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The novel is told entirely through letters, cassette tapes, and official correspondence written by its protagonist, Sarah Worth, a 42-year-old upper-class woman from the North Shore of Massachusetts. The narrative opens with a long letter Sarah writes to her husband Charles, a successful Boston internist, while on a plane heading west. She announces she is leaving him. Before departing, she withdrew more than half of their joint bank accounts, sold all their stocks, and locked family heirlooms in a safe-deposit box. She reflects on their marriage with mingled tenderness and resentment: She loved their material comfort and his physical presence, but he was emotionally absent and repeatedly unfaithful. A coldness grew between them after her second miscarriage. Through her friend Midge's yoga group, Sarah discovered Hindu philosophy and the concept of maya, or cosmic illusion, and she now wants to shed her old identity entirely.

Sarah writes to her daughter Pearl, a 20-year-old Yale student spending her junior year at Oxford, framing her departure as liberation and asking Pearl to write to her at Ashram Arhat in Forrest, Arizona. She writes to her mother in Florida, revealing longstanding tensions. She deposits nearly $175,000 into a personal bank account and sends a note to her psychiatrist, Dr. Epstein, announcing she will not return.

In a long cassette tape to Midge, Sarah describes her arrival at the ashram. After driving through the desert to the tiny town of Forrest, where hostile locals disparage the Arhat (a term meaning "the deserving one," used as the guru's title) and his followers, she reaches the ashram valley: irrigated green fields, trailers, and A-frames around a central plaza called the Chakra. Her intake involves an interrogation by Durga, the Arhat's red-haired Irish executive director, who demands money and questions Sarah's commitment. Sarah contributes $11,000 and is accepted.

Assigned to a trailer with other sannyasins (spiritual seekers who have renounced worldly life) and put to work pouring cement, Sarah endures cold nights, insufficient food, and illness, yet reports deep inner peace. During her first "dynamic meditation" session, a young sannyasin attacks her. Sarah fights back violently, an experience that awakens suppressed rage and leads to a sexual encounter with her group leader, Vikshipta, a German who helped found the original ashram in India.

Sarah rises quickly. Transferred to the Uma Room typing pool, she begins ghostwriting the Arhat's correspondence. She moves into an A-frame with Alinga, a tall blonde from Iowa who becomes her closest friend and eventual lover, and Nitya Kalpana, the ashram's chief accountant, who is experiencing a mental health crisis. When Nitya's condition worsens, Sarah takes over the books and discovers the ashram's finances are in severe disarray, with income falling and expenses spiraling.

Her ascent continues when she begins taking dictation from the Arhat in his hacienda. He christens her Kundalini, a Sanskrit term for the coiled serpent of female energy believed to reside at the base of the spine. She includes a tape of the Arhat lecturing on Kundalini's ascent through the seven chakras, or subtle-body energy centers, only to dismiss his own teaching as a "fairy story" and a "very detailed lie," declaring that "we must use foolishness to drive out foolishness" (82-83).

Throughout the summer, Sarah writes defensively to her mother and to Charles, who has hired a lawyer to threaten her. She develops a romantic and sexual relationship with Alinga. In a letter to Pearl, she voices sharp disapproval of Pearl's new relationship with Jan van Hertzog, a Dutch count's son Pearl met at Oxford. Sarah secretly records a meeting of the ashram's inner circle, capturing fierce power struggles: Durga attacks Sarah as a bourgeois interloper, Alinga defends her, and the Arhat sits passively. Alone with Sarah afterward, the Arhat makes a sexual advance that Sarah deflects.

As the ashram deteriorates under legal pressure from county, state, and federal authorities, Sarah begins quietly diverting incoming funds to personal offshore accounts, including a charge account on Samana Cay, a small Bahamian island, and a numbered Swiss bank account. She also drafts official correspondence in the Arhat's voice, including a proposal for the ashram to incorporate as a city and a response to the IRS defending the ashram's tax-exempt status.

Sarah breaks off her cohabitation with Alinga, writing a tender but firm farewell. She explains she cannot let Alinga become another imprisoning habit and acknowledges that her deeper orientation remains heterosexual. She moves into Vikshipta's vacant A-frame.

The ashram's collapse accelerates. Ma Prapti, the clinic director, confesses to having drugged communal food with tranquilizers at Durga's direction to keep sannyasins passive. Durga and a group of followers retreat with weapons to a canyon compound but surrender. Government officials swarm the grounds, repossessing equipment and serving summonses. In this atmosphere, the Arhat and Sarah consummate a ritualized tantric ceremony called maithuna, involving stages of worship and a yogic technique of semen retention. Sarah secretly records the encounter.

Alinga then reveals the Arhat's true identity: His real name is Art Steinmetz, and he is not Indian but a Jewish-Armenian American from Watertown, Massachusetts, who attended Northeastern University before dropping out to go to India in the 1960s and gradually adopting an Indian persona. Sarah feels deceived, though she acknowledges his origins should not invalidate his teachings. In a final confrontation, the Arhat drops his accent and begs Sarah to stay. She refuses, telling him that for a woman to give herself "there has to be an illusion... a possibility of progress. There has to be rectitude" (223). She threatens to reveal his identity if he tries to prevent her from leaving; he holds her financial manipulations as counter-leverage.

Sarah prepares her departure. She drafts a letter in the Arhat's voice welcoming back a wealthy former sannyasin, Melissa Blithedale, along with her $500,000 donation, positioning Melissa as a replacement near the center of power. She sends the incriminating tape of her encounter with the Arhat to her brother Jerry in Caracas for safekeeping. In a farewell letter to the Arhat, she quotes the Dhammapada: "I have conquered all; I know all, and my life is pure; I have left all, and I am free from craving" (249), and notes she left more than half of a recent large sum in his discretionary fund.

Sarah settles on Samana Cay, an island some scholars believe was Columbus's actual first landing in the New World. She contacts her lawyer, Ducky Bradford, signaling readiness to negotiate a settlement with Charles. She writes to Myron Stern, her college boyfriend whom her parents forced her to give up in favor of Charles. She reacts with hurt and anger to news that Pearl is pregnant, engaged to Jan, and will not return to Yale.

The novel closes with a long letter to Charles that moves through outrage, nostalgia, and quiet acceptance. Sarah expresses fury at learning Charles plans to marry Midge, who had been Sarah's confidante throughout her months away. She then shifts to a lyrical recollection of a week she and Charles spent on Saint Martin early in their marriage, when she felt most fully alive. She first declares she does not believe in divorce, then reverses herself and instructs her lawyer to negotiate terms. The letter ends with Sarah sitting alone in her island cabana at dusk, noting that she catches herself "listening for the grinding sound of the garage door sliding up" (264), an image of persistent domestic longing beneath her declared spiritual liberation.