Nazma Anwar

Osman returns to his ancestral village on a stormy night, the village he had fled in the dark of the night 27 years ago. He finds shelter in the home of Mannaf Khan, a village elder. Osman seeks to rediscover his childhood and goes about reliving the past in childhood memories. He meets Kunjo Buri who had nursed him as an infant. He also meets his boyhood friend Fazlu. Osman is not after worldly gains, he only wants to spend the rest of his life in the village and the nostalgia of bygone days. That, However, is not to be. He comes face to face with a reality of a markedly different kind.

During the Bangladeshi war for independence in 1971, a group of people flee from their villages towards a safe border.

Moti, a ten-year-old Bengali boy, tells us about his country, his life and an encounter that marked his life, that of Paul Danvin, a French captain, who, with a heavy heart, has just let the scrap merchants of the sea attack the hull of his boat with a blowtorch. In Chittagong, Bangladesh, Paul finds himself without a crew, without papers and without a future. He takes the train to Dhaka, the capital, and meets Moti and her mother Alima. By instinct or by fascination, Paul follows them to the village of Rulipara, built on a strip of land protected from the Jamuna River by dykes. While the monsoon rages, and the Jamuna destroys the houses of Rulipara, condemning the population to a new exile, Alima and Paul engage in a desperate struggle to live their love without hindrance.