[1][2] The story is told through the eyes of Venu, a Malayali government officer send for a mission in Calcutta to rehabilitate refugees to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

The story begins with rehabilitation official Venu (Mohanlal) coming to Calcutta on one of his regular visits to shift nearly 35 to 40 refugee families to the Andaman Islands.

Experiencing the shattered lives of poor displaced people deeply hurts Venu in his silent moments alone in his small lodge room.

She desperately wants to move out of the wretched Calcutta for a better future for her children, a daughter (who's completed her MA but never appeared for the examination) and a son about whom she's sad.

Venu visits home in Kerala, a typical matrilineal Nair household, to discuss his chance meeting with Kunjunni uncle's family and also to secure their rightful share for them.

But Arthi rejects the financial help from her husband's family who hadn't allowed her to enter the compound of the house when she visited them years back.

Arthi narrates the humiliation of having to return on a hot summer afternoon from the locked gates of her husband's ancestral house, she and Kunjunni breaking down on their way back.

Immediately after their return to East Bengal, the country gained independence and in the consequent partition, they sought refuge on the Indian side.

Kunjunni dies of cholera in the refugee camp and a pregnant Arthi is left on her own in abject poverty, with two-year-old Damayanti by her side.

As the rest of Calcutta celebrates Durga puja, a few bunch of refugee families are packed in the back of a goods truck and offloaded at the harbor.

But even as a handful of them find hope, another wave of exodus begins, which ends in the Indo-Pak Bangladesh liberation war in December 1971.

[8] Khalid Mohamed wrote in The Times of India, "Vasthuhara (The Dispossessed) is a moving, thought-out masterwork, clear and crystalline.