To the Amins, tradition was everything. So as their daughter, Alpna, moved from her teens to her late twenties, tradition required their intervention.

Fearful their daughter might never be wed, Alpna's parents decided to arrange a marriage. They began scouring the Internet and the classified ads in Indian newspapers for a mate from an elite Hindu caste.

They settled on Viresh Patel, a scholar and a doctor-in-training from Buffalo, N.Y. He seemed the perfect match for their dentist daughter.

After the appropriate introductions and a nearly yearlong courtship, the Amins of Saskatchewan and the Patels of New York state agreed. Last May, the couple was married in a three-day Hindu ceremony awash in Indian tradition. Alpna wore a crimson sari and gold headband. Her hands and feet were tattooed mehndi-style, in flowers and curlicues of henna. In one concession to modernity, their honeymoon was at Disney World.

No one in either family could have imagined where this perfect beginning would lead.

Today, less than a year later, Alpna Amin is in jail, accused of first-degree murder. Six weeks ago at her husband's student apartment in Pimlico, Baltimore police found Viresh stabbed to death in his bed, and Alpna covered in his blood. Under a round-the-clock suicide watch at the Baltimore City Detention Center, she faces a trial that could bring the death penalty.

Both the Amins and the Patels are devastated, unable to fathom how such violence could touch their lives.

"I know she still loves him," says Neena Amin, Alpna's mother. "What happened -- I don't know. It's a nightmare. I pray for them. God help them."

The morning of March 23 broke cold and raw in Buffalo, the first hints of spring still weeks away. It took Alpna Amin 10 hours to drive her Honda past the river towns of New York state through the rolling hills of Pennsylvania to Baltimore.

Alpna was on a single-minded mission. After checking into the Quality Inn on University Parkway, she began to outline her many grievances against her husband. In a shaky hand, she wrote of their separation -- Viresh was in Baltimore completing his surgical residen- cy at Union Memorial while Alpnaremained in Buffalo, living in her in-laws' basement.

She wrote of her expectations of marriage and her disappointment in her husband -- a tall man with a mountain of hair and big, round glasses. She wondered why he did not want her to comfort him. She wanted to be the one he called on -- the one he craved.

Alpna seethed over Viresh's devotion to his family.

He was very close to his mother, Chandrika: She was the one he asked to come visit him when he was lonely. She was the one he could really open up to.

Alpna wrote of her worry over what people might think about the frequency of his mother's trips, that they might believe that she was not a good wife.

Her letter, on the motel's stationery, tells of how she expected so much more from their union -- not more passion, but more of his time and respect.

Never once does her letter mention love. But it is clear that for Alpna Amin, marriage wasn't supposed to be like this.

At first, Alpna bonded with Viresh's family, especially his younger siblings. They had chosen her for their son and held her in high regard. Their marriage was more than between two individuals, the couple believed. It was a union of two families.

Both the Amins and Patels had roots in the Indian state of Gujrat. Both families wanted to arrange a marriage. After corresponding, they agreed to introduce the pair during a visit to the Patels' Buffalo home.

The Amins stayed for three days. Viresh and Alpna went to the John Travolta movie, "Face Off." The families went to Niagara Falls, donning blue rain slickers for a boat ride and a closer view of the falls.

At one point, Alpna baked Indian bread for the Patel family, which impressed them greatly.

"Her performance was very traditional, she looked so family-oriented," recalls Viresh's 15-year-old brother, Dinesh.

Nearly a year after their initial meeting, Alpna asked Viresh to have his father talk with her father. She told him she wanted to be his wife.

Nandlal Patel spoke to Amin's father and they agreed to the arrangement.

"It looked like she totally blended in with the family," says the elder Patel.

The wedding tape

In those ebullient early days, the Canadian Broadcasting Co. sought out the families and persuaded them to allow a news feature on the wedding. The resulting 11-minute TV piece describes how an arranged marriage was not an anachronism or a nod to near slavery, but a modern choice by modern couples.

"I don't think passionate love is the only thing that makes a marriage survive or that marriage is built on," Alpna told the CBC, which aired the story last July. "Being friends, I think, is definitely one of the things that is a plus to have in the beginning."

Neither Alpna nor Viresh had ever dated anyone else before getting married. Both sets of parents were in arranged marriages that had lasted more than 30 years.

Alpna's views of love and marriage were shaped by her parents, but also by Western culture. She loved sappy, romantic movies and books.

"She always wanted me to pick a husband for her on one condition: that if I picked somebody, she had the choice of saying yes and no," Neena Amin told the television reporter. "I think she was just watching us and other family members. I think she just wanted what we have."

Before his marriage, say friends from college and medical school, Viresh spent most of his time with his family and his school books. He helped with his family's construction business and was fiercely devoted to his religion.

Viresh told the CBC that he felt his parents had "arranged the meeting, not the marriage."

"I could just tell that there was something definitely between us -- some kind of chemistry, you could call it, between the two of us," he said. "I just knew somehow that she was the one."

Alpna grew up in Saskatoon on the central plains of Canada, a place very isolated from the Indian culture of her parents. She had moved there with her family from North Wales, Great Britain, when she was 6 months old.

Alpna told the CBC that she had not always believed in arranged marriages. But by the time of her wedding, she had grown to love Patel.

"In my teen-age years, I just thought for me it wouldn't matter who I married, just as long as I was happy," she said. "But as I got older, I just felt that the person I want to marry should be of my culture, just because I felt that I can preserve it that way."

As the months passed after the ceremony, though, strains developed.

The grievances

Alpna was surprised to see how much Viresh's father, Nandlal, influenced their lives.

Alpna believed her husband was supposed to be strong, a fervent protector of his wife. But in the letter she wrote in her Baltimore motel room, she chastised Viresh for telling his father everything -- even Alpna's private thoughts. He also let his father make decisions for them.

Often, she wrote, her father-in-law would scold her; once he described her family as "dirt." The material differences between the two families stood out -- hers had new money, his old.

After writing out more than three dozen grievances, Alpna left the Quality Inn. The bed was unmussed, the room almost untouched.

It was March 24.

Alpna drove to Viresh's apartment near the Pimlico racetrack.

His mother, Chandrika, visiting from Buffalo, was sleeping on the living room sofa. About midnight, she was startled awake by the jingle of keys in the front door. At first, she thought it was a burglar. It was Alpna.

Chandrika called her husband in Buffalo to let him know her daughter-in-law had just arrived. Nandlal Patel got on the phone with his son and told him "it was late and get to bed."

It was the last conversation they would ever have.

About an hour later, Chandrika says, she heard noises in the bedroom and ran down the hallway. She saw her son lying face-up in his bed with blood oozing from his wounds. She ran to the neighbors and asked them to call an ambulance. Then she went back to the bedroom and cradled her son in her arms.

She remembers telling Alpna only to "go wash up."

The interrogation

By the time Det. Marvin Sydnor of the Baltimore Police arrived, Alpna had been handcuffed by police in the dining room.

During interrogation at the police station, Alpna, still covered in her husband's blood, admitted killing him. She told police she had done it in self-defense.

Sydnor didn't believe her story. He calls the self-defense scenario "implausible."

But Alpna's family stands by their daughter. Her father, Dr. Dev Amin, a prominent physician in Saskatoon, pledges that "whatever she says, we will stake our life on it. She is not a person capable of anything like this."

"She is a perfect child. We never had any problems growing up," says her mother, Neena. "I know my daughter would never do anything like this. She is so loving."

The Amins are fighting to get Canadian embassy officials involved in the case and hope their daughter will be released on bail. They have retained Baltimore lawyer Edward Smith to defend her.

At the detention center, Alpna has an hour of visiting time each week and infrequent access to the telephone. She can read only religious books. When her mother first came to visit her, she tried to hide her handcuffs to spare her mother. They spoke through a glass wall.

"I cannot even hug and hold her, we just talk through the glass," Neena says, sobbing. "Do you know what a nightmare it is that you cannot hold your own child? She is so scared, just crying."

The Amins say they pray for their daughter and for their son-in-law's soul. They are grieving for him, they say, and mourn for his family's loss.

For the Patel family, the loss of their first-born son is almost unimaginable. They are consumed by grief.

At their Buffalo home, they burn incense near his photograph. The entire extended family -- about 15 people -- sleeps in the carpeted living room.

Chandrika, who sleeps between her husband and her 15-year-old son, Dinesh, talks in her sleep and has nightmares.

Her daughters, Anita and Beena, made a scrapbook for their parents. It has become a family treasure. The brown leather binder is filled with pictures of their older brother in his cradle, in his Scout leader uniform, in graduation caps and standing on the beach near the family's village in India.

There are no pictures of his wedding.