Aftab was born in an orthodox Muslim family to an herb doctor as a hermaphrodite in Old Delhi. His parents decide to influence him to behave like a man and begin saving money for his surgery to become a ‘normal’ man. However, Aftab becomes obsessed with the lifestyle for Hijras, a community of transgenders who dressed loudly and made money by either prostitution or asking for alms at big gatherings.
After his initiation as a hijra with a new name Anjum, and castration later, Anjum continues to live at Khwabgah. One day, she finds a little girl abandoned outside the mosque, and adopts her. To pray for the sickly girl, she decides to go visit the shrine of Ajmer Sharif.
However, she is attacked in the Gujrat riots of 2002. Traumatized, she becomes insecure and distrustful of people. Soon, she leaves khwabgah and begins living in a graveyard. A number of people turn up to visit her as she began to illegally encroach the graveyard. Along with Saddam Hussein, a tenant at her ‘guest house’ and Imam Ziauddin, a blind Muslim priest, she started a business to provide funeral services to people who were rejected from other graveyards.
Saddam later reveals that he is a low-caste man who saw his father being lynched by a mob over suspicion for killing a cow. She finds a baby during a protest march near Jantar Mantar, which is taken by a woman called S. Tilottama. Biplab Dasgupta, who has rented his flat to Tilo, one of his college friends, is confused about Tilo’s disappearance and the mention of a baby, whom the police is looking for.Apparently, he fell in love with Tilo in his college years as both of them, Naga and Musa worked on a play.
Naga went on to became a journalist with Leftist leanings, while Biplab worked in Foreign services.While both of them were posted in Kashmir, during the 1996 insurgency, Biplab receives a call that Tilo has been arrested along with a dreaded terrorist called Musa. He sends Naga to look into the matter. Soon, he receives the news of the two getting married.
Fourteen years later, he hears from her as she is looking for a place to live. As he begins to go through her stuff to see for a clue about her disappearance. He finds photos of people tortured during the insurgency and a collection of files on the officer who had interrogated her and had killed Musa. The officer had killed himself by this time after he was granted asylum in the US. Naga was obsessed with Tilo, but when she moved out, he decided to move on.
After a number of affairs, he decided that he was still in love with her. Tilo moved out and began to live on her own. Its revealed that Musa was actually alive and had been meeting Tilo in secret. Tilo is being searched by police for kidnapping a baby and is offered a refuge by Saddam and Anjum.
It is revealed that Musa’s daughter and wife had died in an army gunfire which led him to become a terrorist. Tilo had visited Musa and learned of the military rule in Kashmir. She witnessed the murder of an innocent man called Gulrez, who was thought to be Musa. Tilo married Naga as advised by Musa to avoid suspicion. She later discovers of having conceived Musa’s child, but had it aborted as she wasn’t sure of her motherly instincts. They all seem to settle in the graveyard.
Saddam proposes to Zainab and gets married. Funerals are held for his father, Tilo’s mother and the orphan baby’s mother who turns out to be a communist rape victim, who left the child born from her rape by police officials, to fight and die for her movement.
Musa collects Tilo’s stuff from Biplab, and the two men discuss on the future of Kashmir, with Biplab growing anxious. Musa meets Tilo for the last time as he dies in confrontation later. All the inhabitants of the graveyard guest house find happiness after being evicted from the world.
