The award-winning poet Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's first collection of short stories, Arranged Marriage, was published in 1995, and in 1996, it won the American Book Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Fiction, and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize for Fiction. The collection was well received by the public, quickly becoming a bestseller, and met with critical acclaim. Paul Nathan's review in Publishers Weekly is typical of those who affirmed Divakaruni's first foray into prose: “The name Chitra Divakaruni is one that more and more people are going to learn to recognize, pronounce and remember.”

Donna Seaman, in her Booklist review of Arranged Marriage, hails Divakaruni as “a virtuoso short story writer” and comments that “these are ravishingly beautiful stories, some profoundly sad, others full of revelation, all unforgettable.” Seaman draws attention to the main theme of the collection (and of “Meeting Mrinal”), “the vast differences...