Book Review: Sahil Will Come and Other Stories
1 min read
Team Kitaab reviews Sahil Will Come and Other Stories (Published by Orient Blackswan, 2025), originally written in Telugu by Afsar and translated by Alladi Uma.
In Sahil Will Come and Other Stories, Afsar stakes out a luminous yet unsettling territory of the fragile emotional and social landscapes of Indian Muslims negotiating the pressures of contemporary India. With a prose style that appears deceptively simple, Afsar distils the complexities of urban and mofussil life in Andhra and Telangana into stories that are as clear as water and yet as deep, refracting questions of identity, community, and survival in an age marked by widening social fissures.
Across eleven stories, Afsar chooses not the spectacular but the everyday, the quiet heartbreaks, the personal ethical battles, the small resistances that define ordinary lives. Yet these ordinary lives unfold against a backdrop of rising religious fanaticism, suspicion, and the casual violence of labelling. In the haunting title story, Sahil Will Come, the terror of uncertainty becomes visceral; the narrative confronts a reality where a person can be branded a terrorist and disappear overnight. What pierces through the story is not only fear but the aching persistence of hope, an insistence on waiting, on believing, on the tenderness that survives even in the shadow of state and societal paranoia.
