From Darkness to Dawn

 

• ₹250.00
• by Ashfaq Ahmad  (Author)
• Book: From Darkness to Dawn
• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Gradias Publishing House
• Language: English
• ISBN-13:  978-81-995369-1-3  
• Product Dimensions: 22 x 14 x 1.5 cm

 

There are nights that last a single hour and nights that seem to last a lifetime. Between them sit the small human acts of survival: the quiet resistance, the stubborn defiance, the private bargaining with fate. That is the territory this collection walks— a narrow, sunlit lane that cuts across ordinary streets, simple homes, the market’s ruckus, and the temple bells at dawn. These stories are not great events invented for grandeur; they are the small, stubborn rebellions of women who, in different registers and from different vantage points, refuse to be reduced to the shapes the world prescribes.

This book holds seven short narratives bound by one impulse: to find light when the light is threatened, to insist on living fully when the world expects contraction. The arc of the collection is purposeful— a movement from rupture to reckoning, from escape to repair, and from private exile to an attempt at communal belonging. Each story stands alone; together they form a mosaic of resilience.

From Darkness to Dawn

A riotous, intimate tale of two women who refuse to accept a life handed to them by social prescription. They step beyond the tidy lines of family, religion, and public etiquette, and find in each other a shelter and a revolt. This is not a story of ideology but of intimacy— the practical, earthly work of two people who choose one another in a society that prefers conformity.

Kahani Junction

A small park with numbered benches becomes a larger stage — a junction for stories, secret and loud. Here three women from three generations, three classes, three distinct social worlds meet. Their lives intersect briefly and indelibly; their shared sorrows and fierce hopes seed a plan that promises not only escape but a new public project. This story is about how unlikely solidarities are born — in benches, in gossip, in shared tea — and how they can grow into real alternatives.

Unfinished

 A tender and dangerous portrait of identity and acceptance. Born as a boy but living the truth of a woman, the protagonist navigates neighborhoods, taunts, and love. A local, elder tough — the kind the alleyways know by name — becomes the unlikely witness to her truth and, finally, its gentle acceptor. This story asks what it costs to be whole in a place that prizes sameness — and what it yields when a solitary, stubborn kindness chooses to stay.

The Healing Touch

 Grief has weight and shape. This tale follows a woman whose small acts of care — of touch, of attention — unseen by a large world, become the very thing that steadies others. Her hands, her patience, the room she makes for a stranger’s pain, produce repair. It is a study of intimacy without theater; healing that arrives not as miracle but as steady labor.

The Light Beyond Twilight

 An older man leaves his comforts and reputations behind to live among a village whose needs cannot be measured by the ledger of his earlier life. In the dusk of his years he discovers a new sort of brightness: meaning made by giving, by presence, by the shedding of the self’s brittle pride. The story unfolds with the quiet clarity of someone who has learned to turn toward what endures.

The Silent Connection

Two strangers share an encounter so small it might be overlooked — a bus ride, a look, a pause — and yet the connection that forms between them makes both of their private worlds richer. Silence here is not absence; it is a language — particular, precise, unshowy. The narrative traces the gentle economy of mutual recognition.

Madhurima

 A widow’s sudden decision to reclaim the life she postponed becomes a reckoning and a gift. In the coastal light of Goa she seeks what youth left behind: longing, beauty, the right to desire again. There she meets a man who understands absence. His promise is not the rescue-song of melodrama; it is the simple pact of companionship and the possibility of repair.

What binds these stories is the book’s faith in moral imagination— the conviction that ordinary choices, when made courageously, alter the world’s grammar. Each protagonist faces constraints that look immovable: caste and class, custom and code, hunger and humiliation. Yet each also finds a point of leverage— a word, a stubborn ritual, a friendship, a job, a stolen hour— that opens a margin for living differently.

There is another common thread: the refusal to romanticize suffering. These are not allegories in which pain automatically blossoms into wisdom. The books’ characters suffer in ways that are practical and sharp. The relief they win is pragmatic, sometimes partial, sometimes fragile. It is earned, not bestowed. You will find no easy consolations here — only the steadiness of people who, day after day, choose to stand.

Language matters in these pages. Names — Saheb, Amma, Chachi — arrive in transliteration as small flags of belonging. Foods, festivals, and local rhythms are described with a specificity meant to root the reader in place rather than to exoticize it. Dialogue carries the register of the street and the parlor both — the clipped Hindi of a market vendor, the careful English of a woman attempting to claim new vocabulary for her life. The prose aims for a kind of quiet craft: sentences that move forward, voices that remain distinct, and an emotional honesty that never varnishes the truth.

The collection also asks a practical question — what can solidarity look like across difference? In Kahani Junction, the answer is organizational: a business that begins with empathy and ends by remaking livelihood. In From Darkness to Dawn, the answer is intimate and defiant. In Unfinished, it is acceptance; in The Healing Touch and The Light Beyond Twilight, it is the reclamation of purpose; and in Madhurima and The Silent Connection, it is the right to love without apology. Together, these answers suggest that a society’s smallest ethics — how it treats its women, its elderly, its lovers — are the measure of its capacity to renew itself.

If you turn these pages looking for grand spectacle, you may be disoriented by the book’s preference for the low-lit rooms of ordinary courage. But if you are willing to attend to small acts — the steadiness of a hand through pain, the careful bookkeeping of a brave woman’s savings, the decision to speak a prohibited truth aloud — you will find here a narrative of emancipation both intimate and public.

This is a book written out of a city that could be any city, and yet each story is particular. The women here do not wait for salvation; they construct it with whatever is at hand. They trade in the currency of repair — work, empathy, stubbornness, love where it is possible. Each story ends not with a final triumph but with a new arrangement of living that promises more room for breath. That is the smallest sort of revolution, and it is sometimes the only sort that matters.

Welcome to From Darkness to Dawn. Read slowly. Notice the benches, the park, the small businesses and the small violences. Listen for the ways the characters teach each other how to continue — and imagine how your own small choices might reconfigure the day ahead.

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