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

He'd had his friends make inquiries. They learned that she was poor. Her sister and she were living with relatives after the parents had been lost in some typhoid complication. Her dowry was meager. What she did have was beauty, and for my father, who owned this house by the river, whose own parents had died, and even more important, who was rich enough to do as he pleased—including studying something as useless as history, getting a doctorate in it, and then teaching it at the university—this was enough.

They saw each other on the bus for months. He passed her notes that declared his undying passion, slipping them into the open mouth of the shopping bag at her feet or into the cheap unclasped bag under her armpit. She never responded either in word or through letters of her own. She never even looked at him again. That initial meeting of his gaze, that was all she could declare. After that everything was up to him. "A girl can't be cheap," she says. "You have to maintain yourself. Do you understand? You have to keep your pride. Without that, a girl is nothing."

* * *

They met formally thrice before they were married. He went to her relatives' small, battered house and was fussed over and served weak tea and plain cake on two occasions. Once he had escorted her to the cinema, where a thin, sweating aunt had sat between them and they had watched the earnest Professor Higgins labor over the guttersnipe Eliza Doolittle's vowels before falling in love with her. The young professor sat in the dark and wondered if he could enact a similar metamorphosis with the girl who sat on the other side of the thin aunt. Meanwhile, the girl was rigid with terror and excitement at the spectacle of the moving giants above her. It was her very first movie. She was seventeen years old, and her suitor was twenty-nine.

After the movie they went for falooda and Chinese rolls. The thin aunt had gone off to the bathroom and the young man had realized that what he had seen in her eyes when she first met his gaze on the bus had not been passion or rebellion but desperation. It was frightening to realize this, but it did nothing to assuage his desire. He was hooked.

They were engaged and her relations were jubilant. Most incredible, this bridegroom had not asked about dowry, had not mentioned the requisite plots of land, refrigerators, or houses that were usually expected. His own family was livid. An extensive collection of aunts and uncles and cousins and assorted jetsam of the far-flung family refused to come to the wedding. There were only the groom's colleagues and their wives. On the bride's side, only her older sister, some of her badly dressed family, and a few of her young school friends, shy around the older people. It was a truncated and odd assortment in a country where extravagant weddings are a national pastime. And then even in this small gathering, all around the couple, a hum of gossip.

One professor's wife bows her head close to another's, says, "Do you know? They met on a bus?"

The other takes a shocked suck of air. "What? Can't be."

"It's true. I heard from Sujatha's son."

"These modern girls. They'll do anything to catch a good one."

"Yes men. Can you imagine if his parents were alive to see?"

"They must be turning in their graves. Such a good old Kandyan family."

"Yes. What to do? The world is not what it was. All the old rules are broken."

They, the newlyweds, heard the whispers and ignored them. They ran out to his car in a hail of rice. No more buses for them. Then they were alone. They were not used to each other's scents or tastes. The bride had only ever shared a bed with her older sister. They had never kissed or held hands. But this was normal and natural. For it to be otherwise would have been unthinkable. In this place and time, one did not dip a toe into marriage; one plunged into it, fully dressed.

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.