Willie Chandran - whom we first met in Half a Life- is a man who has allowed one identity after another to be thrust upon him. Now, in his  early forties, after a peripatetic life, he succumbs to the demanding encouragement of his sister - and his own listlessness - and joins an underground movement in India ostensibly devoted to unfettering the lower castes. But seven years of revolutionary campaigns and several years  in jail convince him that the revolution 'had nothing to do with the village people we said we were fighting for,' and he feels himself further than ever 'from his own history and.., from the ideas of himself that might have come to him with that history.'