Life hasn't always been easy for Shyama, a woman in her mid-forties whose husband abandoned her when their daughter was still young. But she has finally found happiness with Toby, a man ten years her junior. She and Toby want to have a child together, but Shyama's doctor tells her that her womb has become "inhospitable."("An inhospitable womb There, she had been looking for a title for her autobiography.") While Shyama and Toby begin their search for the perfect surrogate, four thousand miles away a young woman in rural India named Mala becomes convinced that carrying a child for an international couple will be her ticket out of poverty--and as her life intersects with Shyama's, the two women soon discover that an apparently simple arrangement may be far more complicated than it once seemed.