Like many children who grow up in peculiar families, Ru does not realize just how peculiar his home life is. As he gets bigger, he starts asking questions. Who am I? Who are we? Where do we come from? The second two are particularly important in in Bowbazar, the Calcutta (the spelling that Das uses throughout the book) neighborhood where Ru’s small family lives in a large house with a Chinese restaurant in the front part. When he is in his first years in school, his mother answers the third with “You wouldn’t believe it if we told you.” (p. 13) Later on, she gives a bit more. “We come from nomadic people. We move around. There are many of us around the world, but we’re solitary, and don’t like to draw attention.” (p. 16)

Readers will know more from this novella’s title, and from the memory of Ru’s that Das uses as its opening anecdote. He remembers being small, and in the garden with his grandmother, who was tending a bush low to the ground.

It wasn’t a seed pod at all. With practiced care she nudged open the curled, broad leaves, unwrapping it to reveal what was inside.
The broad petals of the pod were the brown wings of a creature that fit gently in the pink cradle of my grandmother’s palm like a bat. Its tail was the thin stem that connected it to the branches of the tree. And curled inside the embrace of its own wings was the contracted body of the beast, its six limbs clutched to its torso in insectile fragility, its sharp and thorny head like a flower’s pistil, the curled neck covered in a dew-dusted mane of white fur like the delicate filaments of a dandelion seed. The gems of its eyes were left to my imagination, because they were closed in whatever deep sleep it was in.
“It’s a dragon,” I said, to encase the moment in the amber of reality.
“Yes it is,” said my grandmother with a proud smile. Whether this was pride at me or the little dragon whose papery brown wings she was touching, or both, I can’t say. “Here, we call it the winged rose of Bengal.”
It was the most beautiful thing I’d seen in my life. I remember the immensity of the happiness I felt, looking at this flower-like fetus of a dragon growing off a tree tended to by my grandmother, knowing that dragons were actually real and grew on trees, wondering if people knew.
I couldn’t really believe it, which is why the memory became a dream. I convinced myself it wasn’t a true memory, because dragons don’t exist. (pp. 10–11)

Later, he forgot the details. Still later, he remembered some of them and asked his family about dragons. They told him he had a dream. Even later, he became aware that he was missing many memories because drinking the Tea of Forgetting was a regular ritual for the only child in his home. But not everything stayed forgotten.

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