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wrong.”
    George had stayed for ten days, and on the ninth day they had become engaged. Then he had returned to his work in Rochester, and Amina had begun the tedious quest for the fiancée visa. That had been November, and although they’d e-mailed almost every day, she hadn’t seen George again until he had picked her up at Dulles International Airport in March of the following year.
    8 Her visa had required her to get married within ninety days of her arrival in the United States. George had wanted to allow her to get settled, and his mother had needed time to organize the wedding party, and so they had waited more than two months. Her mother understood that it wasn’t practical for George to pay for another place for Amina to live during that time, and she certainly didn’t want Amina living alone in a foreign city. She’d agreed that Amina might stay in George’s house until they were married, but she’d made Amina promise that she and George would wait to do
that
until after they’d had the ceremony at whichever Rochester mosque seemed most suitable. She had talked about the one thing Amina could lose that she would never be able to get back.
    In Dhaka, Amina had meant to keep her promise, although she hadn’t entirely agreed with her mother. Especially after she got to America and had time to think about it, it seemed to her that there were a lot of other things that could be lost in an equally permanent way. Her parents had lost their land in the village, selling it piece by piece as her father invested in a series of unproductive business ventures. (Now the same land was worth more than three hundred times what her father had sold it for.) After that they had lost their furniture and then their apartments in Mirpur, Mohammedpur, and Tejgaon, and only Ghaniyah’s father’s intervention—securing another apartment in Mohammadpur at a special price, through a businessassociate—had kept them from becoming homeless altogether. This way of living had taken its toll on her mother, who was skinny and prone to ulcers; Amina thought her mother was still beautiful, with her wide-apart eyes, and her thin, straight nose, but her mother claimed that she had lost her looks for good. Worst of all, her grandmother had lost Emdad and Khokon, and nothing she could do would ever bring them back.
    Compared with those losses, whatever it was that Amina had lost on the third night she spent in George’s house was nothing. George had agreed to her mother’s conditions and had even purchased a single bed, which had been waiting for her in one of the bedrooms across the hall; on the first night, they’d brushed their teeth together like a married couple, and then George had kissed her forehead before disappearing into his own room. There were no curtains on the window of the room where Amina slept, and the tree outside made an unfamiliar, angled shadow on the floor. Everything was perfectly quiet. At home there had always been noise from the street—horns, crying babies, and the barking of dogs—not to mention the considerable sound of her father snoring. Even when they’d had more than one room at home, she’d always shared a bed: first with her grandmother and her aunt, and then with her parents. When she turned twelve, her father had suggested that she move to a cot, but Amina and her mother found that neither one of them could sleep without the other, and so her father had finally moved onto the cot himself.
    On the first night George had sheepishly presented her with an enormous stuffed panda, almost as big as she was—a gift from his mother, who’d thought she might be homesick and in need of comfort. It would have looked absurd and childish to sleep with a thing like that, and so Amina had thanked George and set the panda on a wooden rocking chair in the corner of the room. She fell asleep right away and then started awake in the dark. She looked toward the window, trying to ascertain what time it was, and saw