About Footnotes from the parallel life
Footnotes from a Parallel Life
There are books that tell stories, and then there are books that collect souls. Footnotes from a Parallel Life belongs to the latter. It does not merely describe lives, it slips inside them. It speaks through time, through machines, through memory, through the quiet hum of things that have lived, broken, and lived again. It is a book that begins with wonder and ends with belonging.
At its heart, this is the story of a traveller not of places, but of existences. The narrator drifts between centuries, bodies, and even inanimate forms, touching every fragment of the world that breathes or once breathed.
In one moment, he is Bhawar Lal, a man from 1995 who suddenly wakes up in 2025, blinking at billboards that sell “Pantelligence” pants that cry before you do. His confusion is comic, but it hides something deeper: the fear of time leaving us behind. In another heartbeat, the traveller becomes a Mongolian queen, fierce and wise, whose rule is not of conquest but of compassion. Then he finds himself inside a train engine, a hundred-rupee note, an old wooden door, a dish of Baba Ganoush, a pair of glasses, even the invisible rhythm of breath within a human body.
Each of these transformations becomes a small universe. Through them, the author builds a world where every object, every being, every speck of existence carries a story. The ₹100 note remembers the sweaty palms it has passed through, the door recalls the lives it guarded, the scooter reminisces about its days as a companion to love, work, and rebellion. Even food that is smoky, rich, and aromatic tells its tale of survival and flame. These are not random tales; they are pieces of a single mosaic, revealing that everything around us, no matter how ordinary, holds a pulse of life.
The beauty of Footnotes from a Parallel Life lies in how it blurs the line between the human and the non-human. It gives voice to silence, emotion to objects, and meaning to moments that often pass unnoticed. It gently reminds the reader that empathy is not limited to people; it extends to time, to matter, to everything that has carried our touch.
What makes the book mesmerizing is its language. It flows between humour and philosophy, between modern slang and poetic reflection. One moment, it makes you laugh at Bhawar Lal’s panic when he meets a robot called “Robo Pappu”; the next, it leaves you quiet with a line that stays long after the page turns: “Strength is not in the voice that shouts loudest; it is in the one that listens longest.” Each chapter opens a new world, and yet, every world feels like home.
Reading this book is like travelling without moving. You feel yourself stretching, across centuries, cultures, and feelings. You realise how fluid identity can be, how easily we could be someone else, somewhere else, and how all these lives, however different, hum with the same ache for connection. The book’s brilliance lies in this shared humanity; it lets you inhabit the queen and the mechanic, the machine and the mind, and somewhere in between, you begin to see yourself.
Beneath its humour and imagination lies an emotional core: the search for meaning in change. Time, here, is not a straight road but a river that loops, pauses, and sometimes flows backwards. The traveller moves not to escape life but to understand it to listen to what the world whispers when no one is paying attention. And as you follow, you realise that every story no matter how distant, absurd, or magical echoes something familiar in your own heart.
Footnotes from a Parallel Life is for anyone who has ever wondered what it means to truly be. It is for those who have felt misplaced in their time, who have looked at an old object and sensed a memory it might hold, who believe that even silence has stories. It teaches you to slow down, to see, to feel and to realise that maybe, life itself is a collection of borrowed moments from other lives running parallel to ours.
By the time you finish the book, you carry its worlds inside you. You begin to notice how a train hums like a heartbeat, how the rustle of an old note feels like a whisper, how a door’s creak sounds like memory trying to speak. You realise that you, too, are someone’s footnote in a story greater than yourself and that is not a small thing, but something deeply beautiful.
In the end, this book doesn’t just entertain; it awakens. It leaves you a little quieter, a little more tender, and infinitely more curious about the secret life of everything around you. Footnotes from a Parallel Life is not simply read it is felt, deeply, like an echo that keeps returning long after the final page has turned.
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Author Bio:
Swatilagna Mishra is a 21-year-old writer and Computer Science Engineering student who believes that both humans and machines run on stories. While she studies algorithms by day, by night she builds parallel worlds out of words, places where a hundred-rupee note remembers, a door sighs, and time folds into itself.
Her debut book, Footnotes from a Parallel Life, isn’t just fiction it’s a quiet rebellion against forgetting. It collects fragments of existence and weaves them into something luminous, strange, and deeply human. Blending humour, empathy, and a touch of absurdity, her writing celebrates the poetry hiding in everyday life.
When she’s not writing or coding, she can usually be found overthinking, observing the world through coffee-stained notebooks, or wondering if the Wi-Fi router has feelings too.