I left lunch with a neatly framed image of Akram and Farhana’s marriage. I’d read the news stories about first-generation South Asian women in Britain, ground down by isolation and tradition. I was certain I knew what was at work here: a busy husband with a spouse cut off from her home and culture. Farhana, I decided, was suffering from the misery of exile. Weighed down by domestic drudgery. Imprisoned by tradition. Such was my attempt to stuff her into a grand cultural narrative. Not long after, I realized that my vision of her as Virginia Woolf’s Angel of the House was a flight of fantasy.
