Excerpt from What Lies Between Us by Nayomi Munaweera, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Next to her, my young father-to-be wears the costume of the Kandyan kings. In later decades it will become fashionable for all young grooms to don these garments, but during this period, the early 1970s, they are still reserved exclusively for the old Kandyan families. So he wears it not as fashion but as a marker of a certain heritage, a certain history. Here on his feet are the curved slippers, and above that, the various complicated sarongs. One's eyes move upward to the maroon matador jacket studded at the shoulders with sequined lions. On his head is a tricornered crown, itself topped with a small golden bodhi tree. The only costume in the world perhaps where the male's outshines the female's.

They don't look at each other, these two. They face the camera and barely touch. They are not smiling; smiles were not requisite in those days. This is one of the only photographs that has survived, so it remains here large on the wall. If my mother had had another, she would have replaced this one, but she doesn't, so it is the one that endures.

* * *

When Amma is in a bright mood she tells me how matches are made. We are Sinhalese Buddhists, and this is how it has always worked. When a son comes of age, a mother makes inquiries. The matchmaker comes to the house wearing his cleanest white sarong and swinging his black umbrella, sheaves of astrological charts and photographs of girls in his battered briefcase. He sits in the best chair and makes his pronouncements. "The Kalutara Ratnasomas have four daughters of marriageable age. No sons. The mother must have very bad karma. The eldest girl is ready and they are eager to find a boy for her so that they can also start looking for the younger three."

When he leaves, the women of the family gather to compare the girls he has suggested. Beauty, lineage, docility, and culinary skills—these are the subjects of comparison. And then a girl is chosen. For a doctor son, an engineer son, a mother can expect a pretty, fair-skinned daughter-in-law from a good family. For a son who drinks or who is lame, who shouts so the neighbors can hear, a dark girl or one who has done badly at her O levels will do. A dowry of course changes everything. A father will collect money for years to marry off a daughter. A father of many daughters is an unlucky man: he will work tirelessly, and after his girls are married off, will have nothing to show for it.

Everybody knows that happiness in marriage is not expected. It is a possibility, of course, but it is not the reason one gets married. If it happens, one is lucky, but marriages are arranged for many reasons—financial, social, as a calming agent on the hot tempers of young men and the possible waywardness of young girls. Happiness is hoped for but is never an expected consequence.

* * *

Amma says, "We didn't do it like that. We broke the rules." I can tell she is both proud of and ashamed about this. They had been on an up-country bus. My father, a young man on his way to the university; Amma, a girl of unknown pedigree, certainly not someone his parents if they had been alive would have approved of. He had seen her, her bare arm snaking up out of her sari blouse sleeve to hold on to the swaying strap of that bus, which moved like a boat. She was willowy in her printed sari, her feet in leather sandals, the toenails painted the lightest blush of pink. He had looked at these toes and then dared to look at her face, and she had not looked away, as almost any other young woman would have done. Instead she had held his gaze for the briefest moment, and he had been snagged on that glance.

She says, "He had a nice shirt. I knew he was a Peradeniya boy, and that was all the difference." She continues, "He passed me notes after that. On the bus. He was so nervous. He didn't even need to take the bus. He had the car. But that one day it had broken down and he had taken the bus, and from then on, every day he took the bus and I was there."

Excerpted from What Lies Between Us by Nayomi Munaweera. Copyright © 2016 by Nayomi Munaweera. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.