After the death of his mother, the narrator finds an album with photos of his early childhood in a drawer, which he spent on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago. As a young woman, the daughter of stump workers from Aargau had plunged into an adventure with a ne'er-do-well from the West Indian upper class and had a child. While the rest of the family is trying to erase the memory of the mother's years among the "savages," the narrator sets out to rescue this story, which is also his own.

"Tobacco and Chocolate" leads into the tropical jungle of a British crown colony in the 1950s and 1960s. As the narrator delves deeper into his Indian ancestors, who were shipped to the Caribbean as contract workers, he uncovers not only a family tree but also a piece of colonial history. In contrast, the memory of growing up in his grandparents' tobacco house in Aargau is juxtaposed with the approach to a mother who always seemed distant during her lifetime.