Satya Chaudhry is told by her doctor that she has cancer and will die soon. She goes back to her native village in the Rajputana area and requests her acquaintance, Roop, to provide companionship to her husband, Dev Chaudhry who runs a liberal newspaper. Roop keeps rejecting Satya’s proposal and retorts that just because Satya’s father had done a lot of favours to her family, she cannot balance the scales by asking inappropriate favours but later gets convinced by her father, Dharampal, and agrees on the condition that she will marry Dev to which Satya agrees.

Once married, Dev tells Roop that he still loves Satya and that their relationship will only be cordial and platonic. A depressed Roop takes solace in music, which she begins by learning from the madam of a kotha, Bahaar Begum. She also begins working in her husband’s publishing house, to use her education to her advantage. Roop expresses interest in writing about the condition of Heera Mandi, the locality in which the kotha is located, during which she meets with a womanising blacksmith named Zafar.

Zafar wants to exact revenge on his parents, Bahaar Begum and Balraj Chaudhry (who abandoned Zafar after ending his extramarital affair with Bahaar) by seducing Roop, as she is married to Balraj’s legitimate son, Dev. Roop misconstrues Zafar’s intentions and falls in love with him. She also begins to develop a friendship with Dev, much to Satya’s happiness and sadness. Satya dies after urging Dev to give Roop a chance and to forgive Balraj for his affair. As part of another effort to humiliate Balraj, Zafar instigates communal hatred in his friend, Abdul Khan, by demanding for the partition of India on religious lines, which Balraj and Dev do not support.