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Sandeep Dahiya, known affectionately as “Sufi,” is a literary virtuoso whose pen weaves tales that resonate with the softest whispers of gentility and the tender aroma of life’s minutiae.

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Vision of Sandeep Dahiya

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About

Sandeep Dahiya, a literary journeyman, intricately weaves his Haryanvi village roots with the vibrancy of Delhi.

Books

Dive into a decade of literary magic with Sandeep Dahiya. His notable works stand as a testament.

Goals

Sandeep Dahiya's journey, from a village scholar to pursuing dreams of IAS and PCS, is a narrative of resilience and academic triumph.

Vision

In Sandeep Dahiya's vision, literature becomes a compass. He navigates uncharted realms, challenging norms & infusing modern storytelling.

Books

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Beyond and Beneath

It is a long story, slowly moving like a broad river in its journey through the plains. It is just an effort to highli >>>>

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Lazy Ways to Truth

Corona pandemic is one of the most difficult phases in our history. It robbed many a smile from so many beautiful eyes >>>>

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About author

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Sandeep Dahiya, a versatile literary figure, draws inspiration from his dual upbringing in a Haryanvi village and urban Delhi. Having a decade of editorial experience with reputed academic publishers, he's known for his two dozen works including Footsteps Lost, A Half House, Faceless Gods, Mists on the Moon and Runaway Husbands, showcasing a harmonious blend of tradition and modernity.
Hailing from Sonipat, Haryana, Sandeep's educational journey, from a village school to a small-town college, led him to academic success in Ecology, Journalism and English Literature. Encouraged by a perceptive official in Shimla, he embarked on the challenging quest for the coveted IAS and PCS, emerging as a literary outlier challenging the status quo. Despite setbacks, his resilience nurtured by a decade in editorial roles and numerous other real life experiences guides him as he pursues his dreams with the anticipatory whispers of his innate voice.

Poetry

Holy Whispers

Holy Harlots

Yamuna!
A black, toxic, putrefied nullah.
Cow!
A sewage-eating big pig
surviving on garbage dumps 
Two holy mothers turned harlots 
in this age of Kaliyuga! ...

Holy Touch!

With softly pining majesty,
 silence sings a song,
Shadows grow long,
Her soft fingers brace my face
and go along a tears trace.
Delicate tip of her finger bears the 
 jewel,
The tear that would have been lost as 
 salt on my face.

City Lights

Neon dreams on urban streets,
city lights, where life meets,
skyscrapers touch the night,
a dance of shadows in city's light.

Moonlit Reverie

Moonbeams weave a silver song,
night's canvas where dreams belong,
in the quiet of the moonlit sea,
a poet's heart finds reverie.

Raindrop Serenade

Raindrops tap a soothing tune,
on leaves of nature's monsoon,
a serenade from the sky's embrace,
as rain paints joy on every face.

Whispers of Autumn

Leaves of amber, gold, and red,
fall with tales the trees have bred,
autumn's whisper in the breeze,
a dance of farewell among the trees.
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Books

Some Other Books by the Author.

Book 1

A Nobody’s Notebook

It’s the notebook of a small-time writer. No big efforts at super-heroism, no ironies of heart-breaks, no bombastic romance, no gooseflesh rippling drama, no thunder-stricken rigmarole of saving the planet from the aliens. It’s not about chafing thoughts, it’s all about the frolicking gaiety of common emotions in the life of common people.
Beyond the grinding millstone of bigger caprices, it’s about sublimated emotions. It creeps genteelly like a flowery vine. It’s just a fragile moment capturing the kernel of eternal truth in it like you see in a painting of beautiful hills, smatterings of snow on the slopes, chatty streams, green pastures and a sense of virginal peace to tow all these along. There are no chivalric, lionized doctrinaires delving into deep mysteries of human existence. It’s a gently flowing painting on a self-absorbed canvas. The human characters simply add to the soft shades of the softly evolving painting.
In this small world, I believe everyone is taking chiming steps to be a nice human being. Come, let’s all walk together for a greater collective good.

Book 2

Lazy Ways to Truth

Corona pandemic is one of the most difficult phases in our history. It robbed many a smile from so many beautiful eyes. Streams of individual pains flooded our terrain and formed a massive river of collective miseries. However, we have to walk through the dark night to welcome a new dawn. Of course, we did it. Many fell on the perilous path. It’s a tribute to those who unfortunately couldn’t make it. It’s also for those who made it. These common man’s chronicles are in celebration of life and living against all odds.

Book 3

Mists on the moon

Charles Dickens says the trifles make the sum of life. So don’t be too serious about anything in life. These are little tales of humour and humanity. Elegant, tender and meandering through common occurrences in the life of ordinary people, these tales convey the timeless principles of humanity. The stories carry delicately poignant messages. The characters possess winning humour and show the colours of friendship, love, affection and care. There are lessons on practical philosophy also. All in all, the work is meant to give the readers a pleasant escape from the harder side of life.

Book 4

Runaway Husbands

It’s a beautiful world. If you are happy and joyful, this entire existence feels the same through you. If you exist on a plane of harmony and peace, you invite the entire cosmos to the same plane. When you smile, everything around you does the same. So be a joy-maker and see the beauty underlying everyone and everything around you.
Look out for beautiful souls around you. They are great in their simple ways. They are exceptional and unique even while they are part of the rutted routine. But they run this world and touch our lives in constructive ways that we hardly realise. As Charles Dickens says, ‘It’s not possible to know how far the influence of an amiable honest-hearted duty-going man flies out into the world; but it’s very possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by…’
Through my stories, I try to positively touch the lives of my dear readers. These stories deal with common people who try to stand proud in front of their own conscience. The rest of the life’s tale naturally follows from this point. As Thoreau sums it up so beautifully: ‘Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.’

Book 5

Lost in Red Mist

Ordinary beings possess extraordinary potential to win against odds, to jump over hurdles, to smile over tears, and, most importantly, to be happy when there aren’t enough reasons to be. They are the faceless constituents of a massive commonality. They are surrounded by a swiping generality. They are coloured in the monochromes of mundane reality. Still they are special. We have to acknowledge and celebrate the extraordinary in the ordinary people. I see heroes and heroines in my simple characters. They fight, and oftentimes fail, but write a little passage in the infinite book of life: an ordinary life that was lived substantially. On the small stage of life, they live very intensely. Somehow, the world would not be the world that is still beautiful without their contribution. They heave humanity onwards in its march to some better destination. She is a courtesan fighting for a respectable identity in the quagmire of degenerated nobility, wars, intrigues, debauchery, lust, and, last but not the least, love.
She is a foreign tourist in India—raped—picking up the fragments of her violated self, walking with bruised honour, her innate goodness intact, to reach the house of justice to salvage her identity, to redeem her pride.
A circumstantial pawn in the checker-work of sex trade, she passes much of her youth in the muck of lust and flesh trade, to finally redeem herself, to free herself in her forties, to begin a new life.
Kashmir is burning and in the bigger fire are smouldering little worlds of common hopes, mundane dreams, routine aspirations and regular cravings.
He is huge and lifts unthinkable weights for a living, goes on living and lifting weights only to be crushed by circumstances.
On a badly stomped platform, he gathers the nameless pieces of his dusted identity to have a name, a face, an identity of a common person belonging to the normal world.
In the Tsunami ravaged Andaman, she, an Australian anthropologist, survives and looks with hope at the remnants including the sole surviving Shompen tribal.
On the devastated eastern coast of India, he, a mere kid, takes the onerous task of caring for his still smaller sister, while the world around seethes in chaos.
He dreams big from his small village, only realizing later that the dreams which grow in disproportion to one’s circumstances are as good as nightmares.
He, an old man staying alone with a cat, patches up the holes in his present through tales of the past, to survive, expecting a painless end in the future.
She, a Western tourist at Rishikesh, opens her spirits, while a whole world drags around her feet.

Book 6

Ice Cubes on Desert Sands

It’s an anthology of following stories:
1. A Ladleful of Lilting Memories
2. She is Cheaper than a Buffalo
3. All that Woman is
4. Virtue in the Womb of Vice
5. Call Me Some Other Day
6. Nameless Graffiti on the Wall
7. Highway Murder
8. A Drop of Love in the Poisonous Pond
9. The Undying Flame of Love
10. The Parrot and the Old Sparrow
11. A Gram in the Heart and a Ton in the Mind
12. A Soul’s Pyre
13. The Old Moon and the Imperilled Landscape
14. An Ice Cube on Desert Sands
15. Gone with Colours and a Smile
16. Love More, Hate Less
17. Pegs and Ropes of the Mind
18. The Rapist
19. The Point Where Duty Turns into Hate
20. A Mouse on the Ground, A Lion in the Mind
21. The Hangman
22. The Remnants of a Dream
23. Miracle Boy
24. The Dust around Her Feet
25. A Long Walk to Freedom

Book 7

A Half House

It’s a pickled, various flavoured, cross-genre pill of immediate taste. There are unforgivingly apolitical outpours of the helpless common man; there are magical realist traces of a pseudo-reality trying to portray a better, more convenient world; there are poetic outpours in prose through heart-touching little anecdotes; there are off-beat, unconventional attempts to lay bare a-bit-possible aspect of history; there are abstract thoughts that may capture any context as per the reader’s suitability; there are not-so-fictitious versions of the happenings that matter to the common man; there is flailing, browbeating tug of war among the religion, faith, belief and non-belief; there are large cynical pools, common collectivities of the common man’s helpless grudges against the larger forces…It is like T20 cricket, fast paced, expected, unexpected, unorthodox literary hits to the fence. It basks in convenient improvisations of style and substance. The creativity set free of the conventional genres and bound ideas. It captures the realities lying in dust at the mundane level, polishes the titbits of socio-historical facts with the crude, judgmental brush of a common man who is not bothered about the burden of his own name and identity.
As mentioned it’s a cross-genre experimentation equipoised between fiction and creative non-fiction. The narrative moves on the tightrope held between the poles of fiction and creative non-fiction. The work’s overall genre would still be fiction given the tantalizing twists of tiny plots having common and not-so-common characters telling their little stories and opinions born of their petty cynicism on the basis of little grudges, disappointments and failures where they deem themselves to be the victims at the hands of the ‘system’.
Across the smooth fictionalized pastures of fancy and tragedies, the reader will find the crags, the stony outcrops of cynical, small-time opinions about the larger world, a common man’s pot-shots at the so called bigger destiny-defining elements controlled by the mightier personalities. The non-fiction interjections are also not the typical non-fictitious assessments of the reality; these at least carry the charm of fiction in that they are almost unexpected versions of the convenient portrayal of the things that are important and that we are interested in.
To clearly tilt the work towards the genre of fiction, there are across the stories portrayals of easily recognized characters who act, behave and tell their stories at different places in the book. A common man always bats on a slippery wicket and takes to any hitting posture that will at least avoid his fall; he cannot expect to primarily hit the ball to the fence with a cemented conviction about something; he has to bat, but he has to avoid his fall primarily and then grab whatever the slip-shoddy, fall-avoiding swing of the bat might fetch him.
The characters, ideas, opinions, scenarios, and happenings cover a broad range of issues ranging from wage earners to farmers, professor, corporate high-fi’s, the politicians, young girls working to carve out their dreams in a rapidly changing India, lonely single retired persons, retired military people, frustrated youngsters coming to terms with the life’s uncontrollable elements, etc.
Through different narratives, involving characters drawn from different walks of life, there is an effort to put the common man of India with his slipping footholds against the face of varied bouncers and fluctuations at the public level during the crucial two years before Modi’s emergence at the national level. It depicts the helpless swayings of the common man against the gusts of strong buffeting winds striking their knowing, unknowing, struggling selves, ultimately taking them into the folds where majority of them eventually land up.
This cocktail involving fiction and creative non-fiction will definitely give the readers a literary high.

Book 8

Beyond and Beneath

It is a long story, slowly moving like a broad river in its journey through the plains. It is just an effort to highlight some sober facts like the true meaning of nationalism, religion, politics and humanism. The work has very sharp political connotations. But I would like to clarify that while espousing the cause of clean politics, I have taken very dagger-sharp cuts at certain political forces whose brand of politics results in reversing the basic meanings of religion and nationalism. Also, it is for sure that all such literary efforts from my side are just a battle cry against bad politics, rather than going against any particular political stream. By having creative cuts at the razor-sharp edges of most of the political blocks in India, I have tried to carve out a straight-faced deity whom people have in mind when they envision their interests in the safe hands of the state.
One of the characters is a beautiful girl named Phulva, the gypsy girl. Through the trials and tribulations of her beautiful path through the society of the settlers, I have tried to depict how these almost stateless, religionless people come into friction with the sedentary society to create sometimes ecstatic and oftentimes tragic episodes. She smiles like a lotus in the perilous waters of a muddy pond. Also accompanied is the pleasantly sweet-sour path of the now-vanishing nomadic culture that once caressed the settled society with the suddenness of a fresh and fragrant gust of wind. When the gypsies pitch up their campsite on the fringe of settled—and the so-called civilized society—always there are showers and sparkles as the merging fronts of two different entities rub past each other.
The main protagonist is a lame Hindu religioner. Well so much for his Villainy! But there are reasons for badness. After detailing the circumstantial forces, which put him on the path of selfishness—and ultimately his brand of utilitarian Hinduism—I have tried to depict him under the light of multifaceted sun of faith. Through the testing admixture of religion, spirituality, blind faith and superstition, I have tried to churn out substantive meanings, which have eluded the mankind puzzled by conflicting dilemmas of faith, superstition, ritualism, or the religiondom overall. At the other end is his guru, the man with the real, selfless, utility-less mission of spiritual awakening. Through this contrasting set of religious personalities, I have made a humble effort to point out a little arc along the infinitely drawn out compassionate folds and contours of Hinduism.
Heartily mixed up in the silent pace of the tale is the old Muslim fisherman. The silently brooding—and expertly following the principals of humanism—frail man plays a far-far weightier role in the tale with his effortless manoeuvres instigated by a heart lit by the unsung lore of true humanity. The man from Bengal, a direct victim of the partition-time butcheries, carries along the seemingly insignificant path with firm, humanistic strides.
Then there are smaller players: the disciples, good and bad dogs, stoically suffering animals like donkeys in the caravans, and plainly villainous bunch of thugs who can always put their foul smell in any fragrant orchard—all jutted against the exciting admixture of fate and human deeds.
It is a highly literary work. The target audience is all those who love real humanism devoid of all misinterpretations and miscalculations.

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Testimonials

What people said about my books

" Sandeep Dahiya's literary prowess shines through in every page of his books. His ability to capture the essence of small-town India while addressing universal themes makes 'Runaway Husbands' a compelling and relatable read. "

" As an avid reader, I have found Sandeep Dahiya's writings to be captivating and thought-provoking. 'A Half House' is a compelling exploration of the human experience, skillfully blending emotions and societal nuances. "

" Sandeep Dahiya's 'Faceless Gods' is a literary triumph, weaving a narrative that delves into the complexities of identity and spirituality. His unique storytelling ability is a breath of fresh air in contemporary Indian literature."

" I've had the pleasure of editing Sandeep Dahiya's work, including 'Runaway Husbands.' His narratives are not only captivating but also challenge societal norms, making them a valuable contribution to Indian literature. "

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Faceless Gods

It is a long story, slowly moving like a broad river in its journey through the plains. It is just an effort to highli >>>>

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Desi Blooms

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Musings and Mutterings

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