Young Adult
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The Summer Pact
Maya Kapoor First Bell of Summer The last day of school always felt like a door being slammed shut and another thrown wide open. The classrooms still smelled faintly of chalk dust and overheated computers, the air buzzing with the kind of restless energy that only came when you knew you wouldn’t be trapped here…
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The Sky Between Buildings
Kyra D’Souza Part 1 – The Rooftop Silence The city never really sleeps, but there are these odd hours when even the traffic feels like it’s breathing slow. Three in the morning, maybe four. You don’t check the clock because if you do, you’ll be reminded that life is running faster than you are, and…
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Cloud Atlas Café
Neha Banerjee The Rooftop That Wasn’t There Aarav didn’t mean to miss the last train. It just happened, like most of his mistakes—small, accidental, and irreversible. One late night line of code at work turned into another, and another, until he looked up at the time glowing on his cracked phone screen and realized the…
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The Forgotten Festival
Rahul Malhotra One The summer sun was already high when Rohan, Anya, Kabir, and Tara found themselves assigned to the same group for their history project, a mundane school task about the “lost traditions of Himachal.” At first, they treated it with typical teenage indifference, expecting a few hours of research in the library and…
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The Exam That Changed Everything
Prafulla Joshi 1 Aniket pressed his forehead against the bus window as the vehicle rumbled into Kota, Rajasthan, the fabled city of toppers and broken dreams. The streets seemed to throb with urgency—rows of coaching institutes with massive billboards promising “AIR 1 in IIT-JEE,” hostels stacked like pigeonholes with nervous teenagers peering out, chai stalls…
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Gully Premier League
Mahesh Shukla The first chapter, The Chawl Conspiracy, plunges readers into the vibrant chaos of a typical Mumbai chawl, where the scent of street food mingles with the hum of everyday life. Ro, a lanky teenager with a sharp tongue and an eye for mischief, slumps against the railing of the narrow balcony, lamenting the…
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The Algorithm Knows
Lia Kapoor Part 1: The DM That Wasn’t Me The first thing I see when I wake up is my own face telling me not to ignore her. I say “her” because the mirror version of me on my lockscreen feels like a different person: last night’s eyeliner smudged, hair in a tragic bun, caption…
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Chai & Chalk Dust
Ananya Pradhan One The mist clung thickly to the hills of Darjeeling that September evening, wrapping the sleepy town in a soft, silver-gray blanket. Outside the gates of St. Augustine’s Hill School, where ancient pines swayed gently in the cool breeze, Anaya Gurung tended the modest tea stall her mother had set up years ago.…
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The Firefly Pact
Isla Verma Mira Patel wasn’t expecting to find anything interesting in a house that smelled like mothballs and mildew. Her grandfather’s old bungalow in Elmsworth was the kind of place that felt stuck between timelines—one foot in 1973, the other refusing to acknowledge anything after dial-up internet. Still, here she was, sleeves rolled up, armed…
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Before the Sky Falls
Saanvi A. Menon The rain started sometime after midnight, stealthy at first, tapping like fingers on the tin awning outside Mira’s fourth-floor window. She didn’t get up to look. Mumbai rain, especially in late June, had a way of arriving without ceremony but leaving a trail. The fan above her bed slowed, hiccuped, and then…
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The Echo Between Seconds
Kael R. Nakamura The Man Who Didn’t Blink They say the moment you begin to lose time, the rest of you follows quietly. Elias Shin first noticed the distortion on a Thursday, when his breath no longer misted the mirror. It wasn’t a trick of light—he leaned closer, rubbed the glass, even switched rooms—but his…
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Lagaan Girls
Avinab Seth Chapter 1: The Ball That Broke Tradition The dusty field behind the temple wasn’t much—a patchy stretch of cracked earth, a pair of mismatched wickets, and a tattered red cricket ball held together more by tape than leather—but for sixteen-year-old Meera Patil, it was a universe of freedom. That late afternoon, the village…