The story begins with the narrator taking a cargo ship from India to England in 1964. In England, he lives in a house with more than a dozen other Bengali men. He lives there for several years, with men moving in and out when someone gets married, until his own marriage is arranged around the same time he is offered a job in the library at MIT in Boston.

He flies to Calcutta to get married before heading to Boston to begin his job; his wife, Mala, has been rejected several times, and though they spend five nights together, she cries each night, and he does not assuage her, choosing instead to read a guidebook of America. He arrives in America on the day the crew of the Apollo 11 lands on the moon. For a week, he stays at the YMCA and eats cornflakes for every meal; he is determined to live cheaply until his wife arrives in six weeks, but as he is looking for an apartment for both of them, he finds a room available immediately for eight dollars a week. He calls and makes an appointment.

At the house, a very old woman, Mrs. Croft, greets him. She is strange and stern—she demands the rent be paid on time and left above the piano, and she insists the narrator say that an American flag on the moon is “splendid.