Inaugural Note

Room 16 is as much a product of love as it is of longing.
At the moment, our beloved Room 16 is empty. It is marked with the traces of farewells not given, welcomes left uncelebrated, and conversations ended abruptly. This magazine is an attempt to make whole all the things we left incomplete and to feel closer to each other, if not physically, then through our words and imagined worlds.

The theme of this issue is Kissagoi.
Once upon a time, we built a room of our own. A room made especially to house stories which had hitherto been lurking in the woods. They would scamper homeless, through the rustling leaves; they would slumber dreamless in the roots of trees. They blew about with the summer breeze and sometimes, clung to the fallen petals of bougainvilleas. No one ever knew them because they lived unremembered little lives, invisible to memory. The woods teemed with the silence of stories untold.
Remembered and forgotten, fictional and real, selcouth and quotidian – the stories would, then, narrate themselves each night, after their tellers were gone. The empty room buzzed with the words left behind. The stories told themselves! Picking a word here, exchanging a phrase there, they retold themselves all over again, un-re-membering their original forms. And, in this flexibility and fluidity of form, the stories lived happily ever after in the narrative of our room.
-By Shreya Sharma

M.A. II Year
(Founder and Editor- Room 16 Magazine)