If Only, by Manmohan Sadana, is a wide-ranging collection of stories, poems, dramatic scenes, and reflective pieces that move through love, faith, memory, grief, service, and human dignity. The book feels like a gathering place for many Indian voices and landscapes: Punjab’s mustard fields, Delhi homes and streets, Madurai’s temple life, Kolkata’s Durga Puja, Partition memories, Sikh traditions, Buddhist reflection, and everyday people trying to live with kindness. It’s built less around one plot and more around a shared emotional current, where each piece asks the reader to look a little more closely at compassion.

One of the strongest threads in the book is its attention to people who are often made to feel invisible. “Born under the same Silence” opens with Zainab and Meher, two hijra characters who meet in a world that wounds them but also slowly makes room for hope. When Meher tells a tea vendor, “The way is wide enough for all of us,” the line becomes more than a reply. It captures the book’s larger belief that dignity doesn’t need permission. That same spirit carries into stories about disability, speech, blindness, old age, poverty, and loneliness, where the characters aren’t treated as symbols so much as people who want to be seen clearly.

Sadana’s writing is deeply drawn to tenderness in ordinary life. In “Every Day I Meet You for the First Time,” love becomes an act of daily renewal as Aarav keeps meeting Maya after she forgets him each morning. In “Loving Son,” a beagle named Prince becomes the most devoted child in a house marked by absence. In “The Stuttering Heart,” patience becomes romance. These pieces work because they understand love as attention, repetition, and care. One line from the book puts this beautifully: “Hope is not tied to breath.” That idea keeps returning, whether the story is about soldiers, parents, lovers, teachers, servants, or strangers.

The collection also has a strong spiritual pulse. Sadana writes about Bulleh Shah, Sikh symbols, Buddha, Vishnu’s avatars, the months of the year, and the moral imagination behind Indian traditions. These sections don’t just explain belief systems; they place them beside lived experience. The book’s spirituality is practical and human, rooted in service, humility, forgiveness, and respect. Even when the writing becomes poetic or devotional, it keeps circling back to how people treat one another. In that sense, faith here isn’t distant or abstract. It’s found in a shared roof, a returned wallet, a held hand, a patient listener, or a person who refuses to abandon someone in pain.

What makes If Only memorable is its emotional range. It can move from a battlefield trench to a wedding night, from a five-hundred-rupee note’s journey to a Partition survivor’s household, from mythic reflection to a simple conversation between two people learning trust. The book is sincere, expansive, and openly compassionate. It invites readers to slow down and notice the quiet forms of courage that often go unnamed. More than anything, If Only is a book about human connection: how it survives loss, how it grows through patience, and how it becomes a kind of prayer when people choose kindness first.

Pages: 210 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GTJS4LVN