In 1988 Pius Fernandes, a retired school teacher of Indian birth, receives a diary that belonged to Sir Alfred Corbin, a British Colonial Officer in Kenya in 1910. Corbin hints at his passionate obsession with his married Indian servant Mariamu--a woman who later gave birth to a suspiciously fair son. Fernandes comes to accept that he cannot uncover every secret behind this story, just as his own life is itself full of mysteries.