Rashid Karim, a young man from one of Calcutta's best families, is shocked to learn on his wedding night that his bride is not the educated, seventeen-year-old child of a successful businessman, but Henna, an illiterate, thirteen-year-old shopkeeper's daughter, and the lie echoes down through fifty years until Shona, Rashid and Henna's daughter, now a mother herself, decides to inject a little honesty into the family tree.