At 27, Jason Talley of Corning, New York, leads an orderly life, precisely processing loans for a mortgage company. Its warmest spot is his friendship with Sriram Sundaram and his lively wife Vidya. One night Sriram secretly confides he's planning a trip home to India to visit his mother and asks Jason to hold her gift, a gorgeous red silk sari. The very next evening Jason arrives home to sirens and cops--Sriram and Vidya are dead. The cops call it a murder/suicide.

Grieving, Jason decides to fulfill Sriram's quest and books himself an impulsive trip to India. It's a package deal, he learns, designed for retirees. But luckily there's a gorgeous young woman aboard, a train buff with an escape plan, and before he knows it, Jason has cast aside all semblance of order and embarked with Rachel on a perilous journey. How dangerous he doesn't guess since only now does he learn that Sriram, computer genius, was a defaulter from Bangalore World Systems, believed by his start-up gang to have sold them out to software CEO Ravi Murty in America. Jason has sent details of his trip to Sriram's e-mail list, hoping to meet up with his dead friend's past. And he does. . . .