This August, bask in the warm glow of friendship with Spark’s latest issue! Featuring poetry, fiction and non-fiction, the issue covers friendships of many kinds: the childhood ones, the ones that pull us through tough times, or that we struggle to define.
Shwetha’s poem depicts an innocent friendship between two children that eventually goes awry due to the socioeconomic cynicism exhibited by a group of adults.
How does one define the space between friendship and love? In this story by Meera Raja, Vidya wonders what it might be like to cross this space and imagine a new life for herself.
Chandramohan Nair recollects his two years at a French-medium school in Brussels when his struggles of coping with a new culture and language were greatly eased by some wonderfully supportive classmates.
Bhuvana Sri’s poem is about those true friends who are always there for you in the darkest of times, and the joy of realising that you are not alone.
What does it mean to enter a house as a pet kitten and break into the circle of friendship forged by four older cats living there? Anupama Krishnakumar’s story tells you more.
Nighat teaches the story’s narrator how to make tea, and friendship blossoms, with tea at the centre of it all – until they meet again, seventeen years later. Vani tells the story.
True friendship is an eternal bond that surpasses seasons and distance. Amrutha Mohan’s poem talks about different stages of a precious comradeship – the childhood innocence, separation and reunion of old friends – and yokes it with different seasons.
Praveena’s story describes a troubled mind that finds succour in a relationship so deep that it is hard to delineate the real from the imagined, where friendship is more unspoken than spoken and experiences more dependent on than independent of reality