The Submission - Amy Waldman [144]
He dawdled in memory until dusk, when the light in Babur’s garden turned murky, soft, and the muezzin’s wail poured over him. From all corners men moved toward the exit and the city beyond as inexorably as the canal flowing down the terraces. Mo felt a pull, more passive than volition, to follow them, as if he were a drop being absorbed by a body of water whose size he had no way to measure. And yet he held back, until he saw one man kneel to pray, alone, on a stone border at a terrace’s edge. He went to join him, pausing first at a tap to splash water on his face and hands in a gesture toward ablution.
Mo had last prayed maybe a year ago, visiting the Virginia mosque with his father. It was perhaps the first time he had prayed as an adult, and with the steps of the salat foreign to him, he watched his father. It was a lesson of odd intimacy. Salman was past sixty, and his age told in the creak of his knees, the pause of his body in a question mark on the way to the floor, the gathering of breath before he bent to his forehead, the slight stiffness of the rise.
Mo, even as he moved himself, had been nearly paralyzed by self-consciousness. To see young professionals like him, BlackBerrys blinking from their belts, with their rears hoisted in the air and their socked soles exposed, had made him wince for their dignity and for his own, had made him think that men weren’t meant to be spectators of the prayers of others.
But today, the Afghan, deep in his prostrations, did not acknowledge Mo, even as together they formed a line, a wall, a mosque; he cared not at all for Mo’s judgment. He had forgotten himself, and this was the truest submission.
Mo pressed his hands to the window. The Arabian Sea unrolled to the horizon like a bolt of tussar silk. Behind him stretched Mumbai, its blurry edge embroidered farther every time he looked. The megacity, always expanding: new arrivals in the birth wards and bus stations each day, the dying and departing unable to keep pace. Mumbai spread, Mumbai rose. Mo watched from forty stories above the sea.
He meditated on the water, trying to collect himself. He had spent the past hour in an argument with a Kuwaiti prince for whom he had designed a modest palace, clean-lined and energy-efficient. The commission had gone well until this morning, when the prince announced that he wanted a lawn, a vast, American-style lawn, with sprinklers embedded and mowers at the ready, a lawn on which balls could be bowled, horses cantered, picnics spread, tea parties laid, soccer wars waged. The prince didn’t care that even England and America had turned away from swards of green. With the profits from oil, he could buy water. He wanted a lawn.
He couldn’t have one, not with Mo as his architect. “The landscaping isn’t an accessory, it’s part of the design, so you take all of it or none of it,” Mo had snapped, irritable even by his own standards. It had been a mistake to work this morning: he should have taken the time to subdue his memories, discipline his feelings. He was on edge, a man near sixty anxious about meeting a couple of American kids less than half his age.
They were here, the doorman messaged; he was sending them up. Mo surveyed his immaculate space, then opened his door to a young woman, pretty enough, with crinkle-edged brown eyes, a salting of freckles, a wide smile. She wore a vintage wrap dress, but he suspected, from its awkward draping, that she preferred pants. Behind her stood a cameraman with tousled hair and a tentative smile. Mo politely asked that they remove their shoes.
Molly had pestered