Living Diagonally In My Parallel World!

  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. ...