The Submission - Amy Waldman [73]
Inam took her picture with a disposable camera and asked a Swede to take their picture together, then a Japanese man asked Inam to take a picture of him and his wife, and so easily they became a part of everything, New Yorkers. They had no worries that day, money and jobs, language and family, all as insignificant at that moment as a bucket of water poured into the harbor.
On her television the widows were giving strained smiles to reporters who jabbed microphones at them like doctors probing for disease. There was the blond widow from the jury, her son crying on her lap. Mechanically, Asma spooned more rice pudding into Abdul’s bowl, her attention on the television children, their faces and free T-shirts smeared with ketchup, their smiles, unlike their parents’, bright and real. Abdul was watching her. He could always sense when grief or anger or envy took her elsewhere, and he always brought her back, those betel-brown eyes the deepest correction. He didn’t know he was missing a father, hadn’t come into the world expecting one, or expecting anything, including a free Circle Line cruise. Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.
She woke the next morning to the sound of her neighbors arguing. Asma thought American buildings would have been sturdier, their walls thicker, but this was like being back home: the ability to know, having to know, what was going on in lives not your own or your family’s, so that sometimes it was hard to know where your own thoughts left off and others’ began. The next-door neighbors, Hasina and Kabir, Bangladeshis who had arrived six months ago, were a married couple in their thirties with no children. This did not surprise Asma: she never heard sounds of love from next door, only anger. Quarrels, in her admittedly limited experience, did not make babies.
Hasina lived in strict purdah, never leaving the house without her husband. Sometimes she would ask Asma to bring her something from the market, an ingredient she needed for cooking, or sanitary napkins, or once even underwear, telling Asma her size. On occasion Asma and Mrs. Mahmoud would invite her for tea, but her husband disapproved of Asma living on her own in America with her son rather than returning home to family. Hasina had told her that, but Asma also knew it by the way Kabir avoided her eyes in the hallway, uttering only a gruff “Asalamu alaikum” to avoid being impolite. They were, of course, a favorite subject of Mrs. Mahmoud’s, but Asma had grown as weary of talking about her neighbors as she had of listening to them. Twice she had heard Kabir hit Hasina, or at least she thought so from the sharp scream and muffled cries that followed. But everyone pretended they had heard nothing, that the fights did not exist. When she tried to check on Hasina, Kabir would say, through the door, that his wife was “busy.”
Their fighting was like a radio Asma could not turn down, which gave her the idea of turning hers up. She switched on the BBC and turned up the volume, trying to drown their noise. The radio was so loud that until Mrs. Mahmoud shouted for her, she didn’t hear the phone ringing to inform her of her father’s death.
He had been sick for two weeks—“water in the lungs,” the doctors said, as if he had taken the delta inside of him. His voice on the phone, on the days he could talk, was all rasp and rattle, faint and frail, nothing like the commanding music she remembered. Her mother kept insisting she should come home, and Asma packed and unpacked in her mind, sometimes even in her room. If she did not go, Abdul would never know his grandfather, as he had never known his father—wouldn’t know that a father or grandfather could be anything