The Submission - Amy Waldman [115]
“Are you saying I don’t belong there?” she snapped, and was instantly sorry: without Nasruddin’s help these two years, she would have drowned. Softer: “Let’s just go listen.”
She felt like skipping, realized it was because this was the first time she had been out of the neighborhood since the headscarf pullings began. Free! But Nasruddin wasn’t enjoying the outing nearly as much; as they descended into the subway, he released a torrent of talk. It seemed to meander, but a purposeful current ran beneath. He told her about coming to America when he was only nineteen, younger than her. Kensington wasn’t full of Bangladeshis then. He was lonely. His English was poor. He wondered why he was here. But little by little, he saw. What Nasruddin revered about America was its systems—its predictability. You could trust the government, even perfect strangers, not just your family or fellow villagers, as was the case back home. There, outcomes too often depended on the capricious—or rather covetous—whims of individuals. Almost nothing happened without a bribe to grease the way. Here, he rounded up donations from the community for the local politicians and for the policemen’s union. He knew this would help obtain a hearing, solicit their attention, but the donations were not demanded, not coerced. Every time he visited Bangladesh, he would return to Brooklyn with renewed appreciation for the emergency room doctor who treated his cut hand without insisting he schedule a follow-up at the same doctor’s private practice. What was expected by most Americans, to him seemed heroic. When he went to the construction-permit office they gave him the right forms and accepted his applications without demanding more money than the form specified. Nasruddin never stopped missing his own country, but he loved this one.
They were on the subway now. Asma watched a woman apply gloss to her doughy bottom lip. She relished the way private lives were conducted in these public cars, as if they were just extra rooms in a house. Women put on their makeup and took off their heels, ate their lunches and cooled their coffee. They had no shyness about sharing the lines of their underwear or the color of their bras, the veins in their calves or the moles on their arms. They chewed, read, spoke, sang, and prayed, as she, but privately, did now.
Nasruddin was still talking. There had been too many problems after the attack. She had not dealt with them: he had. The detentions, worst of all; the deportations; the decision whether to submit to voluntary registration; the agonizing choice of whether to go see family in Bangladesh and risk not being let back in the country. Normalcy was returning. She shouldn’t draw unneeded attention to their vulnerable community. There were always new groups arriving; this was the nature of New York. The brownstone work did not belong to Bangladeshis alone. Lately he had found flyers left in entryways by Polish construction workers, offering good work for cheap. They included group pictures of themselves—white men in white overalls, clustered like bouquets of white carnations. What was this about, he asked Asma, not waiting for her answer, other than to draw attention to their skin color? He spoke of his daughters. He wondered often if he should have raised them in Bangladesh. He wanted to create a cocoon for them here, but it was impossible. Like little chicks they pecked their way out of their eggshells. They saw the world around them and wanted to explore it. He talked so much she wondered if he ever talked to his wife. Two decades of strain flowed onto her. She felt so honored to hear his troubles that she almost forgot that she was adding to them.
They exited the subway in lower Manhattan and found their way through the crowds outside, the rows of police officers, to the packed hearing room. She had never been to city hall, but they were late and she had no time to study it. The room was already full. Asma, newly nervous, knitted her fingers