It begins in a near future New York City, when Antar, a low-level programmer in a vast bureaucracy, comes upon the lost and battered I.D. card of a man he once knew -- a man who vanished somewhere in Calcutta, India, years before. Strangely compelled, Antar begins to research the disappearance of the enigmatic L. Murugan, and is unwittingly drawn into a bizarre alternate history of medical science. Leaping backwards to Calcutta in 1995, we follow Murugan as he traces the twisted threads of science, counter-science and ritual back 100 years further to the laboratory of Ronald Ross, the British scientist who discovered how malaria is transmitted to humans. Eventually, Murugan -- and now Antar -- will stumble upon evidence of an impossible ongoing experiment in controlled destiny.