In the fictional Firozsha Baag apartment complex in Bombay, India, the narrator, a 14-year-old Parsi boy, has to pluck white hairs from his Daddy’s head every Sunday morning. As he does so, his father searches the classifieds section of the paper for a new job. When Daddy shows signs of pain during the plucking, the narrator is surprised because his father has told him that he should always be tough. Once, when they were playing cricket together, the narrator blocked a shot with his bare shin, and Daddy was so impressed that told Mummy and the narrator’s grandmother, Mamaiji, about it when they returned home. However, that had happened a long time ago, and now Daddy doesn’t take the narrator to play cricket on Sundays anymore.
While Daddy searches the classifieds, the narrator looks around the room at the calendars covering holes in the wall plaster, particularly the Murphy Radio calendar with the smiling Murphy Baby on it. Although Mummy and Daddy like the calendar, the narrator can see how its corners are curling with age while the smile remains unchanged.
Mamaiji enters the room. As she pulls out her spinning thread and spindle, she criticizes Daddy for making the narrator pluck out his white hairs, saying it will only bring bad luck. The narrator is angry with her for criticizing his father and thinks about all the times he has wished that her thread would break while she spun—but when it actually did break, he would feel immensely guilty and run to help her. Mamaiji spun a lot of thread after her husband’s death, enough that the whole family had several kustis to wear during prayers.
Daddy cuts out a job ad that seems promising and tells Mamaiji that if plucking hairs would bring bad luck, then he wouldn’t have found the ad. Mamaiji often argues with his parents about how they raise the narrator and their other, college-age son, Percy. Mainly, she thinks the narrator is underfed and that his parents have made him stomach weak by forbidding him from eating spicy food. When she could, she snuck spicy food to the narrator and to Percy, but it would make the narrator violently sick.
As Mummy enters with a plate of toast cooked over the Criterion stove, Daddy reads aloud the ad for a “Dynamic Young Account Executive” he has found. Although Mummy is normally encouraging, this time she stays silent. Daddy turns up his nose at the toast, saying that it smells like kerosene from the stove and that when he gets a new job, the first thing he will do is get a real toaster. He jokes that since the British left India 17 years ago, it is time for their stove to go, too. Looking at the narrator, he says that one day he will find the money to send him to the U.S. because there is no future in India. Daddy keeps excitedly imagining the things he will buy with a new job, like a refrigerator, but Mummy interrupts him and tells him that planning too much will only ruin everything.
The narrator likes the kerosene stoves and particularly likes looking into the Criterion’s oil drum. He thinks about when he used to make sure the drum was full on Saturday nights, so that Mummy could make an early breakfast before cricket on Sunday mornings. He and Daddy had always left early, before almost anyone was awake, and walked through the city streets together, passing neighbors and homeless people and watching their antics. But he and Daddy don’t play cricket anymore, nor do they fly kites. The narrator refuses to pluck Daddy’s hairs anymore and leaves to read the comics, and he can tell Daddy is upset from the lines on his forehead. The lines remind him of his friend Pesi’s father, Dr Mody, who used to be the building’s go-to veterinarian before he died.
After reading the comics, the narrator walks outside and sees the complex’s doctor, Dr Sidhwa, meeting his best friend Viraf at the door. They disappear inside. The narrator remembers how Daddy arranged the boys in the apartment complex into teams and captained one of them, running and playing with the younger boys. But one day, Daddy had needed to rest in the middle of the game, and the narrator thought he looked old and upset. After that, the cricket games stopped. When Viraf doesn’t emerge after a long time, the narrator goes in after him. Viraf is visibly upset, and the narrator makes fun of him for being a crybaby. Viraf tells him that Viraf’s father is very sick.
Viraf and the narrator sneak through Viraf’s flat and the narrator sees Viraf’s father lying in his sickbed with a needle in his arm. He overhears Viraf’s mother talking about how her husband, despite his weight and chest pain, refuses to take breaks when climbing the stairs to their third-floor flat and refuses to switch flats with someone on the ground floor to preserve his health. Now he is terminally ill, and she doesn’t know what she’ll do when he dies. The narrator notices that the lines on Viraf’s father’s forehead look like Daddy’s. Disturbed, he abandons Viraf and goes home.
Back in his own flat, the narrator looks around at his family and thinks that Daddy looks old and tired. He wishes that Daddy would ask him to pluck the white hairs from his head, but he doesn’t. The narrator decides that from now on, he will help Daddy pluck the hairs whenever he asks. Throwing himself onto the bed, the narrator wants to cry. He feels guilty for being mean to Viraf and feels sad for Viraf’s father, Mummy, and Mamaiji as they age. Finally, he laments that he never thanked his father for cricket and that he can’t stop the white hairs from growing back.
