Shortly after she was released from the hospital she realized that her parents, who are both internists in private practice, had been frantically trying to contact her from their home in Port Charlotte, Fla.

“Needless to say, they were beside themselves,” she said. “But they’re both doctors, so when I finally told them what had happened with me and Lionel, and that my cut only required about five stitches, they got over it pretty quickly.”

But what she failed to share with her parents was the kind of news that would have cut too deeply for stitches: “When they asked me about Lionel, all I told them was that he was just a friend,” she said. “If I had mentioned that we were dating, they would have been very upset, so I kept our relationship a secret.”

Dr. Beena Koppuzha and Dr. George Koppuzha were born and raised in Kerala, a state in southwest India. They are Knanaya, Christians whose religious heritage traces back to Abraham and whose culture goes back to Jews of the Aramaic-speaking regions of Israel and Syria, who migrated in A.D. 345 to the Malabar Coast. The Knanaya do not believe in marrying outside the faith.

When Cecily was just a year and a half old, her parents moved to the United States. The second of three daughters, she grew up in what she described as a “very strict Indian household,” where her parents insisted that their daughters do not date or marry outside of their tight-knit ethnic and cultural circle.

“All I ever heard was that one day I was going to marry a nice Knanayan boy,” she said. “Well, Lionel is from a loud Puerto Rican family, so I knew my parents wouldn’t like it.”