The Submission - Amy Waldman [36]
God is the greatest of plotters. One day Nasruddin took her to see a lawyer who wanted to help Asma receive compensation from the government for Inam’s death. All the legal relatives of the dead were getting compensation, so there was no reason Asma shouldn’t as well. And if she truly wanted to stay in America and raise her son, Nasruddin told her, she needed to do this.
The lawyer, he said, was an Iranian American. A Muslim, but unlike any Muslim Asma knew. Her dark hair, unlike Asma’s, was uncovered. The skirt of her snug-fitting turquoise suit struck just above the knee. Her pale legs were bare; her heels, which matched her suit, high. Her lips were painted the color of a plum. Asma would have liked to ask her questions all day, most of them having nothing to do with the attack, but Laila Fathi had no time. Her words came fast; her phones rang often; her calendar, which sat open at her elbow, was full.
Asma herself had never kept a calendar, never needed to: even after the attack, she relied on Nasruddin to call the day before—or even that morning—and tell her they had an appointment. In Sandwip the passage of time was calendared by events, not dates, and so were her memories: the harvesting of summer paddy, autumn paddy, winter paddy; the arrival of the first mangoes; school holidays and religious ones—the sighting of the crescent moon at Ramadan’s beginning and end. The two Eids. Election time, a season of violence. Schedules, back home, were provisional. Appointments made were often not kept. People were delayed by poor roads, flat rickshaw tires, gasoline shortages, or simply conversations that stretched on. In America time was gold; in Bangladesh, corrugated tin.
Laila was like a baffling dream, which made it hard to concentrate on what she, in Nasruddin’s translation, was saying. The politicians had agreed, after some months of arguing, to compensate illegal aliens who had lost relatives in the attack. Nasruddin and Laila wanted her to meet the man from the government who was distributing the funds. It would be a way to assure Abdul the future her husband had wanted.
Walk right into the government’s arms? Were they crazy? She did not believe any country could be that generous.
“It must be a trick,” Asma said, “a way to find illegals and deport us.”
Laila said that the government had promised that no information obtained through this process would be shared with immigration officials. “Believe me, I would never expose you to any kind of danger,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that if you come to the government’s attention some other way—getting arrested, for example—they can’t deport you, so I’d avoid contact with the police.”
“Will they put in writing that this is not a trick?” Asma asked, impressed by her own shrewdness. Laila’s smile suggested that she was impressed, too.
In the end Asma was persuaded by her faith in Nasruddin. The three of them worked on her claim, trying to estimate what Inam’s income over time would have been. Asma walked into the meeting with the government man shaking with fear, scrutinized his face