In October 1954, a few days before the departure of the French from Pondicherry to the new Indian Republic, Stanislas Charvin, a young European born in India but raised in France by his grandmother, arrives, impatient, with the sole objective of bringing his mother's remains back to France. Through this initiatory journey, he will find a hated father, meet love, learn terrible revelations about his mother's existence and discover a world more modern than he thought.