In wide-ranging lyrical, prize-winning essays, Anita Mathias writes of her naughty Catholic childhood in Jamshedpur, India; her large, eccentric family in Mangalore, a seacoast town converted by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century; her rebellion and atheism as a teenager at St. Mary's Convent, Nainital, her Himalayan boarding school, run by German missionary nuns; and her abrupt religious conversion after which she entered Mother Teresa's convent in Calcutta as a novice, where she worked for two years.

Later elegant essays explore the dualities of her life as a writer, mother, and Christian in the United States- torn between the call to write, her desire for a life of prayer, and the imperatives of domesticity, all the while navigating the experience of being "an alien and stranger" as an immigrant in America, yearning to set down roots...somewhere.