The Last Suttee

You must come at once if you want to stop the suttee from happening again... This phone message summons Kumud Kuthiyala back to Neela Nagar the blue town of her youth and the shackled life she thought she had left behind forever... As a nine-year-old Kumud witnessed the brutal and horrifying suttee ritual when her beloved aunt immolated herself on the burning pyre of her dead husband. Years later Kumud summoned the courage to escape the isolated and primitive town of her youth to start a new life in Ambayu a metropolitan city. She began as office help at Save Girls Soul Orphanage Center and progressed to become its director. At SGSO Center she becomes a warrior for womens education and equal rights. She teaches young women to protect themselves from outmoded practices and rituals that victimize women. Then a phone call informs Kumud that the suttee of a sixteen-year-old is inevitable. She has vowed that she will never let it happen again. Still haunted by her aunts suttee she leaves everything behind including her love Shekhar Roy to end the barbaric custom that scarred her for life and to save the young bride from committing suttee. As Kumud travels back to the town of her youth long-buried memories resurface and force her to remember the life from which she fled. The town that greets her is full of contradictions. It has electricity and clean water and a new school is open to low castes yet superstition and prejudice abound. How can she convince the town that their centuries-old tradition is cruel and barbaric that a widowed young woman deserves the right to live? Can she change the minds of the townspeople and the Five Elders before its too late?