On a drunken party night, young and attractive Lakshmi kidnaps Placid Hari, a journalist, mistaking him to be the man who raped her sixteen years ago. The morning after alters the course of events: Lakshmi and Hari find themselves taken hostage in a terrorist siege of Bombay along with a teenage fledgling actor. The jihadi-in-charge is the boy-soldier Salim, trained in Pakistan by Abul Razak, the object of whose hallucinogenic passion is Salim's mother. Before the day is done, Salim finds that nothing back home could have prepared him for the fatal eventualities of his mission and his tryst with the compelling story of blood and tears that his captives have to tell.