When Indian girl Mukta turns eight, like her mother—and like all the women in her family—she must devote her life to the goddess Yellamma and become a temple prostitute. Tradition is relentless, despite the fact that it’s the 1980s. But Mukta’s mother tragically dies, and a man of a far higher rank takes the girl into his home in Bombay, to help her avoid the fate that has been set for her. There, little Mukta finds a foster sister, Tara, who opens an entirely different world for her—a world where there is ice cream and poems, books and conversations past midnight.
But one night, Mukta is kidnapped, and Tara’s family moves to America, convinced that her friend is dead… In the mid-2000s, grown-up Tara returns to India with a firm intention to find Mukta at any cost. For that, she will have to risk everything and overcome the impossible, learn a great deal about modern trafficking in people, and uncover secrets that her own family had long kept hidden. This bright, dramatic, thrilling novel about friendship, betrayal, and redemption amid brutal social inequality brings to mind Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner.”