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Stolen Strawberries

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The road to Mahabaleshwar curled through misty hills like a ribbon, and Saarth leaned against the car window, his hoodie pulled tight around his face. He wasn’t sure why he had agreed to Rishi’s invitation. Maybe because the city had become unbearable. His nineteen-year-old life was becoming a burden. Every corner reminded him of Aarya, the girl who had left him for someone, she claimed understood her better. He had replayed their last fight a hundred times: her voice trembling, his silence louder than any scream. She had accused him of being too detached, too lost in his own world of music and unfinished poems. He had wanted to tell her that detachment was the only way he knew to survive, but the words never came. Now, every song he wrote felt like a ghost of her, every line a wound he couldn’t stitch. By afternoon his group reached Rishi’s sprawling farmhouse and almost immediately all of them stripped and jumped into the pool.   Saisha arrived at the farmhouse later that e...
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The Voice That Stayed

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In the second standard class room of Pune Municipal Corporation’s, Marathi school number 22 sat nine year old Meena Raut, her oiled hair tied in two uneven plaits, their elastic bands frayed from repeated use. Her uniform was faded from repeated washing, the hem stitched twice by her mother. She lived with her mother in a cramped one‑room kitchen tenement in Satav Wadi, a neighborhood for the under privileged, pressed between the bustle of Gokhale Nagar and the once quieter lanes of Model Colony. The walls of their house were painted once in pale blue, but years of smoke from the kerosene stove had turned them into a patchwork of soot and peeling paint. A single bulb provided yellow light, hung from a wire, flickering whenever the electricity dipped, which was often. Her mother worked as a domestic helper in the nearby apartments of Model Colony, scrubbing floors and washing utensils. Meena’s father had once been the watchman of a small commercial building near Fergusson College Road...
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