This is a first-person narrative that follows the life journey of a girl named Nargis. The story starts in the Himalayas in post-independence India, spans through Communist Russia, and ends in a Chicago suburb in the United States. While the book recounts delightful memories of childhood in the sixties and colourful anecdotes of family travels through young urban and feudal rural India, finding love behind the impervious Iron Curtain, and the adventure and challenge of immigrating to the United States, the book in the main is about Nargiss struggle to escape the confusing relationship with her father, Brigadier Yadav, and forgo the special status she thrived and in which she enjoyed growing up. The closure Nargis strives for, she painfully realises, has to come from within. Nargiss journey combines the daring straightforwardness of innocent childhood with the poetic eloquence of an adult engaged in hazy reflection.