Mukhagni

On a Sunday morning in February, in a scrub room at Queen Square, Aravind Mishra takes a telephone call from Lucknow. His father is dead.

So begins a forty-day passage through the rites of Hindu mourning: a flight home, the road to Varanasi, the lighting of the pyre at Manikarnika, and the return to a family history he has spent half a life refusing.

Aravind is a consultant neurosurgeon, a husband, a father, a son who came home too late. In the days after the cremation, he must confront the unfinished work his father has left behind: a charitable neurosurgical hospital, a family trust, a sister who has carried the household alone, and a set of obligations that cannot be solved by belief or dismissed by unbelief.

Across London, Lucknow and Varanasi, Mukhagni follows the long argument between duty and refusal, body and memory, grief and work. It is a novel about fathers and sons, sisters and wives, fire and ash, and the strange forms by which the dead continue to ask things of the living.

A quiet literary novel about mourning, inheritance, and what remains when action is required before belief is available.