RE: My Path, Your Path
I love this story!!
Your prose is pitch-perfect. Nothing about it suggests English is not your native language, but your name suggests you're African. You're very well educated and a natural storyteller.
"Not enough action" for Raj, but for me it's fine as is. The action (earthquake, I presume) already took her mother and she's rebuilding her life in the neighborhood of her childhood. You capture the shock, the moving on, the calm that children can achieve after catastrophe:
It's been four days and all she does is stand and watch. They don't seem to be bothered by her silence. She had also watched the ground swallow her mother the week before.
Wow!
She didn't object when they came and took her away after that. She likes the tranquility here. The house she lived in with her mother had always been noisy and there were lots of people.
Your short sentences also capture the mindset and your simple word choices are strong:
She wishes her mother is here with her. She misses her.
We enter the man's POV, and again you pull us right into his world ("Deep Point of View" is the narrative technique you employ so well; you may already know that, but I learned the term years after my degree in English teaching).
Succint prose - I love it!
It became a silent ministration then. She would wait for him on the same spot. He would pick her up without a word. He knew things had changed when he stopped thinking about his late wife...
I love the ending!!!!
#Understatement is so powerful, it makes me see why "purple prose" is verboten. I still love purple prose, especially in the fantasy genre, but in your story, "less is more." This:
Then she's in a tight dress, with painted face, doing what she must to pay her way in the world, and you narrate that, too, with clinical precision and emotional restraint.
I'm sorry I missed out on whatever promo-mentors sessions Raj refers to!