Sai arrives at the judge’s home when she is six years old, after her parents die in a bus accident in Russia. The novel’s present action occurs in her teenage years, when she can marvel over her own beauty as easily as the rare squid in her National Geographic. “Books were making her restless” (77), inspiring dreams of travel and exacerbating her social isolation. Romance, however, proves to be the engine for her coming-of-age. At first besotted with Gyan, she later finds herself the object of his derision about her Western acculturation. Sai is shocked at Gyan’s accusations, and it seems she has never questioned the cultural practices she learned from English nuns and westernized Indians like Noni and the judge.

Although the cook serves as a surrogate parent to her, their class disparity is symbolized by their lack of shared language and “their closeness being exposed in the end as fake, their friendship composed of shallow things conducted in a broken language” (21). Her underlying pride is exposed when she views Gyan’s home for the first time—“Sai felt shame, then, for him” (280). Sai self-aware enough to obscure her wealthy family’s background from Gyan, but she does not comprehend the difficulty of lives unlike her own.