On the outskirts of a small town in Bengal, a family live in solitude in their vast new house. Here, swathed in silence, a widower struggles with feelings for an unmarried cousin while his motherless daughter Bakul runs wild with Mukunda, an orphan of unknown caste adopted by the family. A family epic and an historical romance set, in the mid-20th century, that revolves around how to love in a time of abandonment and loss, political upheaval, emptiness and longing.