been like that. A place that contains too much. Too many truths. Too many distances between one neighbourhood and the next. A place that asks you to choose which version of it you believe in. And a place that sometimes lies to you just to protect your wonder.

My mother’s lie wasn’t cruelty. It was shelter. She gave me a name for a place she didn’t know how to explain to a child who had never seen anything beyond the slum. She chose familiarity over the overwhelm. She gave me Iran because she couldn’t yet give me the truth of Karachi.

Now I know better. Now I know the city stretches far beyond the lanes of Orangi. Now I know the sea is real. The skyline is real. The distance is real. The divide is real.

But I also know this. That moment under the underpass. That burst of light. That first glimpse of a Karachi that looked impossible. It changed something in me. It taught me that the world was wider than the one I was born into. That sometimes you leave home without understanding you’ve crossed a border. That sometimes a city becomes a country. And sometimes a lie becomes a doorway.

I have spent years walking through that doorway. Trying to learn this place. Trying to claim it. Trying to forgive it. Trying to love it anyway.

Maybe that is what Karachi asks of all of us. To keep choosing it even when it feels like another nation. To keep believing there is a way to belong to every part of it. To keep returning to the places that first widened us. And to remember the moment when the city rose out of the light like a promise we didn’t yet recognise.

I was seven. The buildings were enormous. The sea was close. And my mother told me we were in Iran. Maybe she wasn’t lying after all. Maybe every child needs a myth to survive their first glimpse of the real world. Maybe every city is another country before it becomes home.

Obaid Akhter is a Karachi-based creative whose work explores intimacy, memory, and the quiet politics of everyday life. He is interested in how personal narratives intersect with culture, class, queerness, and belonging in South Asia. His writing leans toward the personal without being confessional, grounded in lived experience and observation rather than performance. Obaid is drawn to stories that sit with discomfort, tenderness, and contradiction.

They say love is about freedom, but you and I know better. We know about the safety of arms that lock tight. The mountains—Sajjangarh watching like a silent sentinel from the top, the ridges of Neemach Mata—they don’t just surround the valley; they embrace it with a ferocity that borders on possession. I am spiraling in that safety. It is a claustrophobic comfort, the kind that says, “Where else would you go? What else is there but this?” I stand at the railing of Fateh Sagar. You know the spot. The black metal is cold against my midriff, polished by a million elbows that leaned here before me, waiting for the sun to drop. The water slaps against the stone—thap, thap, thap—a heartbeat that is slower than mine.

I remember leaving you. I packed my bags with the arrogance of youth, thinking the world was bigger than the reflection of lights in Pichola. I thought I was escaping the smallness, the way everyone knows everyone’s father, the way gossip travels faster than a Chetak scooter in the narrow lanes of the Old City. I left because I wanted to be new.

But now, I return, and I realise: I didn’t leave you. You left me. You are not the city I left. You are a stranger wearing my mother’s jewellery.

I came back to find you, but I think I missed you by a decade. I walk the narrow arteries of the Old City, the veins of Gangaur Ghat where the walls are so close they scrape the skin off your elbows. I am looking for a version of you that doesn’t exist anymore. You paved over the dirt tracks where I scraped my knees. You grew cafes with foreign names where my silence used to sit.

And then, I hear it. The sound that breaks me.

“Kaikar ho, Bhaisa?”

It is not a question. It is an assessment of the soul.

And the answer,

the only answer this city allows, is

“Hao.”

I used to think “Hao” meant yes. I was a child then. Now I know better. “Hao” is not yes. “Hao” is a heavy, singular breath. It is the sound of a rock settling into the mud at the bottom of Pichola.

It is the sound of acceptance without agreement.

Is the heart breaking? Hao.

Is the time passing too fast to catch? Hao.

Are we still here, despite everything? Hao.

It is the language of endurance. It is hard and sweet, like mishri dissolving on the tongue, leaving a phantom sweetness after the crystal is gone. It cuts through the English, through the pretence, through the layers of “I’m fine” I wear in the big cities. You cannot lie in Mewari. The dialect is too grounded in the earth. It pulls the truth out of your throat like a fish hook.

The air here is thick, distinct—a heavy mixture of frying kachoris, cow dung, damp limestone, and the overpowering, cloying scent of agarbatti.

It doesn’t just drift; it haunts. It curls from the doorframes of temples and tailors alike, a grey ribbon writing illegible cursive on the stagnant air. It smells like prayer, yes, but mostly it smells like the 6 AM stillness of a house that is no longer mine. It smells like the precise moment a match is struck—that flare of sulfure before the devotion begins.

It reminds me of the ash. You know that ash? The way the grey cylinder holds its shape for one miraculous, defying moment—pretending it is still whole, pretending it is still strong—before it collapses under the weight of its own burning. That was the peace we had. A peace that was not a solid thing, but a suspension. A peace that was just waiting to crumble.

It is the smell of a man who is no longer in the room but whose silence is so loud it rattles the windows. It is the scent of acceptance—that to be light, you must first burn.

I breathe it in, this holy, suffocating perfume of the Old City. It smells like desperation. It smells like the ghost of a hand resting on my head. It smells like home.

Time behaves differently here. In Bombay, time runs. In Delhi, time marches. In Udaipur, time sits cross-legged on a chabutara and smokes a bidi. It refuses to move.

The city stays. The lake stays. The mountains stay. But we change. I am a stranger in the place that made me.

There is a grief in loving you, Udaipur. It is the grief of loving something that is perfect without you. You do not need me to be beautiful. The sunset will still bleed orange and violet into the grey belly of the clouds over the Monsoon Palace whether I am watching it or not. The sky today is heavy, swollen with a bruised purple. The clouds hold back tears like I hold back mine, suspended in that terrible tension before the break.

“Jithe likhiyo daano paani, uthe hi javela,”

my grandmother used to say. Where your grain and water is written, there you will go.

I thought my grain and water were written far away. But every time I sleep, my dreams are set on the slant of your roads. I dream of the silence of the Rani Road at 2 AM. I dream of the taste of cold coffee that tastes like nostalgia.

I hate you a little bit for this hold you have on me. I hate that I measure every other skyline against your jagged horizon and find them wanting. I hate that I can never truly leave because my accent, my pace, my heart is tethered to this valley.

But then, the evening aarti begins. The bells from the Jagdish Temple vibrate through the floorboards of the entire city. The sound rises, spiralling up past the rooftops, past the terraces, up to the clouds that are finally, finally letting go.

And I forgive you. I forgive you for changing. I forgive you for staying the same.

Khamma Ghani, my love.

Khamma Ghani, my loss.

I am here. I am gone. I am yours.

My city and I grew up together. It raised me when it was still a town, small enough to recognize its own footsteps. Back then, the red light wasn’t a pause, but a meeting place. You stop, and the uncle next to you turns out to be your neighbour, voilà! The woman crossing the road not only seems familiar but turns out to be the teacher for whom you had a test the next day. My city and I shared an intimacy of connections, and that intimacy makes my city a part of me—a town.

The town fed me familiarity. Every lane recognized me, if not vice versa. Now the town is full, and I am emptied by it. The roads are wider; there are many roads, and I use Google Maps now. The city has been mapped spatially, but smudged in my semiotics. The red light is just a red light. No one looks up. No one waits long enough to be known. The town had sound then; it has noise now.

It takes space first. What were once stretches of marshy fields and uncultivated land became buildings over a semester. It takes time. I was practising the art of balance — clutch and brake — on the flyover yesterday. Commutes stretch; home to the gym was a five-minute ride, a seven- minute drive before. Now, it is a seven-minute ride, a fifteen-minute drive. It takes memory too, asking me to relearn directions in a place that I once knew by heart. It demands that I learn the shortcuts.

And yet, I cannot call it cruel. It has given me endurance. It has taught me how to shrink without disappearing. How to carry my childhood inside me like contraband. How to love a place even as it feeds on the very intimacy it once offered.

This is why I call it parasitic. Not because it destroys, but because it survives. I am the host. What it takes keeps it alive; what remains keeps me going. Over time, the exchange has become indistinguishable from need.

We share a bloodstream now.

Detachment would be fatal.

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Khushi Mohunta is an Indian author, poet, and editor. She is pursuing a Master’s in English at Shiv Nadar University. She is the author of Waist Number 42. Khushi has worked professionally in trade publishing in editorial roles with Penguin Random House India and HarperCollins India, contributing to both fiction and non-fiction titles as a copy editor. Her poetry has appeared in Madras Courier and Poems India. Khushi received the Bronze Award in The Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition 2021 by The Royal Commonwealth Society, London.

Chennai doesn’t introduce itself.

It lets the heat do the talking,

a hand on your shoulder,

a quiet warning:

stay, if you can.

Mornings arrive barefoot here.

Salt in the air,

filter coffee breathing life

into half-awake souls.

The sea doesn’t shout.

It listens,

like an old man who has seen

too many people leave

and too many still come back.

This city is not polite.

It sweats, it stares,

it asks where you’re from

before asking how you are.

Autos argue,

buses inhale crowds,

signals are suggestions.

Discipline exists,

just not where you expect it.

Chennai teaches patience

the way elders used to,

slow, strict, without explanation.

You wait.

For rain.

For love.

For change.

And sometimes,

waiting becomes the point.

Evenings feel unfinished.

Tea stalls glow like small confessions.

Strangers share benches

without sharing names.

Someone laughs too loud,

someone stares at nothing.

Both equally understood.

Rain here is never gentle.

It doesn’t fall, it remembers.

Floods. Losses. Stories

we don’t fully speak about.

Still, the city dries its saree,

wipes its face,

and shows up the next day

like nothing broke.

Chennai holds people

the way it holds temples,

with space for silence.

You can be lonely in a crowd

and safe in that loneliness.

No performance of joy required.

Just exist.

That’s enough here.

This city won’t romance you.

But if you stay long enough,

it will sit beside you

when you have nothing to say,

and somehow,

that feels like love.

Chennai isn’t beautiful

the way postcards promise.

It’s beautiful

the way survival is,

quiet, stubborn,

and deeply human.

- Vahith

I’m Vahith from Madurai, living in Chennai for over two years. I work in HR, shaped by psychology and social work, learning people the slow way by observing.

Writing is where I pause. Through creating minimal pieces and personal blogs, I hold small moments, unsaid feelings, and the quiet truths we carry without naming.
vahithhhhh.blogspot.com

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The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, A Wall Made of Holes by Amiya Ranjan Ojha, reflected on the isolation and fragility of migrant existence amidst rapid urban expansion. The series of prints, emphasised the grim realities facing migrants across India, the backbone of this country’s economic engine yet often obscured and erased from its glossy growth story. Depicting vignettes of their working and living conditions, Amiya’s works contrasts their stark existence as an underside to unremittant urban expansion and development. At the Shore by Chetan Kurekar, traced the impact of extractive industries on landscapes and memory through sculpture, painting, and video that together create a vestibule of the artists experience of his home, its landscape and a community left behind. The exhibition pondered the effectiveness of protest against unchecked mining practices and the gradual fragmentation of a community. The artists relationship with the changing landscape of a village overpowered by the coal mining industry is peppered with anxiety, the exhibition quietly symbolises protest, resistance and resilience. An Index of Disobedience by Bharathesh GD featured a series of painted plywood cutouts that critiqued capitalist cycles of production and consumption, and the hollowing out of democratic ideals in the country. spoiled fruit by Vasudhaa Narayanan brought together photography, sound and text to form a feminist archive that listened closely to the female body’s language. The artist explored how women’s bodies in India are forged by caste, class, labour, and the quiet violence of expectation. In doing so, Vasudhaa reimagines the body as a living document that bruises, heals, and remembers on its own terms.

Fulcrum’s film programme, Fulcrum Tilt, opened with a tribute to the spirit of independent journalism that resonates with the founding ethics of the brief but bold magazine after which the space is named. The programme reached out not only to an independent‑spirited community of journalists but also to those who believe in dialogue and exchange through the arts. In October, screenings of short films, brought together independent filmmakers from across the country; through collaborations with People Film’s Collective, Harkat and individual film-makers. The gatherings around these screenings were marked with candid discussion and meaningful exchange that reaffirmed a shared commitment to independent practice.

In the new year, Fulcrum celebrates its participation in Mumbai Gallery Weekend with cityinflux, a long-term city-based project by Ranjit Kandalgaonkar. Through this body of work the artist directs a lens at the relationship a city has with itself, and records moments in in-between spaces that are often overlooked as ordinary or every-day. These spaces and the people that inhabit them epitomise the city’s identity, an identity that is revealed through narratives, momentarily laid bare through gesture.

I look forward to seeing you all at Fulcrum in 2026, may the new year hold veracity, empathy and friendship.

My Best,

Ayesha Aggarwal

Director, Fulcrum.

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