The Vine of Desire picks up where Divakaruni's bestselling novel, Sister of My Heart, left off, continuing the saga of Anju and Sudha, the now-grown cousins and best friends from Calcutta, India. After their joint arranged marriages in Calcutta, the spirited and independent Anju had followed her husband, Sunil, to San Francisco, while the beautiful Sudha had remained behind in India with her husband. For the first decade of their married lives, the two women followed individual paths, but personal tragedies—Anju's miscarriage and Sudha's divorce—result in their long-awaited reunion in America. When The Vine of Desire begins, Sudha and her newborn daughter are on their way to San Francisco where they will live with Sunil and Anju. Anju hopes to help Sudha start a new life in America, away from the stigma of divorce, and Sudha hopes to help her dear friend overcome the pain of losing her baby. At first, the women are overjoyed to see one another, and their bond seems strong enough to suggest that each woman's unselfish goal is possible. But Anju's startling realization of her husband's passionate obsession with Sudha shatters any illusions and causes a seemingly irreparable rift between the two friends. Tormented respectively by guilt and bitter jealousy, Sudha and Anju must individually grapple with both their inner pain and the outside pressures of frenetic, impersonal city life in America as they journey toward independence. Ultimately, the women are forced to look beyond the destructive circle of love, passion, and hurt and form a new relationship as the antidote to their suffering. Only then are they able to find a way to reconcile their ties to the past and to resolve their friendship.