On a Sunday morning in February, in a scrub room at Queen Square, consultant neurosurgeon Aravind Mishra misses a call from Lucknow. His father is dead. By the time Aravind returns to India for the forty days of mourning, the life he has kept at a distance has already begun to close around him.
Called back into rites he does not believe in and a family history he has refused to inherit, Aravind moves between Lucknow, Varanasi and London: the burning ghat, the sister he left behind, the wife who will not rescue him, the daughter who sees him too clearly, and the patients, priests and trustees whose questions undo the arrangements of a lifetime.
Mukhagni is a literary novel about grief, unbelief, family duty and the impossible ache of coming home too late. It follows a surgeon trained to cut and close as he encounters what medicine cannot master: loss, time, ritual and the fire that passes from one generation to the next.
