The story of the novel, in brief, grows with the development of a semi-literate woman in a corner of the state of West Bengal in India, the birthplace of the writer himself. It co-insides with that of the rather complicated and pathetic history of the Indian subcontinent in the late thirties and forties of the twentieth century, which witnessed the greatest man-made famine of the early forties in Bengal, awakening of the Bengali Muslims, their resurgence in the political life of undivided India and Bengal, the ugly rise of religious communalism between the Hindus and the Muslims, the great Calcutta Killings and, sadly but finally, the partition of the subcontinent into two states on the basis of religion. The protagonist, the semi-literate housewife of a rather lower middle class Muslim family, found herself on the wrong side of the new border. She refused to move on to the other side, where her husband and children were going simply because she was not convinced of the rationale of the partition. She throws an open challenge inviting whoever it might be to convince her of its necessity. Can any of the readers do so?