The novel tells the story of Dimple Dasgupta, a young Indian woman whose arranged marriage to an engineer clashes with her romantic dreams. Her adjustment from her parents’ home to her wedded state with her husband’s family brings its own challenges, including an unwanted pregnancy that she terminates. As she and her husband move from Calcutta to New York, instead of her imagined, idyllic U.S. life, Dimple confronts a reality that is in some ways harsher than what she left back home.

Figuring out on her own what the rules are of American life when she had been used to upper-class Indian society’s clearer delineations, Dimple feels adrift and purposeless. The reader sees hints of deeper mental instability and a tendency toward violence; Dimple even contemplates suicide. Confronting the realities of class, race, and anti-immigrant prejudice, both she and her husband, Amit, struggle to understand their diminished status. The novel’s tone grows darker as she starts an affair with Milt, a white American man. Dimple’s alienation from her own culture and upbringing eats away at her mind until she loses her judgment completely. Lashing out at her husband, she does not merely kill him with a knife but actually cuts off his head.

Dimple’s character owes much to literary models such as the naif Candide and the marriage-mad Jane Austen heroines. This hapless young woman, however, cannot find her way home, literally or metaphorically, and becomes permanently lost.