This novel begins in 1990 in small-town Southern India. Vijay is desperate to escape to the big city following his graduation from college. His big chance arrives unexpectedly when the family servant Raju runs away to join a Hindu fundamentalist cult. Encouraged to write an article about the increasing power of the fundamentalists, Vijay eventually gets a job in a small Bombay monthly publication, The Indian Secularist. There he meets Rustom Sorabjee - the energetic and inspirational founder of the journal who becomes something of a mentor to the young man. When Bombay is thrown into a series of increasingly violent riots in which hordes of extremists search out and systematically murder Muslims, Vijay wants to get to the heart of the story but almost loses his life in the process. To recuperate, he is sent on a working holiday to a tea estate in the Nolgiris mountains, near a spectacular Christian shrine, The Tower of God, that is the object of religious wranglings. Vijay is to investigate, but not get involved; however, when he befriends Noah, an enigmatic and colourful character who lives in the local ceremony and quotes Proust -- he finds out that there is more to the story of the shrine than he had bargained for.