When the killing starts in Dhaka, the villagers know the army from West Pakistan will soon be in their area, but unlike the other young men, and his beloved step-sister Moni Banu, Kamal cannot join the resistance. Born with a hole for a mouth, most people, except Abbas Miah, the teacher who adopts him, his friends and Moni Banu, regard him as the village idiot. With Abbas Miah, Kamal embarks on a Noah’s ark journey, with the motley survivors of the massacre that inevitably comes, to find refuge in the distant floodplains until the war is over. Along with a bombastic old actor, the village mullah, the village cut-throat, two Hindu boatmen, a foul-mouthed old woman, and a pious Islamist, who might just be a collaborator, Kamal discovers that there can be no escape from the war and the issues it raises