Living Diagonally In My Parallel World!

Pune, September 2025. The city had grown louder—flyovers slicing through old neighbourhoods, cafés blooming like wildflowers, and the hum of scooters and conversations filling every crevice. But in a quiet lane off Prabhat Road, in a second-floor apartment with peeling blue shutters, lived Kshama Datar, a 62-year-old retired literature professor who had once taught at Fergusson College. She was a spinster. Her home smelled of sandalwood and old paper. Books lined every wall, their spines faded, their pages annotated with thoughts she never shared. A brass lamp flickered in the corner, and a framed black-and-white photograph of a man with kind eyes sat on her writing desk. His name was Raajan Joshi. He had died twenty years ago. But Kshama still spoke to him—sometimes aloud, sometimes in her mind. What she never did was write about him. She had spent her life teaching poetry, dissecting metaphors, and guiding students through the maze of language. But when it came to Raajan, wor...

It had been raining consistently for the past few days. And Pune in 2025 had degenerated from a warm and cosy town to a city of problems. Monsoon had softened the city’s edges. Rain clung to the bougainvillea vines spilling over compound walls, and the air smelled faintly of wet stone and old books.   In a quiet corner of Model Colony, a small café with fogged-up windows waited for its usual crowd of students and freelancers. But today, it hosted something rarer—a reunion.  Aarav Gokhale arrived five minutes early. He always did. Punctuality, he believed, was a form of respect. He chose a table by the window, ordered a black coffee, and stared out at the drizzle. His fingers tapped the rim of the cup, not from impatience but from anticipation laced with dread.   He and Radhika Deshpande were an quite a pair during college. He  hadn’t seen Radhika in thirteen years. They had met during their postgraduate days at Pune University —he in Urban Sociology, she in Poli...