Brahmahatya
A novel of karma, ritual, and the consequences that follow the soul
In the stillness of a South Indian retirement home, a man signs in under another name. He is not there to heal. He has come to atone-or to destroy.
Ravi Narasimhan is a son hollowed by loss. Denied dignity for his dying father by Dr Chari, an unfeeling Brahmin doctor, Ravi arrives seeking a reckoning shaped not by law, but by dharma. As the days unfold, GMR Residency becomes a site of quiet ritual: where kriya passes as routine, where chant and silence blend, and where karmic threads-long knotted-begin to stir.
Around him move others caught in their own reckonings:
- Bhavna, the assistant manager, poised between compassion and the heavy burden of memory
- Sridhar, a clerk whose innocence begins to splinter at the edges
- Pishacha No. 3, a woman whose very name unsettles the air
- And Mr Kasturi, the enigmatic founder-seer, sentinel, and perhaps something more
Haunted by grief and fuelled by rage, Ravi teeters between self-destruction and brahmahatya-the act of killing a Brahmin, a sin darker than ordinary murder. In the shadows, ancient stories echo: the Samudra Manthan, when gods and demons churned the ocean in search of nectar but first summoned poison. So too here: before moksha, there must be memory. Before liberation, there must be reckoning.
Woven with verses from the Mahabharata, Bhagavad Gita, Maha Mrityunjaya, and Vishnu Sahasranama, Brahmahatya is both a modern parable and a psychological thriller:
- How silence may sanctify when speech has failed
- Why ritual, when performed with intention, becomes justice
- How the soul remembers what the mind forgets
- And what it means to offer up memory as oblation
A finalist for the 2017 SPR Book Awards, Brahmahatya is no conventional narrative. It is a tapasya, a sacred heat, a mantra wrapped in ash awaiting the reader's gaze to set it free.
The final page bears only a single word.
Om.
