Varanasi, India, 1938; 7-year-old Chuyia's husband has died and she is forced to live as a virtual prisoner, as a future cash cow for the mainly elderly inhabitats, in a widows' ashram. Her main ally, beautiful and still young Kalyani, is flirting with handsome Brahmin's son, and Mahatma Gandhi follower, Narayan, but marriage for a widow is against the arcane laws of the Hindu religion. Plausible but with an uncomfortable mixture of Bollywood melodrama and social realism.