The story opens with Sang, who lives with two roommates named Heather and Paul. Although Sang’s full name is Sangeeta (last name Biswas), she goes by Sang. She regularly receives phone calls at her home from Bengali suitors scattered across the country, who have heard that she is “pretty and smart and thirty and Bengali and still single,” and wish to marry her (174). They have heard these things through her familial and community network of Bengalis, but do not know the full truth: that Sang has a boyfriend, that she studied philosophy (not physics) at NYU (not Colombia), and that she has dropped out of her Harvard doctoral program in favor of a part-time job at a bookstore in Harvard Square.

Paul observes, with disappointment, that Sang is never ill-mannered to her suitors. She entertains them with polite questions and courtesy, while using her nonexistent coursework to stave them off, and only complains about their impingement upon her privacy once she has hung up the phone.

Heather, an unattractive and involuntarily single woman studying law at Boston College, is openly resentful of all of the attention that Sang receives. Paul, who is preparing for his English Literature orals and nursing a crush on Sang, tells Sang that she is like the Odyssey’s Penelope.