With their mother, Indira, dying, Gita and Amala return home to Newport News, Virginia. To the place they both fled from. A place Indira came to with her husband Derwin in pursuit of the American Dream. That illusion dissipated when Derwin left her to raise their half-Black, half-Indian daughters alone in the East End, an economically depressed and predominantly black section sometimes referred to as the Bottom, but within walking distance of waterfront estates, within view of historic Civil War sea battles, and just down the road from prestigious and historically black Hampton University, the first NASA installation, and Fort Monroe.
Now Gita and Amala must reconcile who their mother was, who their father is, and where they come from to understand their own identities.