Tara Mitra Part 1 — The First Gaze The sky over Goa wasn’t just blue—it was bold, like a canvas splashed with reckless abandon. Rhea stepped into the quiet artist residency nestled between palms and silence, her duffel slung over one shoulder and her thoughts as heavy as clay. She had come here to escape, to disconnect, to breathe. After fifteen years in Mumbai’s blistering art scene, she wanted to sculpt something not for a client or a gallery, but for herself. Something raw. Something honest. She wasn’t prepared to meet Ayan. He was leaning against the porch railing when…
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Aisha Verma Part 1 The first time Neil saw Siya, she was hurling a half-eaten vada pav at a man twice her size in front of Andheri Station. It hit the man square in the chest, splattering red chutney like a bloodstain on his white shirt. A crowd had gathered, of course. Cameras were out. Someone was live-streaming. Neil had been passing by, DSLR in hand, mind elsewhere, when the chaos sucked him in like Mumbai traffic at peak hour. “Don’t touch me!” Siya yelled, her voice sharp as a glass shard. The man, red-faced, lunged at her, but Neil…
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Anjali Reddi Chapter 1: Maya Sharma hated mornings. Not in the poetic, “oh I need coffee before I can function” way people posted on Instagram. No, she actually hated mornings—because mornings meant meetings, meetings meant people, and people meant expectations. And expectations were just heartbreak in PowerPoint form. Her alarm blared at 7:30 AM sharp—set to an aggressive tabla remix that could probably revive the dead. She sat up on her bed in her neat Indiranagar apartment, looked out at the half-sunny, half-smoggy Bengaluru sky, and groaned. “New day, new inbox full of garbage,” she muttered, grabbing her phone. Fifty-two…