As Malika, a communist resistance fighter, prepares to assassinate the new governor in a village in the recently independent India, she recognizes the man riding in the car and hesitates. The man is Rayappa, who Malika had first met five years earlier. Fifty years later, Rayappa, now living in Canada as Irwin Peter, receives a letter asking for information about Malika. The lingering legacy of the caste system, the brutal invasion of the kingdom of Hyderabad by the nascent Indian state, and the encounter between Irwin and Malika would all have profound consequences.
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