When Simran dies suddenly in Berlin in 1989, Lekha, adrift and unfulfilled, travels to settle her estranged aunt’s affairs. Swept up in a city in flux, what begins as a brief, practical journey soon unfolds as an excavation of memory, longing, and forces that shape lives across time and place.In Berlin, Lekha uncovers Simran’s life as a young immigrant in 1960s London, her decisions bound up in intense love and friendship amid shifting political landscapes of postwar Europe and beyond. Yet Simran’s story remains incomplete, at least until Lekha’s greataunt Prushna comes into view, her quiet audacity illuminating the hidden history of a family marked by Partition, exile, upheaval and displacement.Light Across the Plains spans decades and continents, tracing the bonds between different generations of a family as they push against the confines of the times they live in and learn to live with the choices they make.’