The Interview Before Morning

✒️Mrinmay Patgiri (UG 4th Semester)

It was 4.03 on a June morning. Summer had already arrived.

Aaita (Grandma) coughed in the room right next to me. The sound travelled through the red brick wall and stayed for a moment before disappearing into silence.

I was still awake. I had been awake for hours.

The chai beside me had gone cold. An Unfinished assignment flickered on the screen of my laptop, like a patient paralysed upon a table waiting for diagnosis. Flying termites moving in lazy, directionless circles around the tube light. Some of them already shed their wings. A lizard clung to the wall above them.

It also remained motionless.

Then one termite disappeared. Then another.

Outside the gates a group of woman passed on their morning walk, talking loudly enoughfor half of the neighbourhood to hear. The houses around ours still asleep, and the silence carried their words all the way to my window. They were talking about someone, as they always did. A name, a complaint, a burst of laughter. Then another story. By the time they reached the end of the lane, I could hear the voices but not their words. The assignment was still there, exactly where I left it, incomplete and ignored.

I checked the time.

4.06

Three minutes had passed. I leaned back at my chair and looked up. The fan was still turning. Its steady hum filled the room.

Lately, I seemed to belong to everything except myself. There were moments when I felt like I had almost no more of anything to share.

My time belonged to deadlines. My attention belonged to notifications. Even the person staring back at me from the mirror sometimes felt like a complete stranger.

I picked up the journal lying beside my laptop. A sentence had been highlighted in yellow:

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull”

I recognised it immediately, Orwell. I read it again. When I looked away, the silence in my room seemed deeper. Or perhaps I was.

When I looked up again, there appeared to be three man in my room. The room was no longer empty.

A man sat under the clock. Another stood by the window. The third leaned against the bookshelf , slowly turning the pages of a notebook. Nobody spoke. The man by the window looked as if he had come to challenge something. The man with the notebook looked as though he already understood. The man under the clock simply watched. I thought of classrooms, mirrors, strangers........Questions I had spent years preparing answers for. Question that never came.

I blinked.

The room was empty again.

I picked up my copy of 1984. The highlighted line was still there. The book’s pages almost got jaundiced by now, but I still loved the smell. I remembered buying it at Assam Book Fair last year.

A few minutes later, distracted as always. I reached for my phone. One reel became another. Then a reel popped up on my screen. A man was speaking. Behind his voice a familiar song played. "sing with me, sing for the years..." I listened. Outside, the night was gone. A new day had arrived .

The assignment was still waiting on the screen. The journal was still open.

The book remained where I had left it.

Somewhere down the road, a bicycle bell broke the morning silence. It caught my attention.

I put the phone down.

I turned off the light. Within minutes I was asleep.

The Diamond We Left Behind

✒️Sourav Jyoti Das (PG 4th Semester)

Mars Colony, 2095

The crowd erupted as the hundred-millionth citizen stepped onto Martian soil. Red deserts had become green plains. Artificial oceans reflected a blue sky. Children born on Mars had never worn oxygen masks. Humanity celebrated what historians called The Musk Revolution. A giant hologram of Elon Musk appeared above New Olympus City.

"We became a multi-planetary species."

The audience cheered.

Among them stood sixteen-year-old Leo. His history teacher had assigned an unusual project: Visit Earth.

A week later, Leo boarded a shuttle descending through Earth's atmosphere. What he saw shocked him.

The planet was beautiful.

Mountains pierced the clouds. Rivers wound through forests. Birds crossed the sky in enormous flocks. Sunlight danced across oceans that seemed endless. It was nothing like the stories. Growing up on Mars, he had been taught that Earth was old, crowded, and broken—a world humanity had wisely outgrown.

Yet standing beneath a giant banyan tree, breathing air that no machine had manufactured, Leo felt something strange: wonder.

His guide, an elderly woman, noticed his silence.

"First time on Earth?"

Leo nodded.

"It's... beautiful."

The woman smiled sadly.

"It always was."

They walked through a forest older than any city on Mars. Sunlight filtered through the leaves while a cool breeze carried the scent of soil and rain.

"Then why did everyone leave?" Leo asked.

She placed her hand against the rough bark of an ancient tree.

"Because we were searching for gold," she said softly.

Leo frowned. "What gold?"

"A bigger future. New worlds. New wealth."

She looked up at the vast green canopy above them.

"And while searching for gold, we forgot we were already standing on a diamond.”

Leo looked around.

The rivers.

The trees.

The birds.

The oceans.

A living world that had taken billions of years to create.

No engineer had built it. No corporation had funded it. No machine had manufactured it.

It was a miracle humanity had inherited for free.

That evening, Leo returned to Mars. The cities were magnificent. The technology was astonishing. The future was bright.

Yet for the first time, Mars felt artificial.

Before sleeping, he opened his journal and wrote:

"We crossed millions of kilometers to create another Earth. Perhaps the greatest mistake in human history was believing that Earth itself was not enough."

Outside his window, the lights of Mars sparkled like gold.

But in his heart, he could not stop thinking about the diamond.

Echoes from Endless Height

✒️ Jumi Talukdar (PG 4th Semester)

In her eight-by-ten foot room, Juli sat cross-legged on her unmade bed, watching the downpour that smashed against her window. The raindrops cascaded from the sky in heavy, relentless sheets, blurring the concrete jungle outside into a soft, impressionistic smudge of grey. A strange, absolute serenity covered the region. It was as if nature had drowned the city and had draped the world in a quiet blanket of rain. On her desk, the laptop screen blinked restlessly, casting a cold, artificial blue glow across her face. A barrage of bright notifications stacked up in the corner—urgent work emails demanding immediate replies, red bubbles from social media alerts, and endless group chats debating things that felt entirely trivial. Each ping felt like a tiny hook pulling her attention, a digital tether anchoring her to an exhausting, simulated reality. Juli leaned forward, staring at her own reflection wrapped in the dark glass of the screen, superimposed over a spreadsheet she had not closed. Looking into her own pixelated eyes, a hollow sensation settled in her chest. She questioned her existence, wondering who she truly was beyond those endless digital demands. Was she just an algorithm of productivity? A ghost operating a machine? A sudden wave of rebellion washed over her. She pressed her index finger against the power button. She held the button down, counting the seconds: one, two, three... The laptop screen flickered, gasped, and went entirely black. Instantly, the artificial blue light vanished, and the room grew dim, swallowed by the natural twilight of the storm. But as the screen died, the world outside came alive. The rhythmic drumming of the rain against the glass suddenly sounded sharper, clearer and infinitely deeper. The hum of the laptop cooling fan faded into nothingness, leaving only the beautiful, chaotic symphony of the downpour. For the first time in months, the endless static in her mind cleared. Juli closed her eyes, sank back against her pillows and finally took a breath.