Cyrus and I got married exactly two months after we met the second time, which was thirteen years after we met the first time. The first time, I was in ninth grade and Cyrus was in eleventh. I knew his middle name, what classes he took, when he had free period, and which afternoons he stayed late for swim team or jazz band practice. In other words, I was in love with him. Cyrus did not know any of my names or that I had recently moved to Merrick, Long Island, from Queens, that I had skipped fourth grade and was in possession of one friend, a girl called Huong who occasionally sat beside me at lunch, that my parents were immigrants from Bangladesh and that was why my lunchbox con- tained rice and curry, something I was perpetually ashamed of, not just because of the curry smell that stuck to my clothes but also because my mother never closed the Tupperware properly, so there were always little bits of chicken and rice plastered to the insides of my backpack.
Tahmima Anam (Bengali: তাহমিমা আনাম; born 8 October 1975) is a British Bangladeshi writer, novelist and columnist. Her first novel, A Golden Age, was published by John Murray in 2007 and was the Best First Book winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In 2013 she was included in the Granta list of 20 best young writers. Her follow-up novel ‘The Good Muslim’ was nominated for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize.