The Submission - Amy Waldman [131]
So much pressure in his head, on his heart. He should have officially reported the threats against her; he should have stopped her from speaking that day. Now he was guilt-sick along with his worry.
“What happened?” he could hear reporters asking each other and any Bangladeshi they could collar. “What are they saying? What’s wrong with her?”
He reached her at last. She was on her back, her eyes were closed. In the dark streamers that spread from beneath her, Nasruddin saw the blood that flowed in the streets back home on Eid al-Adha, when hundreds of goats and cows and sheep were slaughtered for the festival. Dr. Chowdhury was there, too. He lifted off the coat and the shawls, then lifted Asma, gently, tearing the salwar kameez, cardinal with blood, to reveal a flash of blood-mottled bare brown skin before he applied pressure to the wound and covered her again. Nasruddin took in her closed eyes, the horrible pallor of her face. Asma would want to know if she had been exposed. She would want the whole scene described: Was everybody looking at me? Was I brave? And who took Abdul? Were the aunties fighting over him, or did you take him? And what was Mrs. Mahmoud doing? Screaming, I bet. Did the paramedics have to treat her, too?
Did you take him? This imagined question prodded Nasruddin from his shock. Where was Abdul? Nasruddin scanned the crowd. Maybe the police had him? With relief he saw Laila gripping Abdul, who sobbed still. A siren’s mechanical wail grew louder, slower, as the ambulance nosed through the crowd. Two paramedics pushed through to the clearing the police had created around Asma and busied themselves over her. They gave no clue as to her condition, but Nasruddin knew and began to weep even as the ambulance pulled away, and at the sight of a man who had steadied his community for two decades so unsteadied himself, the crowd seemed to melt, women crying, men kneeling, everyone rocking, rocking.
Abdul: he needed to be removed from the scene.
“Mrs. Mahmoud! Take Abdul upstairs!” he ordered, then saw Mrs. Mahmoud puddle to the ground. She would have to collect herself to help wash Asma’s body; so would Mrs. Ahmed, who now had found her way to the ground, too. Nasruddin grabbed Mr. Mahmoud and pointed to Laila Fathi and Abdul and said, “Take them upstairs now! Now!” and Mr. Mahmoud, red-eyed himself, led them away, with a police officer clearing the crowd ahead of them. This was only the beginning of getting the boy home, Nasruddin realized—Nasruddin would have to fly Abdul, along with the body, home to Bangladesh. He felt helpless just thinking about it, him alone on a plane with a two-year-old orphan.
“The press! The press! They killed her!” someone called out. The reporters were scattered through the crowd, refuse on a deltaic river. Men in the crowd had grabbed some of them by the arms and were holding them; other journalists had formed a small defenseless knot by a building, the brick at their back. “Press!” they were shouting. “We are journalists!” Some had fake smiles to go with the terror in their eyes.
Bangladeshis, furious now, surged toward them, and Nasruddin saw a few of the bigger cameramen move to the front of the group and a few of the women frantically punching their cell phones and still others waving for the police, who moved toward them, shouting at the crowd, “Get back! Stay back!”
The crowd pushed forward. The reporters pressed themselves against the building, the women among them holding hands. “You killed her!” his neighbors were shouting in fury. Nasruddin didn’t know if they meant this literally—had a reporter stabbed her?—or that the journalists had endangered her with their stories. He was being rocked so hard he could barely keep his footing but even so he saw the police officers’ hands going to their gun holsters and he cried