Living Diagonally In My Parallel World!

  The auditorium was hushed, the kind of silence that feels like a held breath. Twenty-six year old Vedant Joshi, stood under the soft amber spotlight, his Indigo kurta creased at the elbows from nervous palms. Outside, Pune’s October drizzle tapped gently on the windows, like a rhythm trying to remember itself. He looked out at the crowd — students, elders, couples, a few youth with rainbow pins — and began: I was not born to cleanse your shame, Nor play the silence in your name. I was not carved to fit your mou ld, Or shrink my truth to make you bold. I rise not from your fear or doubt, But from the voice you cast out. I speak because I still remain A son, a soul, not just your pain. The words hung in the air, fragile and defiant. A few heads nodded. A woman in a cotton saree clutched her son’s hand. Somewhere a mother silently wiped a tear. A father shifted in his seat, eyes moist but proud. The gathering was quiet, but not passive — it was a room of people who had ...

  The monsoon in Pune had turned every street into a silver river, but inside her Erandwane apartment, sixty-three year old Asha Pathak felt nothing, but arid drought. Her chest tightened each morning as if an invisible hand squeezed her heart. The coffee pot on the stove—once the herald of dawn—now sat cold. Memories of laughter and righteous debates over Sanskrit shlokas had eroded into echoes. Six years after her husband’s death, Asha’s intelligence, once her brightest flame, flickered under the weight of exhaustion and loneliness.  Asha paced the narrow living room, tracing grains of the Shahabadi floor tiles. Each step whispered reminders of her son’s farewell hug at the airport, of the day she defended her doctoral thesis at Cambridge, of the time she convinced a class of sceptical students that the metaphors in the Bhagavad Gita weren’t archaic riddles but living truths. Now, every archived memory felt like a relic behind glass— seen but untouchable, unreachable. ...

The River Takes It's own Course   Shrikant They say the river forgets. But I remember everything.  It started some years ago.  I had taken early retirement to write books. My first two books with stories on human relationships were well received.  It began with her voice. Not the sound — I never heard her sing — but the silence around her. Vaidehi Deshpande. She lived in that old bungalow near Parvati Hill, the one with the sagging balcony and the bougainvillea that bled red onto the compound wall. I saw her first on a Thursday evening, when the sky was the colour of old brass and the air smelled of wet stone. She was feeding crows with turmeric rice, her saree a faded violet, her hair streaked with silver like monsoon lightning. She moved like someone who had once danced and now remembered only the rhythm. My wife, Anjali wouldn't understand, so I told her I was walking to ease my knees. But truthfully, I was walking to find her again. I began timing my ste...