Who can you love? What do you owe to love and what to the world at large? Such are the questions that drive the story of Ramu, a Brahmin man, and Ponni, a woman of the Dalit ""untouchable"" caste. Set against the backdrop of twentieth-century South India, the novel takes readers from the 1890s village where Ramu's grandmother grew up to the Emergency years of 1970s Madras.