Somdutt and Chandrmukhi are upper-caste Hindus belonging to India's affluent bourgeoisie. Like most Hindu secularists-leftists, they are moral snobs who attack Hindu fundamentalism not only because it will impede the modernization of their co-religionists but also to appease Muslims whose resistance to the reformation of their archaic traditions and personal laws mainly out of antipathy to Hindus, who advocate it, they secretly despise as asinine! Their indifference to the Muslims' economic and educational backwardness further testifies to their contempt for their fundamentalism. Chandrmukhi holds sumptuous evening parties where her upper-class friends shed crocodile tears for the poor. Her husband, Vishnu, suspects Somdutt to be her lover. Distressed by his unrelenting jealousy the loving and virtuous wife accidentally succumbs to and becomes pregnant by an admirer, whose identity remains a matter of conjecture. She commits suicide from remorse.
Vishnu's uncle Jawaharlal, a wealthy lawyer, is a typical devotee of Gandhi who preaches Hindu-Muslim brotherhood despite thinking that most Indian Muslims, who voted for Pakistan but remained in India, despise his idol as a sanctimonious and wily Hindu politician who desperately tried but failed to prevent the formation of a sovereign Muslim State.