Jhumpa Lahiri is a contemporary American author with her roots in India. As in her Pulitzer Prize winning collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies (1999), marriage and its maladies are also recurrent themes in the stories of her third book Unaccustomed Earth (2008), especially in the eponymous tale and ‘Hell- Heaven’. In these two stories she explores the relationships that exist between the husband and the wife in arranged marriage as well as in love marriage, in marriage in the same race as well as in marriage in different race. She also visits those areas of immigrant experiences that determine the nature of conjugal relationship. The couples inhabiting the world of the tales display a variety of marital relationships. Some suffer from marital discord that rises from lack of love and care, but the marriage does not end in divorce. There are others whose relationships are strained owing to the emergence of a third person between the husband and wife, often leading to break ups. There is also the marriage where the couple shares mutual love and respect. Again we have a love marriage that ends in a tragedy when the husband dies in an accident, and the wife refusing to remarry. Here is thus violation as well as adoption of the ideals of marriage as laid down in the Bible and in the Indian scriptures. This paper attempts to unveil and analyze the prismatic hues of the institution of marriage in the two well known stories, and capture the essence.