The Submission - Amy Waldman [74]
Asma was also afraid to know her newly weakened father, since her stubborn strength was modeled on his. To hear him faded was to feel her own power ebb. So much of who she was came from him—and would keep her from him. Clinging to America, to the possibilities it dangled, was her own small war of liberation, if a lonelier one.
She harbored a secret fantasy that in America, she could remarry. Not now, not for a long time, not while her ache for Inam remained so deep. But someday she wanted her son to have more than a paper father. If she remarried in Bangladesh, she would have to leave Abdul with Inam’s family. This she would never do. It wouldn’t be easy to remarry in Brooklyn, but if she had gotten out of Sandwip, she imagined she could get out of Kensington, too. What would it be like to live in those neighborhoods she saw on TV, with white people and big houses and driveways with cars? And sprinklers? She wasn’t saying she wanted to live that way. She just wondered.
“Will you come?” her uncle asked now. Why, she wanted to say: her father would be wrapped and buried before she got home.
“Insh’Allah,” she said.
She ended the call inconsolable and irascible. Abdul had put a pot over his head and was stumbling around, bumping into furniture, giggling hysterically. Her neighbors’ argument continued, their voices rising and falling with no consideration for her loss. It was disrespectful, like bombing during Ramadan, not to pause for the news of her father’s death, even if they didn’t know of it. She resented them as much for having each other as for hating each other—for having each other to hate.
There was a moment of stillness; perhaps it was over. Then she heard Kabir’s voice again, louder, angrier, then a shriek and a howl and sobs. She had had enough. She thought of her husband, the kindest man she knew, and of her father, the bravest; picked up Abdul, took the pot off his head, marched next door, and knocked loudly.
When Hasina’s crying stopped, it left a vacuum—sharper than mere silence—in its wake, like the sudden, startling end of a monsoon. Even wriggling Abdul grew still, as if sensing something had changed. Asma banged again. There was a rustle; she sensed a presence behind the peephole. Then Kabir opened the door, and Asma pushed past him to Hasina, who was huddled on the couch, her face red and puffy, her right eye starting to swell.
“Come with me,” Asma said, trying to grab Hasina’s elbow without dropping Abdul. Hasina seemed to be making her body dead weight, hugging the couch with her thighs. Abdul, straining his own legs toward the floor, wasn’t helping. “Come with me,” Asma said louder, as if Hasina hadn’t heard. “I’m going to find you a place to stay. You must leave this marriage.” She had read about a shelter for abused Muslim women in one of the Bangladeshi papers. And now here was a perfect candidate, as if a character had walked out of a television serial.
“Leave?” Hasina hissed. “Where do you get such language, such thoughts?” Her venom took Asma aback. “I don’t want to leave,” she said. The skin of her socket was still puffing; soon the eye would disappear, like a rock in water. “Shame! Shame!” Her hysteria rose and she began screaming at Asma to mind her own affairs. Soon Kabir joined in. Asma clamped her hands over Abdul’s ears, but he began to scream, too. Backing out of the apartment, she found the hallway full of neighbors, Mrs. Mahmoud among them, who had come to see what was going on. Before they could investigate, opine, pronounce, she ran into her room, locked the door, and sobbed into Abdul’s hair.
Two hours later came a knock on Mrs. Mahmoud’s door. Three men known to Asma as residents of the building stood there announcing their concerns about her interference. Her response,