Featured Release
Fiction
Professor Arif Ahmed steps warily into a seedy massage parlour in suburban Melbourne, uncertain what he will find beyond the beaded curtain.
This is unknown territory for the inquisitive academic. A personal voyage of discovery with few preconceived notions.
Unlike most of those who have preceded him he is not there as customer for the parlour's usual services. It is his curious mind that has urged him to cross the threshold into an unknown world. A mind which believes nothing is ever as it first appears.
That we live parallel lives.
Reluctantly he succumbs to the urgings of Amelia, the baffled young woman assigned to service him. He accepts a gentle shoulder massage but nothing more.
A conversation develops. He discovers Amelia is far more than her massage parlour job suggests. A migrant like himself, but one struggling to survive. A student with a degree in disciplines similar to his own but lacking the resources to progress and achieve her ambitions.
True to his belief that human life can consist of more than one existence simultaneously he follows his heart and endangers his family life and professional career to help Amelia reach her academic goals.
Could this bring relief from the scars and insecurities he still bears from his own adolescence? As he fosters Amelia's rapid success at university his mind transports him back to his own student days of uncertainty, deceits and deception.
Now he must again keep secrets, this time from his wife and their two daughters. Another double life in which he has to rely on deceit once more.
But now there are also acute reminders of his own mortality that cannot be ignored.
An absorbing tale of life's parallels across generations and cultures.