Rukmini is married to the District Collector of a small town in Assam, and teaches in the local college. On the surface her life is settled and safe, living in the big beautiful bungalow on the hill above the cremation ground, seemingly untouched by the toil and sufferings of the common folk living ‘below’. And yet there is an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that grips the town each time there is an ‘incident’ and this has its repercussions on her life too—for Assam is in the grip of insurgency and it is this thread that runs like a dark river through the novel and forms its plot.

The Assam students’ agitation of the 1970s and 1980s has grown into a full-blown agitation today with kidnappings, extortions, and political instability being the order of the day. The meaninglessness of the violence, the complexities that divide ‘them’ and ‘us’ and the point at which the two merge are all explored here and the final dénouement is horrifying and yet true–for there can be no other ‘end’ to such a tale both in personal and political terms.

MITRA PHUKAN is a well-known Assamese writer and contributes regularly to prominent English dailies in the North East. She has recently edited a collection of Assamese short stories and published a number of books for children.

Four musicians: a bright, young, aspiring student, two highly respected gurus married to each other, and a globe-trotting star, each deeply immersed in the tradition of Hindustani shastriya sangeet. Their lives intersect in the small mofussil town of Tamulbari on the banks of the Brahmaputra.

Against the backdrop of a magnificent musical heritage and the haunting and timeless ragas that sweep through the pages of this wonderfully evocative novel, Mitra Phukan presents the ambitious sitarist Kaushik Kashyap, already a ‘name,’ who tours the world with his beautiful Italian student, Nomita, the shy, small-town vocalist, whom Kaushik’s parents have chosen for him, Nomita’s Guruma, the beautiful, calm Sandhya Senapati, and her husband, the handsome Tridib Barua, who seem to be hiding deep, dark secrets, and Guruma’s friendship with the well-known industrialist Deepak Rathod.

As the eventful monsoon months give way to autumn, the characters come to a deeper understanding of themselves even as their lives change dramatically and forever. By turns serious, deeply moving and utterly irreverent, Mitra Phukan’s eye for detail, her immense knowledge of Hindustani classical music and her profound understanding of human nature come together in this remarkable novel.