The novel opens with a postcoital reflection from a first-person narrator. The narrator remains unnamed in the single-page Prologue, although by the Epilogue it is understood that Yasodhara is this narrator. Here she lies in the cave of her lover’s body, listening to his fluttering heart as he whispers her sister’s name in his sleep.

The setting is 1948. The British are leaving a newly independent Sri Lanka, called Ceylon while under British rule. The British are described as “retreating” as the flag of the new nation is raised: “a stylized lion, all curving flank and ornate muscle, a long, cruel sword gripped in its front paw” (6).

The narrative is told from the perspective of Yasodhara Rajasinghe and recounts her father Nishan’s childhood growing up in independent Ceylon. Nishan and his sister Mala are raised by their mother Beatrice Muriel and their father, a doctor who took on a new surname to disguise the economic limitations of his low-caste family origins and “win both medical training and a wife” (11). Mala has darker skin than Nishan, and Beatrice Muriel looks at her as “the stain of low-caste origins” (10).