Karim has an older half-brother, Ali, whose mother, Mamkuu, divorced Bakari Abbas when Ali was eight. Three years later, Bakari married Raya. When three-year-old Karim and his mother arrive in Unguja, Ali is 15 and still in school but loves skipping class to fish with friends. He is sharp-featured like his father but shorter and stockier, with a mischievous, glowing face. He excels at mimicking teachers, once earning a blow from the violent mathematics teacher he was parodying.

The brothers have little contact at first because of their age difference and because their mothers do not get along. Raya suspects that Mamkuu despises her for marrying Bakari. As years pass, they connect through holiday visits and chance meetings. Ali finishes school and joins the customs police. Karim attends the same school and excels academically. Teachers remember Ali as a troublemaker but praise Karim as talented and obedient. The headmaster visits their home to tell Raya that Karim is exceptional. Ali is proud and protective of his younger brother.

Raya works at a clothing store and gradually detaches from Karim, leaving his care to her mother (his grandmother). The grandmother wakes him for school, tends his injuries, and listens to the stories he reads from his books. As Karim grows taller than Ali, his brother takes him swimming and to football matches. When Karim is in secondary school, their father dies at 58 from heart failure, after years of illness. Karim, forbidden contact with his father, feels regret rather than grief. He reflects on his parents’ neglect and vows to be a better father if he ever has children.

Ali, by contrast, had visited his father regularly. Bakari’s will leaves the business to Ali and the house to his third wife; Karim, Raya, and Mamkuu receive nothing. Ali sells the business, and using the money, he and his wife, Jalila, buy a small house. Raya has been gradually moving out, renting her own room because the family home feels stifling. A few months after Bakari’s death, Karim’s grandmother dies suddenly. Raya tells Karim that he must stay to look after his grandfather, as she cannot return. Unbeknownst to Karim, Raya has been in a year-long affair with Haji Othman, a pharmacy owner from Dar es Salaam. When Karim is nearly 15, Raya marries Haji and moves away. His grandfather goes to live with Hafidh’s family, and Karim moves in with Ali and Jalila, who welcome him warmly and give him the large downstairs room. Ali encourages him to take advantage of his good school, which government officials’ children attend. Jalila fusses over him and boasts about his talents.

Two years later, at 17, Karim visits his mother in Dar es Salaam for the first time since she left. He travels by ferry, with Ali seeing him off. He properly meets Haji, who is amiable and cheerful. They live upstairs in a house shared with Haji’s “gloomy, silent” father, who lives downstairs. Karim sees the old man smile radiantly once and wonders if he is unwell, so unexpected is the sight. Raya and Haji have an openly loving relationship. They employ a gardener, Juma, who visits weekly, and a cleaning woman, Farida, though Raya dislikes having servants. Farida asks Karim if Raya is his mother and seems exhausted. Karim spends the month exploring the city, enjoying new freedom. He reconnects with his mother, who is more affectionate but still avoids discussing his father.

Karim spends his last two school years with Ali and Jalila. Jalila gives birth to a son, Ibrahim. Karim earns a scholarship to study geography and environmental studies at the University of Dar es Salaam. He lives in a shared campus room his first year, visiting Raya and Haji occasionally for meals. Haji repeatedly invites him to move in, but Karim prefers his freedom. A fellow student from Unguja, Seif, pranks him with fake love letters. Karim reflects on his and his friends’ sexual innocence.

In his second year, Karim moves in with Raya and Haji. His room overlooks the garden, where he observes the easy friendship between Juma and Haji’s father. Farida falls ill and cannot return to work. After Raya complains about housework, Haji buys a washing machine, which becomes a topic of affectionate bickering. By year’s end, Karim tires of the long commute and misses campus life. Moreover, he feels Haji’s silent disapproval when he returns home late. He applies for campus accommodation for his final year without telling them.

Several days before Ramadan, 13-year-old Badar and his father travel by bus from their village to town. Badar’s father remains silent throughout the journey. They walk through crowded streets to a prosperous house near a large mosque. An elderly, clean-shaven man whom his father calls Uncle Othman lets them in. Badar trips on the threshold, which he takes as a bad sign. After a brief conversation, his father tells Badar to stay with Uncle Othman, who is Haji’s father, and leaves without another word, leaving Badar confused about whether this is permanent.

Haji’s father leads Badar to the back of the house and leaves him with Raya, who is making sesame bread. The cheerful Haji Othman arrives home for lunch. Afterward, Raya tells Badar to wash the dishes and gives him the leftovers to eat. She shows him his room, a storeroom in the kitchen block, and instructs him to clean the kitchen and yard. Badar understands that he has been brought to work as their servant. That night, alone in the dark storeroom, he has a panic attack and sobs.

He recalls his adoptive mother telling him that his birth mother died of cholera when he was a baby. His birth father, Ismail, left him with them before going to seek work in Mombasa and disappeared. The adoptive mother often reminded him that he was a burden, and his adoptive father, Mohamed Rashidi, treated him with disdain and waved him out of his sight. His adoptive brother, Omari, mocked and hit him, calling him names. His adoptive sister, Aysha, bullied him and recently accused him of peeping on her while she dressed. Badar suspects that this accusation prompted his being sent away. He concludes that his adoptive family disliked him intensely and always feared that they would abandon him.

In the darkness, he sees a recurring nightmare figure: a white, segmented, worm-like creature with a smiling human face and dark blue marble eyes. It shakes its head from side to side. Though he no longer fears that it will smother him, its presence makes him anxious. Despite his fear and misery, as he falls asleep, he feels a small stirring of anticipation for what the next day will bring.

Sixteen-year-old Fauzia “[knows] her mother’s anxious look well” (56). Fauzia’s mother, Khadija, worries constantly about footsteps, voices, shortages, and violence, but especially about Fauzia. Only Fauzia’s father, Musa, called Ba, can sometimes calm her, though not always. The source of Khadija’s anxiety is that Fauzia had the “falling sickness” (epilepsy) for three years in childhood. Her last seizure was at age six, a decade earlier, but Khadija still fears its return. She tenses if Fauzia catches her breath unexpectedly.

Fauzia hates hearing her mother’s vivid descriptions of her childhood seizures and leaves the room when she begins. Musa typically interrupts Khadija, telling her that the worrying is harmful and makes Fauzia feel like an “invalid.” He reminds her that Fauzia has been checked regularly and that the illness has not returned. Khadija admits that she cannot help worrying.

Fauzia discovers that telling her mother what she learns at school soothes her. Khadija listens with rapt attention to lessons about planets, Earth’s revolution, or a cow’s four stomachs, which she calls elimu za dunia. Khadija reveals that she was taken out of school as a girl to care for her ailing parents, who both lived for several more years before passing away. When Fauzia was younger, Khadija sometimes lay on the floor of her room at night, humming and singing softly. Khadija makes all their clothes, favoring pale floral designs for Fauzia to make her look happy.

Fauzia was diagnosed at age three. The first doctor warned them to avoid shocks that might trigger seizures. Others offered various explanations for the illness, from divine will to the evil eye. The memory of having lost control of her bladder and bowels during seizures brings Fauzia shame, though her mother says that it only happened at home. Her last episode, just before starting school, involved trembling, dizziness, and a brief fall. Her mother’s warning that anxiety could trigger an attack made her dread school, but she took to it happily.

Khadija sometimes wishes that her daughter were different but knows that this thought is sinful. She believes that Fauzia’s illness is her fault. She reflects on her perceived weaknesses: being unable to nurse Fauzia and unable to have more children. She lost her first pregnancy during the same month that their farm was taken away amid a violent uprising. Two years later, she lost another pregnancy and experienced prolonged bleeding for weeks. Ten years passed before she became pregnant with Fauzia. After a difficult delivery, she and Musa decided to have no more children, and a doctor prescribed contraceptive pills.

The local hospital doctor could do nothing for Fauzia’s illness beyond prescribing a pink liquid that made her sleep but did not stop the seizures. Musa consulted his sister, Sahar, and her husband, Mahmud, who live in Mombasa. They recommended Dr. Sharifa, an Egyptian children’s specialist. Khadija and Musa took Fauzia to see her, staying with relatives to save on expenses. The private treatment was costly, and Khadija suspects that Musa borrowed money to pay for it. Dr. Sharifa explained that there was no cure but prescribed pills that would help calm Fauzia and control seizures. The pills helped control Fauzia’s final seizure, which occurred just before she started school. They continued expensive check-ups in Mombasa, first yearly and then every two years.

As Fauzia grew into a healthy, radiant teenager, Khadija’s anxiety eased somewhat, but she still worries that people will remember Fauzia’s illness and warn men away from marrying her. She reflects that her husband, Musa, who is nearly twice her age and now in his mid-sixties, has a “serenity” born of “resignation” to life’s losses: his first wife and child, and the farm. Khadija concludes that she is simply a worrier by nature, perhaps because her mother was frightened when she gave birth to her.