Delhi, 1946. Ma and Bappu are liberal intellectuals teaching at the local university. Their fourteen year-old daughter - precocious, headstrong Alma - is soon to be married to a young man training to be a doctor: Alma is mostly interested in the wedding shoes and in spinning wild stories about evil spirits for her beloved younger sister Roop, a restless child obsessed with death. Times are bad for girls in India. The long-awaited independence from British rule is heralding a new era of hope, but also of anger and distrust: political unrest is brewing, threatening to unravel the rich tapestry of Delhi - a city where different cultures, religions and traditions have co-existed for centuries. When Partition happens and the British Raj is fractured overnight, the wonderful family we have come to love is violently torn apart, and its members - Ma and Bappu, Alma and Roop - are forced to find new and increasingly desperate ways to survive. But the resilience of the human spirit is an extraordinary thing...