Losing a child, a beloved’s death, coping with a parent’s illness, cancer taking over life...everybody grapples with their personal demons and tragedies. When these real life stories are told, it can help others understand complex issues, face adversities, promote positivity, create connections and emerge stronger.
Three years ago when COVID-19 snatched away friends and family, and confined people to their respective physical and mental spaces, Rachna Singh, then a Principal Income Tax Commissioner, realised how ephemeral life is and set herself on a journey of retrospection.
“With my father in the Army I had travelled all over the country and later my work took me to different places. In the last 30-odd years, I met many extraordinary people,” she says. Her associations with women in anguish resurfaced in her mind and sparked the idea for Phoenix in Flames (Vishwakarma Publications). In 2021, she quit the Indian Revenue Service to focus on her first love, reading and writing, with four books on economic matters already under her belt.
Bureaucrat-turned-author Rachna Singh has published her new book Phoenix in Flames | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
“You will not find the stories of women I chose to tell, in the pages of history books, they may be living next door, they are all ordinary women who walk the tightrope of life with grit and determination,” says Rachna.
And so there is Sana, Safeena, Kudrat, Sahar, Malini and Mrityunjayi, in whose life every woman will find an echo. Rachna says her book is a fiction based on stories drawn from true incidents. She has used composite characterisation to narrate them because she did not want to break the trust of those who gave her entry into the deepest and darkest corners of their life.
“Some of them have emerged rejuvenated from their pain, some were consumed by their torment. So, the book is a bit of an emotional roller coaster, mirroring what happens around us all the time,” says Rachna, who believes in connecting with people and deriving strength from each other.
No matter which echelon of society you are from, grief unites like nothing else, says Rachna, who finds Malini’s story as the most heartbreaking.
Bureaucrat-turned-author Rachna Singh has published her new book Phoenix in Flames | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
“It tore me up to see Malini’s maternal grief when her teenaged son lost his battle with cancer. She loses herself dealing with that enormous emptiness and tries to claw herself out,” Rachna recalls. Mrityunjayi grapples with the death of her father and her lover in quick succession and the shock and confusion that envelops her life thereafter. There is a heart-breaking empathy in there, Rachna says.
Besides death, pain and depression, the book also dwells on social obstacles women face. Like Safeena who was given in adoption as a baby by her parents who chose her over her brother because they could not afford raising a daughter. Before writing the story, Rachna met the brother, who told her he still lives with the burden of that guilt. Or how Kudrat, a golfer from an affluent family rebuilds her life after facing domestic and psychological abuse in her marriage. “Sadness is the underbelly of our society which can’t be ignored,” says Rachna and hopes her stories will help people deal with reality and be the silver lining.
The book is a myriad of emotions and the pervasive metaphor is that of a phoenix. “It is a symbol of immortality and rejuvenation and every resilient woman emerges from pain to look at tomorrow as another day,” says Rachna who is next working on the biography of a well-known photographer.
