Rukmani is the story’s narrator and the novel’s main character. She guides the audience through her life from a first-person limited perspective; she never relays what others are thinking and is only able to perceive and interpret their actions. Her perspective makes her the primary vehicle through which Markandaya conveys key elements of themes such as The Clash Between Tradition and Progress. Rather than seeing changes as opportunities, Rukmani approaches them as threats to her way of life. She cannot understand why people would choose a non-traditional life and makes efforts to guide her children along the traditional path.

Rukmani's character is also a lens for exploring different levels of privilege and class. When Markandaya introduces Rukmani, she comes from a position of relative well-being in her community as the village headman's daughter. However, her brother reveals the limits of her father’s power under British colonialism, and Rukmani acknowledges, “by the time I came to womanhood [...] that his prestige was much diminished” (4). When she marries Nathan, she expresses disappointment that her new home is a “mud hut, nothing more than mud and thatch” (6). In the span of a single introductory chapter, she learns that privilege and prestige are impermanent.