The novel follows a number of different characters' viewpoints on and around the date of 15 August 2047, the centenary of India's partition and independence from the colonial British Raj. This future India has become balkanized into a number of smaller competing states, such as Awadh, Bharat, and Bangla. The global information network is now inhabited by artificial intelligences, phonetically called aeais in the novel, of varying levels of intelligence.