On holiday from boarding school, young Ishvaku is fascinated by the bedtime story his mother relates to him—that of the warrior Ashwatthama, from the Mahabharata, whose blind vengeance provokes a curse from Lord Krishna, forcing him to wander the earth in eternal suffering. But the story is interrupted by a bandit raid in which Ishvaku’s mother is killed, and Ishvaku is packed off to his ancestral village in the Chambal Valley ravines of Central India. There he discovers a family in crisis, whos...