The narrator and her mother leave Sri Lanka for California, where the immigrant teenager struggles to fit in but also shares moments of genuine joy and intimacy with her Americanized cousin Dharshi. After an altercation shortly before the narrator’s 14th birthday, her father drowns and Samson goes missing. And then there's Samson the gardener: is he a source of protection or threat? She's not completely sure, but she has dreams of dangerous sexuality.
Her mother veers from doting to withdrawn to hostile. But her nostalgic memories also contain fear, dread, and confusion.
In glorious detail she describes the lush beauty of her childhood home, the flavors of the food, the love she feels from cousins and schoolmates. The narrator, born a year later after a difficult delivery that left her mother unable to bear more children, feels the pressure of being the center of her parents’ lives.
The narrator’s father, a professor from an upper-class family, married her beautiful but poor mother in the early 1970s, when he was 29 and she only 17. This family tragedy begins in a prison cell, where the unnamed narrator wants to explain her (also unnamed) crime by telling her life story, from birth and childhood in Sri Lanka to adolescence and young adulthood in California.
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