Much like many of Desai's tales, this story focuses on an individual's quest to discover their personal identity amid strong family and societal pressures. As a result, the family's role is pivotal to the plot. Suno feels overwhelmed by his family's constant meddling in his life. They persistently urge him to ‘‘study, study, study,’’ pressuring him to prepare for his exams. Ironically, it is their very actions that disrupt his ability to concentrate. His father listens to news broadcasts in six different languages, while his mother creates a commotion in the kitchen with her sizzling cooking and splashing water. His younger siblings tease and pester him when they return from school. Even the creaking of his father's shoes on the stairs breaks Suno's focus. His mother's attempts to help him study only add to the interruptions, as she insists on giving him milk with sugar. Suno's initial step to escape his family's suffocating environment is to leave the house in search of a quieter space to study. By physically departing from his family home, Suno symbolically breaks away from the life path they have planned for him.

Suno's "vision" of a young woman in the park allows him to truly experience life for the first time. Yet, before this moment of personal transformation, Suno is surrounded by imagery of death. These images symbolize the lifeless existence he has been enduring while studying relentlessly for an exam that his parents insist he take. During a conversation with another student he meets in the park, Suno first likens his exam-driven life to a living death. He notes that the other student's "face was like a grey bone," an image that leads Suno to ponder death. "I felt as if we were all dying in the park, that when we entered the examination we would be declared officially dead." Suno sees the degrees they are working towards as "like official stamps—they would declare us dead. Ready for a dead world. A world in which ghosts went about... Slowly, slowly we were killing ourselves in order to join them." As Suno leaves the park, he encounters a beautiful, dying girl on a bench. This image of life teetering on the edge of death jolts him into a new understanding. He considers the dying girl and the older man on the bench as belonging "to the dead," but realizes that "now I had seen what being alive meant." With this "vision," Suno decides to embrace his own life by refusing to take the exam, which he sees as a mark of death.