In Colombo the judge suffers multiple strokes leading to his death, leaving Sylvia Sunethra to manage a debt-ridden estate. She relents to renting the upstairs apartment to a Tamil family to make ends meet. The cultural differences between the Tamil family upstairs and Visaka’s Sinhala family downstairs are referred to as “the Upstairs-Downstairs, Linga-Singha wars” and establish an ongoing domestic rivalry that creates tension between the two families (36).

While Sylvia Sunethra is distracted over her family’s economic hardship and her intentions to find suitable spouses for her children, Visaka engages in a passionate first romance with Ravan, the Tamil boy upstairs. When Ravan proposes they marry despite their ethnic differences, Visaka immediately withdraws from his embrace, looking at him as though he’s mad for thinking “the differences between them could be blown away like dusty cobwebs” (43). Visaka’s rejection of Ravan sets him on a path of vengeful behavior. He begins by ignoring Visaka despite her desperate attempts to regain his affection. When she learns that Ravan is about to marry another girl, Visaka “grows careless with her heart, and worse, her reputation” (45) and openly asks Ravan to take her back. Alice arrives to drag Visaka back to her family’s downstairs apartment just as Ravan’s family laughs at Visaka’s expense.