“She was so depressed,” said the brother, who took her side against the family. “There was nothing she could do.”

Ms. Zahan became resigned to her fate. After about a year, her husband returned to Bangladesh to fetch her. A party was held in their honor and this time she smiled for the camera. They left together for the United States.

‘He became so dominating’

The couple landed at Kennedy International Airport in May 2018.

On their first night together in New York, Ms. Zahan expressed to her husband that they should “get to know each other,” she recalled. If he took her to watch Bollywood movies, or if they walked holding hands around the city, maybe she’d be able “to feel it,” she told him. But he disagreed.

Her Bangladeshi husband could have seen it as his conjugal right. But for Ms. Zahan, it was something else altogether.

“I was crying, but he didn’t care,” she said. She showed the self-harm marks still visible on her wrists from earlier that summer.

Ms. Zahan had been told that she would be deported if she tried to leave her husband, she said, adding that her passport had been taken from her upon arrival in New York. Promises to enroll her in school or let her work were not kept. “I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have the keys to the house,” she continued. “He became so dominating.”

In a recent phone call to Ms. Zahan’s husband, he denied any act of violence or abuse, and challenged that the marriage was forced. Asked about how he met his wife, he said it was through family, but did not respond to the question about the circumstances of the marriage.