Ayesha Malhotra Part 1 – Silence After the Flare The desert had always been quiet, but after the flare, silence was something else entirely. It pressed against the windows, settled on the roof tiles, thickened the air between words. Before, there had been the hum of ceiling fans, the tinny burst of radio jingles from the next-door grocer’s shop, the shriek of kids playing cricket on the dust-patched street. But the morning after the sky burned orange and green, none of that returned. The fans sat useless. The grocer closed his shutters. The cricket bat lay abandoned in the sand.…
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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 stopped altogether. Silence followed, thick as wet wool. The power was out. Again. She lay still, waiting for the noise to return — a whirr, a click, the hallway inverter kicking in — but the darkness held. Beyond her shuttered window, thunder cracked the sky…
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Avni Sharma Cut. Camera. Chaos. Adil Mehta hated networking events. He hated the artificial laughter, the overflowing wine glasses, the desperate smiles hiding behind even more desperate scripts. But tonight, he had no choice. His rent was due, his bank balance read like a horror story, and his last script — a coming-of-age story about a grieving magician — had been rejected with a “Nice tone, but not marketable.” So he stood awkwardly at the corner of the Film Writers Guild mixer, nursing a warm soda and mentally rewriting every regret of his life. That’s when it happened. A shout,…
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Ishaan Talwar Part 1: The First Note The first time Aryan strummed his guitar on the old green bench outside the Fine Arts Block, the sun was melting into the Delhi skyline and the air smelled of samosas from the canteen. He wasn’t playing for anyone. He never did. But someone was always listening. That evening, it was Tara—the girl with the nose ring and the journal full of angry poetry. She was standing near the rusted railing, scribbling something when his chords cut through the dusk like the beginning of something they didn’t yet know was coming. He looked…