In the final days of the British Raj a young Hindu woman, Asha, finds herself deeply in love with Firoze, a Muslim, but when Asha and Firoze's newly independent nation is brutally cleaved into India and Pakistan Asha and her family must flee. She loses her father, mother and brother, as well as the secret baby she carries in her womb, arriving in a Delhi of cramped, diseased refugee camps. In 1998, as India and Pakistan race to join the nuclear club, a newly widowed Asha travels to New York to visit her daughter Priya and her granddaughter Lana, who is to marry a Pakistani Muslim called Hussain. When Asha meets Hussain, she discovers his grand-uncle is Firoze. Will they put family before self, or choose a love that might destroy all they have so painstakingly created?