The Submission - Amy Waldman [66]
Hands shot in the air like they were doing the wave. There were cheers and whoops and cries of “Take it back! Take it back!” Sean passed around a sign-up sheet for the protest and scheduled a practice session.
“Don’t forget to keep the pressure on Claire Burwell—she’s the most important backer Khan’s got,” Debbie said when the church had emptied. Her hands were on her slim hips; PEACE glittered from her neck. She eyed the Virgin Mary as if sizing up a potential recruit.
“Asma!” Mrs. Mahmoud called, clapping her hands. “Come out for tea. I’ve bought gulab jamun.”
Asma sat very still on her bed and wondered if she could get away with pretending she wasn’t home. Ever since her pregnancy, she had hated gulab jamun—sticky, sweet, sickening. All she wanted was to curl up with the latest newspapers and read while Abdul played quietly. She was in the middle of a column translated from the English papers: “Islam means submission—it makes slaves of its followers, and demands that people of other religions submit to it, too. Their goal is to impose Sharia, Islamic law, wherever they can, including the United States. They will tell you this isn’t true, but the problem is that Islam also sanctions lying—the Islamic term for this is taqiya—to help the faith spread or to wage jihad. The Muslim who entered this memorial competition practiced taqiya by concealing his identity …”
Asma paused to think about this. Because she didn’t read or speak Arabic, her knowledge of the Quran came in pieces, through memorized prayers, through the sermons at Friday prayers, through bits quoted and discussed by her grandfather, her father, the imams. None of those people had ever told her to wage war against non-Muslims or try to impose Sharia, although they probably wouldn’t rely on the women to do that. Certainly no one had told her to lie. This didn’t mean she never had. She lied to come to America, putting “honeymoon” as the purpose of her visit on the visa application, when she knew she was coming to America to live. But people from all over the world, from every religion, told that lie. She lied when she told Inam that it didn’t hurt the first time they made love, but after that the pain had become pleasure, so deep she couldn’t find words, so it wasn’t a bad lie, and also she guessed that lie, too, wasn’t told only by Muslim women. She lied, was lying still, to the Mahmouds by not telling them about her money …
“Gulab jamun!” Abdul sang out. Now there was no pretending.
“We’ll be right out,” Asma called, heaving a sigh that she hoped released all of her resistance.
She opened the door from her room and saw Mrs. Mahmoud inching her buttocks into her sofa, as if anchoring herself for a long chat. Setting Abdul loose to roam, Asma took a seat next to her. Mrs. Mahmoud held out the plate of gulab jamun, and Asma managed a very small bite.
Tea with Mrs. Mahmoud was never just tea, rather it was a lubricant for the gossip that would be disseminated or collected, the measuring of everyone else’s situation and the landlady’s own.
“They say the rains in Sandwip are going to be terrible this year,” she began, with authority. “But my husband’s parents don’t have to worry: they have a new roof because of the money he sent. They say it is the best roof for kilometers around …”
Mrs. Mahmoud slurped her tea and belched politely. She had twenty years, forty pounds, and several hundred gray hairs on Asma. Her talk was a solid object that filled the room, confining Asma to a tiny space.
“Salima Ahmed thinks she is special these days because she has found a match for her son,” Mrs. Mahmoud said of her sworn enemy and sometime best friend. “She snuck into line in front of me at the butcher. She thought I didn’t see, but