Ranjit is a young man who has been assured a lucrative job. All he has to do is turn up for the interview dressed in a western style suit, but all the city laundries are on strike that morning, and his only suit is dirty.

The spirit of a condemned 20-year-old student wanders through time, linking together four stories of people struggling for survival in this gritty meditation on poverty, natural disaster and political strife in India. A middle-class family's home is no match for the monsoons, while another clan's morality is compromised when famine strikes. Young boys smuggle rice, and politicians pity the poor while living in the lap of luxury.

A political activist escapes the prison van and is sheltered in a posh apartment owned by a sensitive young woman. Both are rebels: the activist against political treachery and the other on social level. Both are bitter about badly organized state of things. Being in solitary confinement, the fugitive engages himself in self-criticism and, in the process, questions the leadership. Questions are not allowed, obeying that is mandatory. Displeasure leads to bitterness, bitterness to total rift. The struggle has to continue, both for the political activist, now segregated, and the woman in exile.