Living Diagonally In My Parallel World!

Aditi Deodhar had once been the kind of girl who filled a home with laughter. Growing up in Nashik, she had loving, attentive parents who believed she was capable of anything, and an elder brother, Aseem, who treated her like a fragile treasure he had sworn to protect. Their evenings were full of small joys... her mother’s experiments in the kitchen, her father’s habit of humming old Kishore Kumar songs, and Aseem’s dramatic commentary of imagined cricket matches that made everyone laugh. Aditi had been cheerful, bright, and full of life. She had been happy kid. Until one day, when something happened that changed her forever. She never spoke about it, never allowed the memory to surface, never let anyone know how deeply it had carved itself into her mind. She simply folded the pain into silence and carried it with her into adulthood. Others thought she had suddenly matured and praised her for that… but she knew what had changed. Now, at twenty‑seven, living alone in a one‑bedroom f...

Ayan Mitra had always believed that music lived inside everything, the hum of ceiling fans in his childhood home in Kolkata, the rhythm of rain on tram windows, even the uneven clatter of utensils in his mother’s kitchen. He heard melodies in footsteps, harmonies in conversations, and entire compositions in silence. Music wasn’t just his passion; it was the way he breathed, the way he made sense of chaos, the way he stayed alive. Even as a child, he would tap rhythms on school desks, hum tunes while cycling through narrow lanes, and imagine orchestras playing behind everyday life. Reva Bharadwaj’s family hailed from Himachal Pradesh and now settled in Delhi. She was in love with Delhi’s colors, textures, and movements. She saw beauty in the curve of a staircase, the way sunlight fell across a wooden table, the symmetry of shadows on a wall. Young, sharp, admired for her instinctive ability to transform spaces into living stories, by her late twenties she had already become one of the...

With the delayed monsoons, the July heat in Mumbai pressed down like a hand that refused to let go. Fifty-two year old Sanket Ketkar, was veteran of the TV news world. He sat in his office at the channel’s Marathi news headquarters in Andheri. His trademark grey Nehru jacket hung on the back of his chair. He had built his reputation over decades, grilling ministers and opposition leaders alike on his 9 pm show Straight Talk with Sanket. Viewers admired his fearlessness; politicians dreaded his questions. Most people thought he was invincible. It was two years since the new government was elected amidst promises of better days and improvement in the lives of a billion people. And the air in the newsroom had changed. The channel had recently been taken over by the Goyal Group, a sprawling business conglomerate with close ties to the ruling regime. The takeover was announced with smiles and promises of “synergy,” but Sanket knew what it meant: control. Sanket’s backstory was etched ...