The story, told partly in flashback to 1968, concerns a clique of English public schoolboys who bully and humiliate an unpopular younger pupil (Cox) who is 'bad at games'.
Set in Hamburg's “Hell's Kitchen,” a waterfront milieu of gangsters, pimps, dealers and prostitutes, the story follows the attempts of an ex-seaman first to insinuate himself into the scene, and then to extricate himself from it.
When his parents are killed by three men, Amar, Akbar and Anthony, Vijay teams up with a forest officer who was framed in a murder case to avenge their deaths.
When the 'Lowly Ronin' helps an orphaned teenage girl avoid being turned into a prostitute, she then claims he is her father and they start a farm as father and daughter until fate steps in and he must draw his sword.