The Submission - Amy Waldman [35]
When they spoke by phone—Inam in Brooklyn, she still in Sandwip—he was so quiet that she had to fill the silences herself. Their marriage had been much the same. But she missed his stillness. She hadn’t realized how much it soothed her.
Gold seal, black letters: the death certificate arrived. The Bangladesh consulate acknowledged Inam as one of theirs and provided Asma with a small stipend. With the help of a Jewish lawyer who had made the undocumented relatives his cause, Nasruddin got the subcontractor who had employed Inam to fork over a small amount, too. Three months passed, then six, without a body or even a piece of one. Abdul learned to turn over, and the unspoken question grew louder: When would Asma go home? “They are saying some of the bodies may never be found,” Mrs. Mahmoud said bluntly one day. “They were cremated.”
Were her words meant to sting? Cremation was anathema to Muslims. God had forbidden the use of fire on His Creation, or so Asma had been taught. Then why had God allowed these men to cremate her husband—and claim to have cremated him in God’s name, no less? Where would Inam’s soul go? Would this leave him outside paradise? The next morning, when she heard the Mahmouds leave, she crept to their phone and called the local imam. It was easier to frame her questions without having to face him. She could picture his eyes blinking behind his glasses, the sparse beard that always made her think of a fire struggling to light.
Why did my husband suffer so? she asked.
“It was written,” he said, as she knew he would. The burning Inam might have suffered was nothing next to the torment of the hellfire, which was forever, the cleric continued. If Inam was a believer, she could rest easy—he was in the garden now. His pain here had been momentary; his bliss would be everlasting.
She had no doubt that Inam had been taken into the gardens of paradise. He gave zakat. He always fasted during Ramadan. He prayed, if not five times a day, as often as he could. The morning of his death, lying in bed with her eyes closed, pretending to sleep, too lazy and heavy with child to get up and cook him breakfast, leaving him to the cold dal she had prepared the night before, she had heard the rustling as he prostrated himself. He believed.
And yet the knowledge that he would gain paradise failed to give her the peace or joy that signaled submission to God’s will. Fearful of what the scratching in her chest signaled instead, she prayed to feel peace.
Why did Inam have to die? she asked the imam, knowing this question was not hers to ask. She had the urge to keep him on the phone, string out the conversation. The imam quoted a sura: “No soul may die except with God’s permission at a predestined time.” God was all-pervading, all-knowing, he said, “the creator, owner, and master of the universe. We cannot question His destruction; we are His Creation to deal with as He chooses.”
His words—words she had heard, in one form or another, her whole life—now made God sound like a rich man free to reward or punish His servants as He chose. These thoughts made her ashamed, even apologetic toward God. Yet she persisted in her questions. The men who killed Inam believed it was an act of devotion, one that would get them to paradise, she told the imam. Everyone said so. They believed they were fighting for God, and the Quran promised those who did so a great reward. How could the same paradise make room for both them and her husband?
“God knows best,” he said. But I want to know, too, she thought. Faith for her had always been something like an indestructible building. Now she had spotted a loose brick whose removal could topple the whole structure, and her hand hovered near it, tempted, afraid.
And yet it was God, the greatest of plotters, whom she believed would decide her fate. Or maybe He already had. She expected to be deported; she hadn’t been. She planned to leave when Inam’s body was found; it hadn’t been. One day she realized the wait had become