We asked our readers to tell us how they responded to any of the stories that appeared in December 2025.
- The Rain by Rajalakshmi N Rao
The world of 'The Rain' is intimate and oppressive: a couple who got married two years ago and have been, ever since, housebound by ceaseless rain. It's the rain that sets the mood, dominates the couple's thoughts and daily lives, and dictates their relationship. The wife personifies the rain as many different kinds of lover, male and female, naive and wily. She's wary of sharing these fanciful thoughts with her husband, who already calls her a 'stupid little girl' for filling up the time with reading.
Even in so short a story, the writer perfectly captures the setting. 'Invisible gray feathers' is a wonderful metaphor for the white noise of rain. 'Fierce downward thrust' aptly describes the oppression of loud and relentless rain.
We who have lived through Covid will immediately recognise this world: like Covid, the rain forces proximity and deters intimacy. And, long before Covid, I recognised a parallel paradox, something we've all surely also experienced: sometimes, it's with distant acquaintances, or even with strangers we'll never meet again, that intimate self-revelations seem easiest. Why? Maybe because intimacy is a gift we'd like to bestow on our own terms. The forced co-cloistering of endless rain, of a pandemic, or of long cohabitation seems to strip us of the choice that characterises the gift of intimacy.
So, when the rain in the story ends at last, the couple pretend to make light of it. But surely they, like the reader, are breathing a sigh of relief.
- Amita Basu
The Rain is a quiet, evocative story that uses rainfall as more than atmosphere, it becomes an emotional language. Beneath the gentle prose runs a deep sadness, rooted in the wife’s unspoken unhappiness within her marriage. Her discontent is subdued, almost habitual, making it feel inescapable rather than dramatic. The rain mirrors love in all its contradictions: tender yet intrusive, nourishing yet suffocating. It seeps into silences and routines, much like a marriage sustained without joy. What lingers is the ache of emotional distance. The sense that both rain and love arrive, persist, and leave their mark, whether welcome or not.
- Ashwini Shenoy
- Shiuli by Ratul Ghosh
It is sheer coincidence and Ratul's and my story in Issue 58 dealt with the same theme: Disappearence of the mother. What I wsa especially drawn to, was the mother-son dynamic, which felt deeply relatable to me: a son who believes he is already doing enough, and a mother who is quietly lost, doing nothing. By the end, their roles reverse—but perhaps a little too late.
- Vrinda Varma
An elderly woman vanishes from her home. Her grown son, the narrator, is berated by police and neighbours for not making more vigorous efforts to find her. He's perplexed by his own paralysis: 'I was a fly buzzing against glass, willing it to be air. I needed to escape to breathe.'
Was the woman demented, or was she overwhelmed by the various uprootings she'd recently experienced? The narrator's mother has been widowed; the ancestral house in Calcutta -- called Parijat, another name for shiuli or night-flowering jasmine -- has been sold; she has been forcibly transplanted to the dystopia of Bangalore during Covid. In this nuclear family, with her love for incense sticks, talcum powder, and deep-frying foods, she quickly becomes persona non grata. Confused and ineffectual, desperate to talk and to be useful -- she instead gets on everyone's nerves.
This portrait is instantly recognisable, evoking both pathos and irritation: an elderly person who feels useless, who longs for something to do, and whose desperate desire to be involved paradoxically repels her closest kin and thus deepens her own isolation. Like every good story, this one forces the reader to look with a closer and kinder eye at the people in our own lives.
Shiuli is my favourite flower: for the fragrance, and for the contrast between the cream-coloured petals and the vivid orange stalks. Shiuli serves as a metaphor for emotion at various stages of the story and backstory of this piece: among other things, it comes to symbolise ownership, loss, and resilience.
- Amita Basu
Select responses to stories in ISSUE 57 may be read here.
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