Hands was conceived as a response to the sexual abuse that women and men often tolerate silently. The poem also highlights the fact that abusers are often trusted family members or friends. I wanted to bring out the repetitive pattern of such abuse, and instead of using several verses, I preferred to follow a ‘mirror’ structure. I believe that form plays an important role in how we perceive a text. The arrangement of words and lines is particularly powerful in poetry. I was also conscious about using the present tense since it helps convey that such incidents are constant, ongoing, and irrefutably prevalent in our time.

Pervin writes poetry, fiction, and screenplays, and is the author of a collection of poetry titled A Tinge of Turmeric. She also conducts writing workshops for children and works with teachers to integrate stories within classrooms.

I’ve always been fascinated by those neurological disorders that cause a person to feel a part of their body isn’t theirs any more. They will go to bed as normal, and wake up screaming that there’s a severed leg in bed with them, for example. It’s their own leg, physically; they’re still attached to it. But in their mind they’re completely disconnected from it. And then there’s the even more extreme case of Alien Hand Syndrome—where the hand develops ‘a mind of its own’; does things without its person’s permission. What if these parts don’t have a mind of their own? What if the mind is not disconnected from them? What if it’s not the body parts, but a part of the self we’ve disconnected from? And what if that part of the self is the one still connected to the body?

Leonora works in advertising, and lives mostly inside her head, where she likes to store things that don’t make sense and maybe turn them into stories.

Inheritance came to me backwards, I suppose. I was going through a difficult phase in life—far away from home and friends, lonely, struggling with work, wondering every day if I could run away. And one day I took that speculation a little too far—what if I did run away? What would happen next? What would fill the void I’d leave in my place; what would I find when I returned? Then I put characters around that thought, and the story was born.

Monidipa lives in Calcutta. She writes a blog at julychildren.com.

Pool House might appear to be about romance (or the squandering of it), but it isn’t. It’s about the unassailable ‘why’ and the ‘why is this happening’, and how adultery is a consequence of many disheartening questions we just can’t answer. We try to shoebox our understanding of things that are beyond our control, and it never amounts to anything but further complexity. Character arises when we make decisions in the face of these questions; it makes you different from me, and so on.
Yet, I am Ray (the seeming protagonist) for a few mistakes, and you must be, too. He tries to find hope in the arms of someone subtle and thoughtful, but it’s his innate thoughtfulness that makes him weak. He keeps dreaming of idyll, but the girl sitting by the pool never thinks about that. She doesn’t think about things like this, or that. She doesn’t suffer consequence. Right?
At least—that’s what I think it’s about.

Armaan enjoys travel and the mountains. He recently started a clothing brand called UFF!, and is close to completing his first book, a work of fiction.

Not long before the deadline for Vol. 4 of Helter Skelter’s New Writing anthology, I sat staring at the distressed sheets and wonky pillow on my screen, willing them to translate into poetic form. I was fighting a losing battle with the exhaustion of city life, and pretty soon I was comfortably tucked into my own warm sheets, gratefully submitting to the pull of the surface that my mum, with her newly-broken foot, was trying her best to resist. It was then that Seven walked into my head, fully formed—an account of a week in the life of someone confined to the four corners of their bed.

Like most twenty-somethings, Mahithi is a compulsive reader, closet writer, and avid crafter. She works as a sub-editor by day and pores over travel guides by night.

My story emerges from an asphyxiating fear of motherhood and responsibility. While that may make me sound immature, it is the idea of being responsible for another human life that scares the soul out of me. Comfort reflects my own need for liberty, coupled with a touch of insanity. Amritika is a symbol of everything I have ever feared becoming. Hopefully, this will serve as a cathartic exercise.

Shreya is rethinking her dedication to academia and trying to figure out the secret to personal sanity. Currently, writing seems like the only activity that offers both inspiration and catharsis.

To be completely honest, I can’t remember why or how I wrote my story. I just looked at the visual cue provided, and a couple of hours later I had words on my screen. I guess this is one of those things that writers don't like questioning. But for what it’s worth, I’d like to believe there’s a giant box of ideas somewhere out there, and if you’re lucky it’ll let you peek inside.

C. G. Salamander has published two comics and his work has appeared in Mint. His first book, Palm’s Foster Home for Peculiar Stories, is expected to release later this year.

Until well into my teenage years, I collected all the greeting cards that were delivered home, during birthdays and wedding anniversaries and year-end holidays. It was a habit—in more indulgent moments, I like calling it a hobby—I picked up from my brother, older than me by almost a decade. Horses riding on silver (how excited a child can get by the sight of glitter) snow, pop-up scenes from old forests, joyous frolicking animals toppling over each other, once in a while a hand-drawn card; we collected a sizeable number over the years. As if it were a game, I spent hours arranging and rearranging them.
I hinged my poem on the idea of remembering lived experiences as a means of filling up empty—often sleepless—hours. When sleep proves elusive, I sometimes watch animated T.V. shows from years ago; on more lively nights, I sprint around my apartment complex—my parents once tried getting me to run every morning to get me to exercise. Sometimes I take out the pile of cards, and perhaps out of an obsessive-compulsive streak or just out of habit, I still reshuffle their order.

Sohini changes cities every few years, prefers writing to speaking, likes pretty boxes, dislikes curios, and hoards books and pirated T.V. serials.

I wrote Izmir as an exploration of the Turkish city. Lucas is rediscovering himself, and he does this through the medium of place and people. He stays with an old friend, revisits their past, and realises new things about his life. He is an outsider in Izmir, but he is also accepted—by the people, the warmth, the distractions. It's almost as if he is alive after a long time. While writing this story, I was inspired by the fact that a simple change of circumstances can unearth many possibilities; it can propel a character like Lucas onto a journey of restoration.

Avantika works at Dorling Kindersley where she edits travel guides for a living. In her spare time, she writes fiction and travels.

I write in secret. In shame. When I write I create new worlds, new identities of myself, new copies of others I know. It is difficult to have people read them and know of these identities and know me. The thing I like most about A Wednesday’s Letter is The Bird. The Bird is the voice that everybody has in them; this conflicting, contradictory voice which picks at your wounds while encouraging you to do better. The poem is about this world that a person leaves in their wake and the constant negotiation; a reconciliation of the past with the present. This poem is my ‘Bird’.

Sindhoora is almost 19 and wants to grow up to be awesome. A student of English literature, she divides her time between nibbling at books and pecking at music.

Death Bed is part of a series of short stories I wrote about women who are mothers. The mothers in my stories do not conform to popular ideas of motherhood: they are fierce, they are adulterous, they break through religious chauvinism, and are conniving. These first-person accounts walk you through the minds of women who just happen to be mothers. The underlying passions of these women supersede any motherly ideals and they are truly revolutionary. The mother in Death Bed is perhaps the fiercest of them all.

Aruna is a reluctant N.R.I. who writes to keep herself afloat. Based temporarily in a golden cage, she enjoys cliches, her own cooking, and dreams of flying back home.

There’s this definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Unturned explores this ‘stuck’-ness; and whether the wake-eat-work-play-sleep-lather-rinse-repeat routine of every day is because somewhere we don’t want things to change. Maybe we’re insane not because we expect a different result, but because we don’t.

Leonora works in advertising, and lives mostly inside her head, where she likes to store things that don’t make sense and maybe turn them into stories.

What struck me about the photograph (visual cue for Vol. 4) was the softness of the shadows made by the creases. There was a comfort in that and it made me think of how sometimes we can be consoled by things that are haphazard, things that are no longer in their right places and so on.

Sohini is from Barrackpore and currently studying in the U.K. One of the recipients of the inaugural RædLeaf India Poetry Prize, she was recently also shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize.