Francis Newton Xavier has lived a life of excess in pursuit of an uncompromising aesthetic vision. His paintings and poems, which embody a flamboyant and decadent jeu d'esprit, are to be celebrated at a final show, and party, in New Delhi. Approaching late middle-age, in a body ravaged by hard living, Xavier leaves Manhattan with his partner Goody Lol, and his journey to India becomes a delirious voyage into the past. From his formative years with an infamous school of fin de siècle Bombay poets - as documented by his biographer, Dismas - Xavier must move into an uncertain future of salvation and damnation.