Set in nineteenth Century Guyana, this novel follows the lives of Indian indentured labourers as they encounter the truths about their abandoned condition. It narrates the experiences of an Indian couple, Rohinia and Vidia, growing up and getting married in a small Indian village before setting off for a new life in colonial Guyana.

Issues of caste, slavery, racism, and the immigrant experience in the early 19th century are addressed in this novel. Rohini and Vidia, a young married couple struggling for survival in a small, caste-ridden Indian village are seduced by a recruiter's persuasive talk of easy work and plentiful land. They sign up as indentured laborers to go to British Guiana and discover their harsh fate as "bound coolies" in a country only just emerging from the savage brutalities of slavery. In their problematic encounters with the Afro-Guyanese, hostile to immigrant labor, they confront the truths of their uprooted condition and learn to live with their fate.