Read The Newlyweds for Free Online Page A

admission, in a message sent at 3:43 a.m., that he was actually a Bengali Muslim living in Calcutta.
    Her father had used these examples as ballast for his argument—the people who used those sites could not be trusted—but her mother had weathered each disappointment along with Amina, and her resolve on her daughter’s behalf had seemed to grow stronger as the years passed and her husband’s situation failed to change. They had never been like an ordinary mother and daughter, partly because Amina was an only child, and partly because they’d spent so much time together after she had to leave school. When she and George had begun writing to each other, she had translated his e-mails for her mother, and they had analyzed them with the same care they had once devoted to those textbooks. She hadn’t hidden anything from her mother (even the Heinekens), and eventually they had both become convinced of George’s goodness. They had been a team, discussing every new development, and so it was strange, once things were finally settled, to realize that her mother would not be coming with her.
    She had been e-mailing with George for eleven months when hecame to Desh to meet her and her family. Their courtship had more in common with her grandparents’—which had been arranged through a professional matchmaker in their village—than it did with her parents’, who’d had a love marriage and run away to Khulna when her mother was twenty-two years old. Her grandparents hadn’t seen each other until their wedding day, but they had examined each other’s photos. She had thought of her grandmother the day that she had finally received George’s photo as an e-mail attachment. She knew the photo hadn’t been what she was expecting, but as soon as she saw it, she couldn’t remember the face she
had
imagined. That face had been erased by the real George, who was not bad looking, with a strong brow, nose, and chin. He had admitted in an e-mail that he was trying to lose some weight, but that extra bulk wasn’t evident in his face, which was flawed rather by a certain compression of features, leaving large, uncolonized expanses of cheek and chin. His hair was a faded straw color, and his skin was so light that even Amina had to admit that it was possible to be too fair.
    She had put her hand over half the photo, so that only the eyes and forehead were visible. Could I love just those eyes, she asked herself, apart from anything else, and after a certain number of minutes spent getting used to the milky-blue color, she decided that she could. She covered the eyes and asked the same question of the nose (more challenging because of the particular way it protruded, different from any Bengali nose). She hadn’t written back right away, but the following day at the British Council (an agony, to wait until the computer was free) she’d been pleased to discover that the photograph was better than she remembered. By the end of the day, she thought she could love even the nose.
    Her father went to meet George at the airport, and her mother had come to her room to tell her he had arrived—although of course she had been watching from the balcony. The taxi could come only as far as the beginning of the lane, since their lane had never been paved. Her mother had worried about George walking down the dirt road to their apartment complex (what if it rained?), and they had even discussed hiring a rickshaw. But it would’ve had to be two rickshaws, with George’s bags, and hiring two rickshaws to take two grown men fewer than two hundred meters would’ve made more of a spectaclethan it was worth. Even from her hiding place on the balcony, behind her mother’s hanging laundry, she could hear the landlady’s sons Hamid and Hassan on the roof, practically falling over the edge to get a glimpse of Amina’s suitor.
    “What is he like?” she had asked, and her mother had reassured her:
    “He’s just like his picture. Nothing is