Sudhakar Rao spends hours reading under a suragi tree in his father's home in a small village in Karnataka. As he grows, he moves away from this idyllic setting to the complexities of life in the temple town of Udupi, and then to the whirl of Mumbai. His huge family network strains and breaks, as parents die and friends vanish. Sudhakar Rao becomes a professor of English literature, but memories of his Sanskrit stories and philosophy travel with him even as he travels far from home. His relationships with women, his growing sadness, his dying uncle who had given him so much love, leave him desolate. The Suragi Tree takes the reader through six decades as it traces a path leading from a village in rural Karnataka, through a small town, to the city of what was then Bombay, and then back again to where it all began.