Water is the third part of a trilogy by Mehta, preceded by Fire (1996) and Earth (1998).
Water is set in 1938, when India was still under the colonial rule of the British. Following Hindu tradition, the marriage of young girls to older men was commonplace in parts of India. When a man died, his widow would be forced to spend the rest of her life in a widow's ashram, an institution for widows to make amends for the sins from her previous life that supposedly caused her husband's death.