Living Diagonally In My Parallel World!

Lina Mistri stood on the porch of her old bungalow in Panchgani. She had a couple of hours before her weekly video call with her kids. On the other side of sixty she had become frail in last couple of years. Winter had settled into the hill station, and the sun was setting early, painting the sky in shades of orange and violet. The air was crisp, carrying the faint smell of wood smoke from distant kitchens. She pulled Jamshed’s shawl tighter around her shoulders. The wool felt scratchy but comforting. Her gaze wandered across the strawberry farms that stretched beyond the stone wall, their leaves glistening with the approaching evening dew. As the evening mist began to creep in, her mind drifted back two years, to the days after her husband, Dr. Jamshed Mistri, had passed away. Forty years ago, she came to Panchgani with her husband. She and Dr. Mistri both had been orphan’s. They completed their education in Mumbai with support from their Parsi community. He had left his flourishi...

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...