This is the story of Chandran, a young man in his last year at college when the novel opens. Life, half-planned, is before him. Love, as yet half-glimpsed, like the fleeting green sari on the river bank that sends his imagination running, makes of Chandran for a long while an exile from Malgudi, from his friends, his family and from life itself. And love is the catalyst that makes him turn back to all that which he had turned his back on.
The reader enters a subtle and rewarding world bright with the colour of difference.