In a boxy apartment building in a university town in Illinois, Romola Mitra, a newly arrived young bride, anxiously awaits her first letter from home in India. When she accidentally opens the wrong letter, it changes her life.
Decades later, her son Amit finds that letter and thinks he has discovered his mother's secret. But secrets have their own secrets sometimes, and a way of following their keepers. Amit does not know that Avinash, his dependable and devoted father, lurks on gay Internet groups at times, unable to set aside his lifelong attraction to men.
Avinash has no idea that his dutiful wife had once romanced a dashing Bengali filmstar, whose memory she keeps tucked away in a diary amongst her silk saris...Growing up in Calcutta, in a house bustling with feisty grandmothers, Amit has been shielded from his parents' secrets. A successful computer engineer, he settles in San Francisco torn between his new life and his duties towards the one he has left behind...
