The first lines of the book are: “Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author” (3). The narrator describes waking one morning, shivering, under his mother’s cot with hepatitis E. His mother knows he may die, and she says to him, “Don’t leave us here” (5). His father lives in the city and works as a cook. He only comes home three or four times a year. He says it would be too expensive to bring the family there, even though his wife says that he is a wealthy man. 

He watches his mother leave the hut with his aunts. Outside, she squats as she cleans the courtyard. He thinks of the pain that decades of squatting cause, but thinks “it can be born endlessly, provided it is never acknowledged” (9). His grandmother watches his mother in disapproval. The narrator says his mother has a reputation for being arrogant and headstrong.

His father sends back most of his salary—“ten thousand” (10)—to his wife, where she divides it among their clan. That night, his father stands over him and asks if he will be all right.