Somewhere around two in the morning, while reading Sonarelle: Stories That Echo, I found myself standing in the kitchen holding a steel tumbler of water I had forgotten to drink. The refrigerator hummed softly. A stray dog barked somewhere outside the building. And for nearly a full minute, I simply stood there thinking about a fictional child staring through a cracked window, desperate to feel seen. That is the kind of literary residue Bindu Unnikrishnan’s stories leave behi