As the Babri Masjid is razed in Ayodhya, Ratan Oak stumbles upon a corpse at the Kipling House in Bombay. It is the beginning of an unraveling of the submerged identity he has sought to suppress all his life, that of his great-grandfather, Ramratan Oak. Ratan realizes that the communal violence which consumes his city mirrors the turbulence it experienced in Ramratan's time. For, concealed in the scientific discoveries of the plague epidemic of 1897 is the terrifying truth about the dead woman at Kipling House.