Little Muthkar's life is in mortal danger, caught in Pakistan's lethal combination of class and communal conflict, inequality, intolerance, fundamentalism and jihad overridden by the blasphemy law. This is the epic saga of lovers trapped in the dangerous world of the fallout from the Afghan Jihad in Pakistan. Louisa Skimmer is a lecturer in English literature. An urban, middle class daughter of a distinguished police officer, she studies at Lahore's most prestigious ladies' college. Piaro Masih learns trade craft at his father's feet. He inherits his rural family's role as a bandit and smuggler in the Punjab's heartland. Can their love survive in the conflict between Islam and Christianity, caste and social class, East and West, theocracy and secularism? Testing their limits, considering the condition of women in Pakistani society and the excesses of orthodoxy and fundamentalism, events race to a tragic and blasphemous conclusion. The only witness is a child who must be protected.