Three years of reading law had built her understanding, but a half year working under her father had taught her to inspect each line backward and forward.
A portrait of familial relationships and friendships which an upper class woman in 1920s metropolitan India might have developed told primarily through the tale of a woman who, in the novel, becomes Bombay's first woman solicitor. After a disastrous marriage, her father pays for her to read law at Oxford, and then employs her at his firm where she comes into her own not only because of her own tenacity but also because she is the only lawyer in town who can interact directly with women who live in purdah.