Harriet (Patricia Walters) belongs to an upper middle-class English people family residing on the banks of the Ganges River in India. Her father (Esmond Knight) runs a jute mill, and she has four sisters. Her only brother (Richard R. Foster), somewhat ten years her junior, wants to learn how to tame cobras with a flute. Although they are raised in a genteel, English setting, and even have the benefit of a live-in nanny, their upbringings bear the mark of a curious confluence of Western and Eastern philosophies. If there ever could be a compromise between Christianity and Hinduism, they are immersed in it. (The youngest girl, for instance, has a rabbit she treats as her newborn baby, and says that some babies can be born again and again.)