A man holding a note rings the doorbell of a building with a red sign hanging on the door. The man is older, with a “slight paunch” and “graying hair” (1). A young woman guides him to an office, where there is another man sitting behind a desk. The man behind the desk says to the older man: “I understand you’re looking for someone” (1).  

The novel opens with Kavita, a pregnant woman in rural India, about to give birth. Alone as night begins to fall, Kavita lies on a mat on the mud floor of her village’s birthing hut. Through the contractions, she thinks back to the last time she was pregnant, remembering that period with a sense of dread and unease: “A sudden fear grips her, the same suffocating fear she has felt throughout this pregnancy” (6).

Kavita recalls the traumatic experience of her first pregnancy. Moments after the umbilical cord was cut between Kavita and her newborn baby girl, Jasu (Kavita’s husband) entered the hut and a “shadow crossed his face,” upon seeing his daughter (6). Still weak from having just been in labor, Kavita could not resist when Jasu tore the baby from her arms to dispose of the child, a not uncommon practice for poor rural families in India at that time: “Like so many baby girls, her [Kavita’s] firstborn would be returned to the earth long before her time […] Whether she was drowned, suffocated, or simply left to starve, Kavita hoped only that death came quickly, mercifully” (7).