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warning about a new mother-in-law to ridicule her while her new husband sits back and criticizes her sloppiness and cooking? Her promised resurrection into the state of marriage would be little different from her mother's and grandmother's, except that she had education and ambition, Bangalore-and Bollywood-size expectations and a wealth of ready-made suspicion, thanks to her sister's fate.
    In the months as a full-time bridal candidate, she finally grasped enough of the world to place Peter and Ali in a kind of murky marital matrix. And to think, not long ago, she'd imagined herself in Ali's role as Peter's beloved. It was all fascinating, and just a little sickening. And with the revelation of Peter and Ali came dozens more complications, as though they'd all been lined up, waiting for her to open the door and see with fresh eyes: new combinations, weird embraces, convoluted sexual dimensions with higher peaks of improbability and deeper, more complicated valleys, like the wrinkly march of the Himalayas across Nepal.

3

    It took three hours of sitting in a crisp silk sari at Sengupta's Marriage Portrait Studio, WHERE DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS MEET THEIR MATES, Gauripur's center of marital entrapment for the dwindling community of Bengali girls. When old Shaky Sengupta had been a younger, steadier-handed roaming photographer without a back-alley studio, he'd taken Anjali's grandmother's photo, and then her mother's, and even the garlanded marriage photo of her parents that still sat in the middle of the bedroom dresser.
    She was posed at a table in front of a Qantas poster of the Sydney Opera House, which could be replaced by All Nippon Airways pull-down screens of Mount Fuji and the Ginza district in Tokyo for additional shots; finally she was seated at a bistro table, with an unwashed espresso cup, in front of a Toulouse-Lautrec poster. The espresso cup had recently held sweet coffee. A fly struggled to escape the sticky residue. She kept her face a mysterious blank, saw that her silk sari remained uncreased, and allowed herself only five-minute breaks to dab the perspiration from her upper lip.
    A British-era thermometer advertising Pond's cold cream read 121 degrees.
    A tall young assistant lugged lights and reflectors. She tried to radiate allure from an imagined alpine café under a Martini & Rossi umbrella, with the Matterhorn in the background, while Shaky Sengupta, the palsied photographer, patted her face with tissues and tried to tease a dimple from a smile she could barely force.
    "Never mind, I put in dimple when I take out frown," he said, in English. "Dimple very popular."
    Shaky Sengupta and his diminishing breed of Indian marriage photographers shared a total disregard for truth, passion, or integrity. Which is to say they were ideal enablers in the inherent duplicity of the marriage arrangement. Every girl was fetchingly beautiful in a prescribed manner. The camera and its expressive potential worked more like a shovel. The art was in the touch-up: slimming down the dumplings, puffing up the ironing boards, inflating bosoms, enlarging eyes, straightening teeth, and moistening lips.
    The young assistant caught Anjali's attention. He was extremely tall and thin, wearing blue jeans and a plain light-blue T-shirt. He moved with grace and competence, and his Bangla was even worse than hers. It was he who set up the shots, arranged the reflectors, and measured the focus, doing everything that Shaky in his earlier years might have been able to do by himself.
    When he bent down to clean out her espresso cup, he said, "Studio sessions really suck, don't they?" His accent was pure American, without Peter Champion's decades in India to soften it. He had the longest, most delicate fingers she'd ever seen on a man.
    "What did you say?"
    A convincing American accent, easy enough to acquire these days in India though not in Gauripur, didn't give him the right to flirt with a paying customer. His major duty was to tell her how