After a terrifying illness, an Indian grandmother drops everything and moves to live with her son and his wife in California. What she finds is a family that has begun to leave behind the traditions she cherishes, and her desperate attempts to save them only intensify her suffering.

As Tamil people on the hillside celebrate the eve of their independence, a young Indian boy plots his escape to the city.

A Scottish Foreign Scholar tries to help the beggars he encounters at his university in India, but finds his outlook on life greatly changed by the sincerity of those he once looked down upon.

In Ceylon, colonized by the British, an Indian Tamil woman describes the events that follow the departure of the British from the plantations. She imagines the possibility of a new world as the Indians reclaim their land. However, the reality that follows shows how the British values persist and are upheld by ethnic differences between the Indians on the plantation.

During an unwanted conversation with a stranger on a train in India, a woman reflects on her loveless marriage to her husband — born of financial necessity — and her abandoned dream to attend college in America.

An Indian American woman wishes to reconnect with a childhood friend, but all does not go as planned.

During World War II in West Bengal, a Bengali grandmother and doll-crafter faces the atrocities of British colonial rule. Upon delivering a magical doll to the Governor of Kolkata, the grandmother seeks justice for these colonial cruelties and the death of her grandson.

Set in Canada in the 1980s, an Indian-Canadian immigrant woman travels abroad, attempting to learn how to grieve her husband and sons after a terrorist attack on the plane kills them on their way to India.

An older Japanese man reflects on his past and learns more about the American culture through small encounters with strangers on a train.

An Indian-American teenager grapples with his mother's alcoholism and the adultery of his father, who threatens to send his mother back to India.