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Amina had been half listening (these were strategies she had already considered, and all of them cost money) when the announcer said something that made her look up from her book. Her mother was ironing her father’s best shirt and trousers, arranged on the ceramic tile as if there were already a man inside them.
    “Of course, the easiest way to come to America is to find an American and get married!”
    It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought of it; ever since she was a little girl,she had loved everything foreign. When other girls had traded their dresses for shalwar kameez, Amina was still wearing hers: she had to put on the uniform white-and-gray shalwar kameez in order to go to Maple Leaf, but when she got home from school she would change back into a dress or a skirt. She didn’t mind covering up: when she and her mother went out to the market, she would wear trousers under the dress and a sweater instead of a shawl and even tie a scarf over her hair. Her mother said she looked crazy, especially in hot weather, but her father had laughed and called her his little memsahib. Whenever he had money, he would buy her a Fanta and a Cadbury chocolate bar.
    Most of all, she had always loved fair skin. Her father was brown, and before she was born he had worried that his child would be dark as well. But her mother was
ujjal shamla
, and luckily Amina had come out golden, too. Once, when she was about eight or nine, she had said how much she loved fair skin in front of her father’s friend Rasul, who was as black as the fisherman who worked on the boats near her grandmother’s house. Rasul Uncle had only laughed, but his wife had told Amina seriously that she had once felt the same way, and look whom she had ended up marrying. If you wanted one thing too much, she had said, God sometimes found a way to show you your mistake.
    Amina had never forgotten that advice. It was a species of Deshi wisdom that she knew from the village, where her Parveen Aunty—the eldest and most traditional of her mother’s sisters—often told her just this sort of truth about human fate. Parveen’s husband had left her soon after Micki was born, running off with a distant cousin who was little more than a servant in their house. Two years before, Parveen had taken in the girl, whose potential was evident in her intelligent, tawny eyes and beautiful figure. She had fed her, imparted various lessons in household management, and even taught her to read, so that the girl might one day make a better marriage than she had any right to expect. The day after she had eloped with Parveen’s husband, her impoverished mother had come to beg forgiveness, asking to be beaten herself for her daughter’s error. Amina hadn’t been there to witness this scene, but everyone had repeated what her aunt had said:
    The more laughter, the more weeping
.
    And then:
    Someone who is closer than a mother is called a witch
.
    Parveen’s type of village wisdom was powerful, as long as you stayed in the village. But the farther away you got, Amina believed, the less it held. It was possible to change your own destiny, but you had to be vigilant and you could never look back. That was why, when she heard the announcer’s joke on the VOA, the first thing Amina had thought of was the Internet.
    7 The thing that had impressed her about AsianEuro.com was the volume of both men and women looking for mates. When Amina joined, there were six hundred and forty-two men with profiles posted on the site, and even without including a photograph, Amina’s profile got several responses right away. As it turned out, the problem was not with making contact but with staying in touch. Sometimes (as with Mike G. and Victor S.) a man would correspond for months before he suddenly stopped writing with no explanation. Other times she would be the one to stop, because of something in the e-mail—in the case of Mike R., a request for a photo of Amina in a bathing suit, or “John H.,” the