This film is about the lives and travails of people living around a traffic signal in Mumbai. Silsila is the "manager" of one traffic signal, that is he collects the "hafta" (protection tax) from each signal squatter plying his trade. There's Tsunami, a little scavenger boy, there's Rani - a Gujrati girl selling ethnic clothes on the sidewalk, and there's Dominic - a drug addict and the prostitute who feels for him. Then there's Silsila himself, who's an orphan, and reports to Jaffer bhai the local goon.