The play shows a typical day in the life of Zubaida, a lower middle-class housewife. The larger-than-life kitchen is the reference point for Zubeida from where she operates while dealing with the limited outside world through its window or socializing with her visitors in front of the stove. She starts her day by washing dishes leftover from last night, prepares lunch, goes on to wash clothes, comes back to wash some more dishes, cook some more, and so on endlessly.
And all this drudgery goes unnoticed, unrecognized and unappreciated by the people she slaves herself dead for. All the time there are more demands from her mother-in-law, her husband, her young son and her infant daughter. Then there are the inputs from the outer world: screams of the woman next door being beaten by her husband, news about another housewife from the same street rumoured to have been burnt alive by her husband and mother-in-law, a letter from a sick mother in Hyderabad and more.
Pushed to the limit and alone in her misery, Zubeida's first reaction is to commit suicide but her guts fail her Nailed to her circumstances, she protests in her own little way. In the last scene, she empties a whole container of salt on food taken out for her husband who is always complaining that there is too much salt in the food she cooks. The curtain drops on a Zubeida saying "No More!".