Ruhi Nagral
There are places in every city that live a secret life. In Delhi, one such place existed just off the chaos of Netaji Subhash Marg—a crooked alleyway in Daryaganj where noise dissolved into silence and the present seemed to pause. At the end of that alley stood an old haveli, its faded sandstone façade hidden behind tangled bougainvillaea and dusty electric wires. If you looked carefully, you’d find a narrow staircase, half-eaten by time, leading to a pair of heavy wooden doors painted a shade of blue the sky no longer remembered.
This was Paperweight, a bookstore that didn’t advertise, didn’t discount, and didn’t bother with plastic-wrapped bestsellers. It had no online presence, no loyalty cards, and no AC. What it had instead was memory—its walls carried whispers of every conversation, argument, and discovery that had taken place within them. The store had been opened in 1976 by Ratan Lal Seth, a former literature professor who had walked away from Delhi University and academia without explanation. He never taught again. Instead, he curated Paperweight like a museum of rebellion—stocking banned books, forgotten translations, anonymous pamphlets, and letters exchanged between obscure writers.
Mr. Seth, now in his seventies, still sat behind the desk at the back, surrounded by tea-stained papers, a transistor radio always humming, and a cat named Kafka who behaved as though he owned the place. His customers were few, his books rare, and his gaze sharp. “The right book finds you,” he would mutter, “if you’re quiet enough to listen.”
It was on a Tuesday afternoon in early March—Delhi still shaking off the last breath of winter—that Tara Mehta first stepped into Paperweight. She was twenty-four, a postgraduate student in comparative literature at JNU, armed with dog-eared notebooks and a fire in her gut. Her professors called her argumentative. Her mother called her unladylike. Tara called herself unfinished.
She had come looking for a first-edition of Rasidi Ticket by Amrita Pritam. What she found instead was something far stranger.
The store was nearly empty. Mr. Seth gave her a nod and returned to his reading. The cat blinked once from atop a stack of Gabriel García Márquez. The smell of old paper, damp wood, and strong Assam tea wrapped around her like an old shawl. Tara drifted between shelves, fingers brushing spines like they were pulse points. Poetry. Politics. Philosophy. A whole section just for banned Indian books. She stopped, startled, when someone spoke behind her.
“That’s the aisle where all the rebels live.”
She turned to see a boy—no, a man—leaning against the poetry shelf. Faded black kurta, silver earring, ink-stained hands. He looked like someone who had memorized too many verses and made too many mistakes.
“I wasn’t aware books lived anywhere,” Tara replied, raising an eyebrow.
“They do,” he said. “Especially the ones nobody reads. They cling to the shelves, whispering. Waiting.”
It was a strange conversation to begin a friendship, but that’s how it started—with banter over metaphors and a shared love of language. His name was Arjun Kaul. He was twenty-seven, a part-time spoken word performer, part-time bartender, full-time cynic. That day, they spoke for hours—about Pritam and Faiz, about heartbreak and politics, about how difficult it was to write something true in a city full of noise. When she left, Tara wasn’t sure whether she liked him, but she knew she’d return.
And return she did.
By the following Saturday, Tara was back, notebook in hand. So was Arjun, this time with a guitar slung over his shoulder. Mr. Seth, though he said little, began setting out three cups of tea. By the third week, the circle grew. A graffiti artist named Shaan wandered in, looking for books on Goya but offering, instead, a stack of self-printed zines full of angry illustrations and anti-establishment poems. Noor—quiet, veiled, twenty-one—came next. A computer science student from Jamia, she whispered that she wrote feminist science fiction in Urdu and asked, in the softest voice imaginable, if she could read her story aloud.
The answer was always yes.
Soon, every Saturday evening became a gathering. There was no agenda. No guest list. Only words, shared and reshaped. Sometimes they read from old diaries, sometimes they performed, sometimes they just argued for hours over tea and samosas. Mr. Seth called them “idealists with no money,” but there was a glint of affection behind his sarcasm. He never asked questions. He simply unlocked the doors early, left the lights on late, and let them be.
They began to call themselves The Manifesto, half as a joke, half in hope. The name came from Shaan, who insisted that every generation deserved its own literary revolt. They had no manifesto, ironically. Just a growing pile of poetry, protest songs, zines, short stories, essays, and manifestos never written.
What bound them was not style or genre. It was hunger. A shared dissatisfaction with the literary circles that dominated Delhi—panel discussions in five-star hotels, gated lit-fests, Insta-poets with brand deals. They wanted something messier. Something real.
As word spread quietly—through WhatsApp groups, whispered recommendations, scribbled notes inside books borrowed from Paperweight—new faces appeared. A queer Dalit poet from Karol Bagh. A Kashmiri journalist in exile. A student from Manipur who wrote dystopian folktales. A Bhojpuri songwriter who couldn’t read English but sang like a storm.
And somewhere in that chaotic, fragile, fiercely sincere coming-together of voices, something began to stir.
A movement? Maybe.
A threat? Definitely.
They didn’t know it then, but someone was watching. And listening.
And in the weeks that followed, Paperweight would become more than a bookstore. It would become a battleground. A sanctuary. A spark.
But on that first Saturday, as Tara read her newest poem about the women of Shaheen Bagh and Arjun followed with a song that made everyone fall quiet, there was only one thing certain:
The walls of Paperweight had begun to whisper louder.
And the city, whether it liked it or not, was about to listen.
2
In the weeks that followed the birth of The Manifesto, the bookstore walls grew warmer, noisier, braver. The Saturday sessions evolved from casual readings into a ritual—unwritten, unscheduled, and yet quietly sacred. Everyone brought something: a new draft, a bruised opinion, a half-formed idea. Even silence, when it came, was respected. Paperweight had become a living room for the disenchanted and the determined.
Among the voices that began to rise from this literary cauldron, one was always gentle, yet always unforgettable—Noor’s.
Noor Ashraf wore silence like a second skin. At first glance, she looked like someone you’d forget in a crowd—small-framed, soft-spoken, dressed in modest colors, her headscarf wrapped neatly, her gaze usually averted. But once she began reading, it was as if the world peeled back a layer to reveal fire beneath her composure.
The first time she read aloud was the third Manifesto meeting. The group had been debating whether poetry could still change anything in a world fed on clickbait. Tara had just recited a searing poem about the erasure of women from history textbooks. The mood was restless, charged. That’s when Noor, almost hesitantly, raised her hand.
“I wrote a short story. In Urdu. Can I read it?”
No one said a word. Mr. Seth adjusted his hearing aid. Kafka the cat jumped off a bookshelf and settled near her feet.
The story was titled “Zehra in the Sixth Sky.”
It was set in a dystopian India fifty years into the future, where women were forbidden to read or write. The protagonist, Zehra, a former astrophysicist turned domestic servant, builds a secret telescope from stolen parts and transmits coded stories through the stars. It was both science fiction and parable, wrapped in soft cadences that masked rage with beauty. Noor’s voice trembled at first, but by the time she reached the ending—where Zehra’s final transmission becomes a constellation that girls across the continent follow like a secret scripture—the entire room was still.
Arjun, who usually had a snarky comment for everything, simply said, “That was brilliant.”
Tara touched Noor’s hand and whispered, “Your fire is quieter than mine. But it burns longer.”
Noor flushed and looked away, but a smile crept up, one that stayed.
From that night on, she became one of The Manifesto’s most cherished writers.
And yet, Noor never stayed long. She would read, listen, sometimes join in arguments, but always left before the group spilled out onto the street for late-night chai and biryani. She always said she had “hostel curfew” or “an early lab shift,” but Tara suspected there was more.
It was a Wednesday when the truth spilled out—not from Noor, but from her absence.
That week, Paperweight was buzzing with preparation. The group had decided to host a midnight poetry reading for World Book Day, open to anyone who dared to read under moonlight. Shaan was spray-painting handbills, Arjun was composing an anthem of sorts, and Tara had printed thirty handmade bookmarks with quotes from their favorite rebels.
Noor hadn’t responded to any of the messages. When she didn’t show up that Saturday either, Tara grew anxious. She had never seen Noor without her hijab, never seen her outside the dim light of Paperweight, but she knew that absence could sometimes be louder than presence.
She texted. She called. Nothing.
Then, three days later, she received a message. It was a photo—blurred, taken in low light, showing pages torn and burned. Beneath it, Noor had written:
“They found my stories.”
Tara’s heart sank.
That night, she called Arjun, Shaan, and Mr. Seth. By the next morning, they had cobbled together a plan—not just to help Noor, but to protect what The Manifesto stood for. They printed her story as a chapbook, distributing it anonymously in college campuses across Delhi. A few were left on train seats, others slipped into library shelves. One was mailed to the office of a right-wing magazine. Another was left at the feet of a statue of Savitribai Phule.
Noor had gone underground, metaphorically speaking. Her parents had confiscated her laptop. Her uncle, a local cleric, warned her about “fame” and “corruption.” But her stories, once freed, could not be caged again.
A week later, Noor appeared at Paperweight wearing a bright red hijab—a silent act of rebellion. She didn’t read that day. She just sat between Arjun and Tara, her hands folded, her back straight, her eyes full of steel.
Mr. Seth served her tea in his finest chipped cup and said nothing.
But the entire group knew. The bookstore knew. The walls whispered her name.
In the following weeks, The Manifesto changed.
They were no longer just dreamers. They were protectors of each other’s voices. Of stories too bold to be silenced. A bond began to form—a kind of literary kinship that no lit fest could fabricate.
Noor’s incident wasn’t the last. It was only the first crack in the veneer.
But that night, as the group stood on the rooftop of Paperweight, watching the city lights flicker like uncertain stars, Arjun strummed a soft tune on his guitar, and Tara whispered:
“We don’t write to be safe. We write to be seen. To survive.”
And Noor, quiet as ever, finally replied:
“No. We write to set others free.”
3
By the time March melted into April, Paperweight had outgrown its quiet anonymity. Not physically—the bookstore still sat behind its unmarked door, still refused to be Googled—but emotionally, spiritually, artistically. It had begun to pulse with the fever of a movement in bloom. The Manifesto members no longer needed invitation or reason. They came. They created. They argued, grieved, celebrated, documented.
And in the heart of this growing chaos stood Shaan.
To outsiders, Shaan Khan was a contradiction—graffiti artist by night, art teacher by day, atheist raised by an imam, revolutionary with a paint-splattered backpack and an Instagram he refused to promote. At twenty-nine, he had lived four lifetimes: art school dropout, protest poster designer, political prisoner (briefly), and, more recently, underground muralist whose stencils appeared across Delhi with cryptic quotes from poets most people had never heard of.
He didn’t speak much during the early Manifesto meetings. He preferred to sketch while others read. You’d find him with a worn-out Moleskine notebook, pencil smudges on his cheeks, headphones around his neck with nothing playing. But when he finally shared his work, it shook the room.
One evening, Tara found a folded poster tucked into a poetry anthology. Unfolding it revealed an image of a woman in a sari holding a burning book in one hand and a lotus in the other. The caption below read:
“You will not erase us. We write in ash.”
Noor recognized the image instantly—it was based on her character Zehra.
“I’ve been painting her all over Connaught Place,” Shaan said quietly. “But nobody knows who she is. Yet.”
The group sat in stunned silence.
That was when they realized: Shaan was writing too. Not with words, but with walls.
Every week, he’d appear with new sketches inspired by something someone had read at Paperweight. A line from Arjun’s song turned into a mural in Saket. A phrase from Tara’s essay—“History is written by survivors, not saviors”—showed up scrawled across a college footbridge in Jamia. Noor’s dystopian constellations lit up in neon pink above a crumbling overpass near Hauz Khas Village.
His work was anonymous. Dangerous. Bold.
And it was beginning to get noticed.
A left-leaning cultural magazine published a blurred photo of one of his murals with the headline: “The Street Artist Behind Delhi’s Literary Rebellion.” The article made no direct mention of Paperweight, but within days, the bookstore saw three unfamiliar visitors posing as customers. Mr. Seth’s instincts were sharp—he closed the shop early that Saturday and warned the group: “Be brilliant, but be careful. They notice brilliance.”
Still, Shaan refused to slow down. “Art is resistance,” he said. “If we hide, we’re agreeing to be invisible.”
Tara challenged him. “But what if they come for you next? Or Noor? What if Paperweight gets raided?”
“I’ve already been arrested once,” he shrugged. “I survived. What’s the point of freedom if we don’t use it to pull others out of cages?”
Noor said nothing, but she pressed a new zine into his hand that night. It featured her second story: “The Girl Who Drew Fire.”
It was inspired by him.
A few days later, a massive mural appeared near the Red Fort. It depicted a girl painting on prison bars, turning them into birds. Below it, in delicate Urdu calligraphy, Shaan had written:
“Kahaniyon mein azaadi rehti hai.”
(Freedom lives in stories.)
The mural went viral.
And then came the backlash.
Within 48 hours, it was whitewashed. Police filed a complaint under the Delhi Prevention of Defacement of Property Act. Trolls flooded social media with threats. A right-wing TV channel aired a segment titled: “Urban Naxals Use Street Art to Spread Anti-National Agendas.”
Shaan disappeared for three days.
Arjun was the first to panic. “He’s not answering texts.”
Tara visited his flat near Nizamuddin, but the landlord said he hadn’t returned since Monday.
Noor checked with an old contact in the legal aid group she volunteered for.
And then, just as silently as he had vanished, Shaan walked into Paperweight on Thursday night—soaked in sweat, eyes bloodshot, a deep cut across his arm.
They didn’t ask where he’d been. Only Mr. Seth said softly, “The city doesn’t like mirrors, son. Especially ones that show its cracks.”
Shaan smiled bitterly. “Good. I’ll keep drawing them wider.”
From then on, he started signing his murals. Not with his name—but with a symbol: a stylized open book with flames rising from the center.
It became The Manifesto’s unofficial logo.
And the movement, once invisible, was now marked.
Marked by fire.
4
Before Arjun Kaul became the accidental bard of a literary rebellion, he had been something far more ordinary—a boy who ran from silence.
He grew up in a house where emotions were folded away like laundry—tidy, hidden, and never quite clean. His father, a retired army officer, believed in discipline, not dreams. His mother, once a theatre actress, had long since quieted her own stage to become the ideal homemaker. Together, they had a son they couldn’t quite understand—a boy who scribbled lyrics in math textbooks, who cried during ghazals, who walked out of his engineering entrance exam halfway through and never explained why.
By twenty-one, Arjun was estranged from the version of himself his parents had built. He lived in a paying guest room in Lajpat Nagar, survived by playing guitar at overpriced cafes, and wrote lyrics like he was stitching wounds only he could see.
It was in that exile that he found Paperweight. And later, The Manifesto.
Unlike Tara or Noor, Arjun didn’t claim political clarity. His rebellion wasn’t as sharp as Shaan’s, or as principled as Mr. Seth’s. He didn’t trust movements. He didn’t believe in leaders. What he believed in was voice—raw, aching, unfinished. His songs weren’t meant to inspire. They were meant to echo what people were too afraid to say aloud.
That spring, when Shaan’s murals began to vanish under government paint, Arjun responded not with slogans, but with a song.
It was called “Chalte Rehna”—a slow, broken melody that began with a single chord and ended in layered harmonies, like footsteps walking away from grief. He played it one night at the rooftop of Paperweight, and the silence that followed was more powerful than applause.
Tara recorded it on her phone and posted it to a small literary Instagram account.
By morning, it had 20,000 views.
Two days later, it had 300,000.
By the end of the week, The Manifesto had gone viral.
It was exhilarating—and terrifying.
Suddenly, Paperweight was no longer just a sanctuary. It was a symbol. Articles began to appear—”The Young Voices Redefining Delhi’s Literary Landscape”… “The Poets of Protest”… “From Bookstore to Movement.”
Arjun found himself tagged in posts by strangers. His lyrics quoted on posters. His face, half-lit in the rooftop video, now circulating in forums that rarely cared about poetry.
And then came the email.
It arrived late at night. No subject line. Just a scanned image of an old college magazine. Arjun’s face was on the cover, younger, cleaner, smiling. The headline read:
“Student Lyricist Wins Campus Anthem Contest”
But what mattered was the byline beneath it.
His real name.
Arjun Kaul had dropped his surname when he joined Paperweight. Not to hide, but to become something else—someone whose voice didn’t carry the weight of lineage, of caste, of expectations.
He hadn’t told the group. Not even Tara.
Now, someone knew.
The message was clear.
We see you.
The email was followed by a string of hateful comments on the song video—some attacking his “fake secularism,” others accusing The Manifesto of being “urban terrorists with guitars.”
He considered deleting everything. Fading back into the anonymity of Delhi’s overpopulated music scene. He even stopped showing up at Paperweight for a few days.
It was Tara who dragged him back.
She came to his flat unannounced, marched past the empty beer bottles and posters on the wall, and sat down beside him.
“We don’t get to walk away, Arjun,” she said. “Not when others are risking more just to be heard.”
He didn’t speak. He stared at his guitar like it was mocking him.
“You told me once,” she continued, “that music isn’t about saving the world. Just making someone feel less alone in it. Well—guess what. You’ve done that. And now they’re trying to scare you into silence.”
She stood. “You of all people should know what silence does.”
That night, he picked up his guitar again.
But something had changed.
His new songs were no longer soft. They carried teeth. He began to mix traditional raagas with protest chants, folk riffs with rage. He performed live at The Manifesto’s first public event—Shaam-e-Inquilab, an evening of readings, music, and resistance held at a closed-down cinema hall in Old Delhi.
He opened with a song titled “Naam-Mat-Poochho”—a defiant anthem for those forced to justify their existence.
The crowd stood.
Some wept.
And backstage, Mr. Seth whispered to Tara, “I haven’t heard this kind of fire since the Emergency.”
That night, Arjun didn’t hide his name. He sang it loud.
“My name is Arjun Kaul. I write songs that won’t kneel.”
Outside, on a crumbling wall near the entrance, someone had painted Shaan’s now-famous logo—an open book ablaze.
The fire had spread.
5
Tara Sen had always believed that she could live in both worlds.
In one world, she was a doctoral candidate at one of Delhi’s most prestigious universities, specializing in postcolonial literature. She taught first-year English students how to analyze Achebe and Naipaul. Her research was crisp, methodical, filled with annotated footnotes and passive-aggressive debates with dead white critics. Her professors called her brilliant. Her peers called her intense.
In the other world, she was the beating heart of The Manifesto.
At Paperweight, Tara was anything but academic. She cursed. She cried during poetry. She painted protest banners in her roommate’s bathtub and led zine-making workshops with anarchist artists. It was Tara who wrote the Manifesto’s original declaration—a furious essay handwritten on kraft paper and pinned above the register, opening with:
“We are not here to ask for space. We are here to reclaim it.”
She lived on coffee and confrontation, switching between lectures on literary theory and meetings about underground publishing. But even fire needs boundaries. And Tara had always been careful. The university didn’t know about Paperweight. Her department didn’t know she was publishing radical essays under pseudonyms. She knew how brittle tenure-track dreams could be.
Until the morning she was summoned to the Head of Department’s office.
Dr. Raghavan, a man who wore tweed in May and referred to students as “young minds,” handed her a printed PDF. “Someone forwarded this to the Vice Chancellor,” he said, his voice dry. “Apparently, it’s gone viral among the student bodies.”
Tara scanned the page. It was her recent essay from the zine Inkstorm, titled “Decolonizing the Curriculum is Not a Panel Discussion”. She had published it under the name TS Firebird—a wink to her initials and a nod to the bookstore that had become her sanctuary.
“We cannot have faculty members writing… incendiary literature,” Raghavan continued. “This reads more like a manifesto than academic criticism.”
“That’s because it is,” Tara replied.
“Are you confirming you wrote it?”
She hesitated.
And then said: “Yes.”
The silence that followed was surgical.
“You’re free to express your views,” he said at last. “But do remember—institutions have walls. And those walls have rules.”
She left the office with a formal warning letter and the taste of betrayal in her mouth.
That night at Paperweight, she slammed the letter on the table. Shaan read it silently. Arjun muttered, “Cowards.” Noor just looked at her, concerned.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Tara replied. “Part of me feels stupid for risking everything. Another part feels like—this is the most honest thing I’ve ever done.”
Mr. Seth, who had been dusting off an old typewriter in the corner, walked over slowly and said, “You know, when I was your age, I published a banned pamphlet against the Emergency. I lost my job at the press. Slept on library floors for six months.”
Tara looked up.
“Worth it?” she asked.
He nodded. “Still the best thing I ever wrote.”
That night, Tara made a choice.
She returned to her university email, opened a blank message addressed to the department, and attached a copy of The Manifesto’s declaration—signed with her real name.
Subject line: “For the Record.”
Then she shut her laptop and went downstairs.
There, on the main table, were thirty new chapbooks being stapled and folded by Arjun and Noor. Each featured excerpts from members of The Manifesto—a growing chorus of unheard voices: queer students from small towns, young women from conservative families, poets from the Northeast, autodidact rickshaw drivers, and first-gen readers.
Tara picked up a copy.
The title on the cover read:
“Footnotes That Refused to Be Footnotes.”
She smiled.
She was no longer trying to live in two worlds.
She was writing a new one.
6
Most people assumed Mr. Seth had always been old.
It wasn’t just the grey beard or the reading glasses hanging on a jute string around his neck. It was the way he walked slowly through the aisles of Paperweight, pausing like each book might whisper something. It was the way he seemed to know everything—and everyone—without ever raising his voice.
But Mr. Seth had not always been a bookseller.
Before Paperweight, he had been a printer. Before that, a typesetter. Before that, just a boy in Karol Bagh, learning calligraphy from his grandfather on weekends and sneaking stolen copies of banned poetry into hostel rooms.
In 1976, during the height of the Emergency, he was twenty-two.
That year, Delhi’s air was thick with suspicion. Radio stations played patriotic music on loop. Censorship boards swept through newspaper offices like vultures. Activists vanished overnight. Every wall seemed to echo with silence.
Mr. Seth—then simply Ravi—worked at a small press that printed religious calendars by day and revolutionary pamphlets by night. He was part of an underground network that distributed literature banned by the state: essays on civil rights, prison memoirs, translated socialist manifestos.
The operation was dangerous. Every delivery carried risk. Every letter in movable type was a gamble with freedom.
One night in October, plainclothes officers raided the press.
Ravi was arrested.
He spent seven months in Tihar Jail.
He was never formally charged. Never tried. But he shared a cell with poets, painters, student leaders, and one blind musician who composed resistance songs in Sanskrit and whispered them to anyone who’d listen.
When Ravi was released, the city had changed. His press was shut. His parents had moved away. His friends had scattered or gone silent.
So he started over.
He bought an old building in Daryaganj with whatever savings he had left, filled it with books salvaged from closed libraries, and named it Paperweight—a nod to something small, solid, and impossible to blow away.
He never advertised.
But slowly, the seekers came.
Now, decades later, Paperweight had become home to a new revolution.
That night, after Tara sent her email to the university and Arjun sang his defiant anthem, the Manifesto members gathered around the old wooden table with a stack of new zines and a pile of samosas.
“Tell us a story,” Noor said, nudging Mr. Seth.
“A real one.”
He smiled gently, folded his spectacles, and began.
“I once printed a poem so dangerous that we had to disguise it as a laundry bill,” he said.
Everyone leaned in.
“It was called ‘Andolan ke Baad’—After the Uprising. Written by a poet who disappeared before I could meet him. We printed two thousand copies, rolled them into old newspapers, and sent them through vendors selling pakoras near Rajghat. They never caught us.”
“Do you still have it?” Shaan asked.
Mr. Seth nodded. “Of course. Some stories don’t belong to time. They belong to memory.”
He stood, unlocked a dusty cabinet in the corner, and returned with a yellowed sheet of paper, wrapped in cloth.
As he unwrapped it, the group fell silent.
The poem was written in ink that had faded, but not disappeared. The last stanza read:
“We wrote not with pens, but with veins.
History will forget our names—
But not our stains.”
Tara traced the lines with her fingers.
“This was your Manifesto,” she said.
Mr. Seth smiled. “No. This is ours. It always was.”
Later that night, they hung the poem above the register, next to the new declaration.
Below it, Noor scribbled in red ink:
“Legacy isn’t what you leave behind. It’s what you light on fire.”
And somewhere in Delhi, on the wall of a metro station, a new mural appeared the next morning.
It showed a hand holding a paperweight—on fire, glowing like an ember.
And beneath it, the words:
“This is not nostalgia. This is warning.”
7
Noor Rehman had always believed in brightness.
She believed in bright colors, bright voices, bright graffiti. Her sketchbooks were full of sunbursts and fists, broken chains and blooming lotuses. Even when drawing something painful, she used color like a dare—daring sorrow to stay vibrant, to stay alive.
She was twenty, a Fine Arts student at Jamia, and the only child of a family that didn’t understand her.
Her father was a conservative lawyer who wore crisp white kurtas and quoted the Constitution like scripture—only the parts that suited him. Her mother had once been a kathak dancer, but now wore silence like a second skin. Noor had spent her teenage years tiptoeing around her own thoughts, doodling revolutions in the margins of her notebooks, knowing she’d never show them at home.
So when she found Paperweight, she fell in love the way people do with places that feel like permission.
She joined The Manifesto not as a writer, but as a visual storyteller. She designed zine covers, made charcoal posters, painted faces onto walls and fingers onto fists. Her art never screamed. It sang. Sometimes, painfully. Sometimes, full of joy. Always honest.
But love has a cost.
And truth has a habit of arriving uninvited.
It came to Noor one afternoon in the form of an email with the subject line:
“Please Explain.”
It was from her cousin Faizan, a final-year law student at her father’s firm. Attached were screenshots from The Manifesto’s Instagram account. Her drawings. Her signature.
The caption beneath one piece read:
“To be brown, female, and fearless is not a crime.”
Faizan’s message was short:
“Your father doesn’t know yet. But he will. Thought you should be the one to tell him first.”
Noor stared at the screen, heart thudding.
In one version of her life, she deleted everything. She lied. She said it was someone else using her name. She let the fear win.
In another, she breathed.
And called her father.
The conversation began quietly.
“Abbu,” she said, voice tight. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
It ended with a door slammed so hard, the house shook.
“You think drawing angry girls on walls makes you a hero?” he shouted. “You think hiding behind some bookstore of misfits will protect you when the state decides to crack down?”
“They’re not misfits,” she replied. “They’re truth-tellers.”
“They’re fools,” he barked. “And you’re behaving like one.”
She left that night with a single bag, her sketchbook, and the phone still buzzing with unread messages.
Mr. Seth offered her the upstairs room in Paperweight. It smelled of paper and sandalwood and old stories. She slept on a mattress surrounded by books, her drawings taped to the cracked walls.
And in that cracked space, something solid began to grow.
Noor’s next piece was different.
It wasn’t angry.
It was tender.
A mural across the back wall of Paperweight: a girl with a cracked heart holding a pen like a sword. Around her swirled books like shields, poems like wings.
Tara cried when she saw it.
Arjun took a photo and made it the cover of their next issue.
Shaan titled it: “Still Here.”
But the most unexpected response came a week later.
A note, handwritten in Urdu, slipped under the door.
“I don’t agree with everything you say. But I’ve never been more proud to call you my daughter.
—Ammi.”
Noor stared at the paper for a long time.
Then picked up a paintbrush.
The new mural would be titled “Permission.”
8
Anik Sen had never intended to become a police officer.
He wanted to be a history teacher. Maybe write a book someday. But growing up in a two-room house in Ghaziabad, the pressure was never about dreams—it was about security. His father, a retired constable, used to say:
“If the world won’t give you a seat, wear the badge that makes them stand.”
So Anik passed the entrance exam, memorized penal codes, mastered protocol.
But none of that prepared him for the silence inside the academy dorm at night.
That’s when he read.
He didn’t tell anyone—not his roommates, not his instructors—that he had created a fake Instagram account under the name @InkDrifter and started following The Manifesto.
He was first drawn in by the artwork. Then the poems. Then the stories—raw and brave, often anonymous, but full of something he couldn’t name: unpermissioned truth.
Late at night, after drills and law lectures, Anik would lie in his narrow bunk reading zine pages on his cracked phone screen.
One post hit him like a slap:
“Discipline is not justice.
Obedience is not peace.
Silence is not safety.”
He screenshotted it. Read it three nights in a row. Something shifted inside him.
He began sneaking into the academy library, checking out banned books—translated memoirs from Kashmir, feminist essays by firebrand authors, accounts of student protests.
One day, while doing a field assignment in Old Delhi, he passed a small, vine-covered bookstore with no signboard.
A strange heat crept through him.
Paperweight.
He had seen it tagged a hundred times on The Manifesto’s posts. Now it stood in front of him, real and unassuming.
He didn’t go inside.
But he returned two nights later.
He wore plain clothes. A borrowed scarf. Kept his head down and browsed the front shelf for ten minutes before picking a thin volume titled Letters They Tried to Burn.
The woman behind the counter—Tara—looked at him closely. “First time?”
He nodded.
“You don’t have to be sure to belong,” she said gently, wrapping the book.
He left without saying anything.
That night, back in the dorm, he read every word. And wept.
A week later, he returned.
This time he bought three books. Left with two flyers. And a note tucked into the final page of one volume, handwritten in uneven script:
“You are not your badge.
You are the stories you choose to hear.”
But nothing prepared him for what happened next.
One afternoon, during a briefing, the deputy superintendent handed him a sealed file marked:
“SUBVERSIVE WATCH: PAPERWEIGHT BOOKSTORE.”
Inside were photographs. Names. Surveillance summaries.
Tara Sen. Arjun Lal. Noor Rehman. Shaan Ayyub.
Mr. R. Seth.
Anik’s hands trembled.
A directive followed: monitor social media, track visitor activity, submit weekly summaries.
He stared at the folder as if it were a bomb.
That night, he returned to Paperweight. He didn’t go inside. He just stood across the street, frozen.
Then, something unexpected happened.
Noor stepped out with a stack of posters.
She spotted him. Walked over slowly.
“You’ve been watching us for weeks,” she said softly.
Anik looked away.
“Here,” she said, holding out a poster. “If you’re going to spy, at least read the whole thing.”
He took it with trembling fingers.
She smiled—sad, not angry. “Sometimes the only way out of the machine is to know you’re inside it.”
Then she turned and walked away.
The next morning, Anik placed the folder on his supervisor’s desk—with a typed note:
“Respectfully recusing myself from this assignment due to personal conflict of interest.”
He knew the consequences would follow.
But for once, he didn’t care.
That evening, in the quiet of his bunk, he unfolded the poster Noor had given him.
Across the page, in bold brushstrokes, it read:
“A story doesn’t stop being true just because someone’s afraid to hear it.”
Anik whispered the words out loud.
Then he picked up a pen.
And wrote the first story he hadn’t been allowed to tell.
9
It started with a podcast.
A well-known indie radio host named Meher Joshi aired an episode called “Paperweight: Where Delhi’s Quietest Bookstore Became Its Loudest Voice.”
She had visited The Manifesto anonymously, sat through a reading, bought a zine, spoken to Mr. Seth, and left with a mind spinning and a mic still recording.
The episode was less than thirty minutes. But it went viral.
In it, Meher called The Manifesto “a literary heartbeat in a city that often skips its own rhythm.” She quoted Tara’s declaration, played Arjun’s spoken-word anthem in the outro, and ended by saying:
“In an age where outrage is currency, this is something different. This is resistance without permission. This is poetry in the language of survival.”
Within forty-eight hours:
The zine’s subscriber list tripled.
Journalists began hovering outside Paperweight.
A youth wing of a ruling party filed a complaint alleging “anti-national propaganda disguised as literature.”
And three days later, the raid came.
It was a Thursday evening. Shaan was hosting a community sketch night. Arjun was organizing print layouts on the mezzanine. Tara was reading Neruda near the window. Mr. Seth had just brewed his third pot of tea.
They heard the boots before they saw the badges.
Seven officers. Black folders. A warrant vaguely citing “public disorder via unlicensed publication.” Two uniformed men carried empty boxes.
Tara stood first. “What exactly are you looking for?”
The lead officer—a tall man with a blank expression—replied: “Material that incites unrest.”
Shaan laughed, too loudly. “We’re a bookstore. We incite reading.”
They didn’t laugh back.
The officers rifled through shelves. Opened drawers. Took laptops. Flipped through zines like they were grenades.
Mr. Seth stayed calm. “We are a registered cooperative,” he said. “We pay taxes. We hold permits for distribution.”
The officer smirked. “Ideas don’t need permits.”
“Neither does truth,” Noor muttered.
When they tried to seize the mural boards Noor had painted, she stepped in. “They’re art.”
“They’re evidence,” came the reply.
Tara pulled out her phone, went live on Instagram, and said simply:
“The state is here. They’re looking for stories. Let’s make sure they find all of us.”
Within minutes, the livestream was being shared across platforms.
The video ended with a shot of Arjun—arms raised, smiling, defiant—as he shouted into the camera:
“This isn’t the end. This is the printing press waking up.”
When the officers finally left, two hours later, the shop looked ransacked.
The typewriter was gone. The manifesto board had been pulled from the wall. Even the kettle was confiscated.
But the people stayed.
That night, nearly forty of them showed up. Some brought chai. Others brought candles. They sat on the floor. On cushions. On crates.
Noor started painting again. This time directly on the floorboards.
Mr. Seth recited the banned poem he had once hidden in a laundry bill.
Tara read from Letters They Tried to Burn.
Outside, cameras blinked. A journalist shouted, “Is this a protest or a performance?”
Tara looked up.
“It’s a page,” she said. “We’re still writing it.”
By midnight, the hashtag #WeAreTheManifesto was trending.
Across the country, other bookstores began printing the declaration. Libraries in Chennai, Pune, and Shillong displayed zine covers in their reading rooms. A cafe in Kolkata offered free coffee to anyone carrying a Manifesto printout.
But with visibility came danger.
Three members received anonymous threats.
Tara’s university issued a second warning.
Mr. Seth got a call from an old friend who said, quietly, “Watch your step. They’re not done.”
But it was too late for fear.
The Manifesto had already moved beyond paper.
It had become a movement.
10
The bookstore was quieter than usual.
The dust motes hung thick in the afternoon sun slanting through the tall windows. The walls still bore faint scars of the raid — patches where paint had peeled, plaster cracked. The chairs had been rearranged in a circle. A microphone stood at the center, blinking softly.
The Manifesto members had gathered one last time.
Not because they were defeated.
Because the story wasn’t over.
Tara stepped forward first, her voice steady but soft.
“This is for all the voices that were hushed,” she said. “For the ones who came before us and the ones who will come after.”
She read aloud from a letter addressed to them, sent by a poet from Kashmir, who had never been able to visit Paperweight but whose words had traveled the miles:
“We are the stories
that refused to end.
The ink that outlasted fear.
You are not alone.
Keep writing.”
One by one, they shared poems, paintings, songs, and silent prayers.
Noor unveiled a new mural — a phoenix made from torn pages, rising from blackened embers.
Arjun sang softly, his voice threading through the room like a promise.
Mr. Seth closed his eyes and spoke from memory:
“The past is not a place of rest,
but a battleground.
And every word we write,
every line we print,
is a weapon.
A beacon.
A beginning.”
As twilight deepened, a courier arrived with an envelope addressed to The Manifesto.
Tara opened it carefully.
Inside was a handwritten note on crisp paper:
“To the brave keepers of stories —
Though the world tries to silence you, know this:
your words have already rewritten history.
We stand with you —
from Srinagar to Chennai,
from every hidden corner where hope burns quietly.
Keep the flame alive.
— A Friend in the Shadows”*
Tears glistened in many eyes.
It was not an end.
It was a beginning.
As they blew out the candles, the glow lingered.
Outside, Delhi’s skyline glittered with millions of lights.
And somewhere, a new page was being written.
END
