When Jerry Delfont, a travel writer with writer´s block, receives a letter from an American philanthropist, Mrs Merrill Unger, with news of a scandal involving an Indian friend of her son´s, he is sufficiently intrigued to pursue the story. Who is the dead boy found on the floor of a cheap hotel room, how and why did he die _ and will this writer, whom Mrs Unger claims to admire, find out what really happened?