Kanai Dutt, an upper-class translator from New Delhi, stands on a crowded train platform in Calcutta. He is on his way to visit his aunt in the Sundarbans islands, a collection of tiny islands connected by a maze of rivers. As he waits for the only train to Canning, the station closest to the islands, he spots a young woman, Piya, and instantly pegs her as a foreigner—“she was not Indian, except by descent” (3). He is taken by her “neatly composed androgyny” (3) and wonders what on earth she’s doing travelling to Canning. He notices that she cannot speak any Bengali. They both board the train and sit in the same car.

Kanai manipulates his way into a window seat and begins to read about the Sundarbans islands, which are shaped and reshaped by the tide each day. Conditions in the islands are dangerous and ever changing, and the place is “a universe unto itself…there is no prettiness here to invite the stranger in” (7).

Piya, sick of her seat “in the stuffiest part of the compartment” (8), flags down a tea seller. While on her way back to her seat, she accidentally spills her tea on Kanai’s papers.