Portraits of courage: Rachna Singh’s book Phoenix in Flames is an emotional roller coaster

Find in Rachna Singh’s poignant book Phoenix in Flames, real life stories of eight ordinary women whose resilience and courage can connect, empower and inspire others.

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.

“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.