The short story is a formidable undertaking. The writer must compress plot, action, emotion, resolution into a few pages, which a novel would address over hundreds. The authors in this session are connected not only in the successful exposition of this literary form but also the setting - their characters’ stories are entwined with the land, scenes and topography of their dwellings, offering a unique picture and insight into their lives, hopes and struggles. As far and as different from each other as Uttarakhand, Nagaland, Estonia, they may be, but in their fiction the reader discovers a commonality of being and experiencing which reaffirms the universality of human life.