by Amy Waldman
“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 a pretext. Clinging to the thin thread of hope for his body’s recovery also let her hold on to the entire imaginary American future Inam had woven for their unborn son. Even after spending six years earning a degree from Chittagong University, Inam couldn’t get a job in Bangladesh unless he was willing to buy one. With hundreds vying for every opening in the civil service or a private company, the positions went to the highest bidder. He wasn’t willing, but even if he were, how could he earn the money to buy a job when he didn’t have a job to begin with? It would be different for their son, Inam always said. She determined to make it so. Kensington had such a high concentration of Bangladeshis that she could meet all of her needs for food, cleaning supplies, medicine, and clothing without uttering a word of English, the price being that she could make no move that was not fully vetted in Bengali. But she couldn’t stay without money, and the amounts doled out to her wouldn’t keep her and Abdul for long.
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 for deceit, and walked out with $1.05 million for the lifetime loss of her husband’s earnings. She knew it could not have been simple, but for her it was. Just like that, she was a millionaire, although once Nasruddin did the math for her, showing how that money would have to sustain Abdul until his adulthood, and her for perhaps her whole life, she saw how careful with her dollars she would have to be.
And how careful with herself, for she wasn’t just a millionaire but a secret one. Government largesse had made her rich; government fiat kept her illegal. She had the money to fly to Bangladesh and back a hundred times, but she couldn’t leave America because she might not be allowed back in. There were other relatives of the dead like her, Laila said—relatively well-off, illegal—but Asma did not know how many or who they were. Maybe they passed on the street every day, each of them hiding alone in the dark, fearful that the glimmer from their piles of gold would give them away. God wove a spiderweb to hide Mohammad, sheltering in a cave, from his pursuers. If He wanted to protect her, He would.
There was another reason Nasruddin counseled discretion: he didn’t want the community catching on to her newfound wealth or sending word of it back to Bangladesh. Someone could turn her in to the immigration authorities. Relatives back home could be kidnapped and held for ransom. The money had to stay hidden like a new roll of fat beneath her clothes. So even as financial advisers picked by Laila Fathi invested Asma’s million, she still lived like she was poor.
The most incremental increase in her spending attracted Mrs. Mahmoud’s notice. “You bought brinjal?” she sniffed when eggplants had gone up nine cents a pound. Or “Celebrating, are we?” when Asma, trying to return Mrs. Mahmoud’s all-too-frequent hospitality, offered her some chocolates wrapped in purple foil. They had cost $2.20. Asma told the Mahmouds that the subcontractor had given her a little more money and she planned to stay in America. Their evident displeasure soon yielded to pity. Asma needed to make her money last as long as possible, they said. She would stay with them and pay only fifty dollars a month for her room. To accept felt dishonest, when she could pay more, but Asma saw no choice. Maybe listening to Mrs. Mahmoud talk could be a form of payment.
The status of her dead husband remained as provisional as her own. Nasruddin told her there was to be a memorial to the victims, but that an anti-immigrant group wanted Inam and other illegal immigrants left off it. To include them, the group claimed, would condone their “law-breaking” and make them equivalent to citizens. The prospect of her husband’s exclusion gnawed at Asma. It would be the final repudiation of his existence—as if he had lived only in her imagination. He had to be named, for in that name was a life.
When the anti-immigrant group held a small protest near city hall, she and the Mahmouds watched it on the local news. Mr. Mahmoud translated. The angry man being cheered by the crowd, he explained, was a popular radio talk-show host, Lou Sarge, who had become ever more popular by assailing Islam. He frightened Asma, with his skin too white and hair too black.
“Respect for the law is what makes America, America,” Sarge roared. “If we put illegals on the memorial, we will be spitting in the face of the law-abiding Americans, including legal immigrants, who died. The illegal immigrants who died came here seeking opportunity, but if they had stayed home they would still be alive. Isn’t that the greatest opportunity of all?”
Asma ground her fists into the sofa cushions, furious that there was no one to speak for her husband, for the army of workers who cleaned and cooked and bowed and scraped and when the day came died as if it were just another way to please. But the next day, the mayor said he thought all o
f the dead, illegal or not, should be listed, and soon the governor and the chairman of the memorial jury agreed. Inam would take his place as a permanent resident on whatever memorial came to be. But she couldn’t shake the sense, like the shudder after a near-accident in a Chittagong bus, that history had only narrowly made room for him.
9
Mo stood in the lobby of the God Box, a name that reflected both the building’s shape and the dizzying array of religious organizations it housed. The Muslim American Coordinating Council—MACC—was one of three Islamic groups listed on the directory, along with five Jewish committees and a dozen Christian ones that ranged from mainline Protestants to evangelical missionaries. It reminded him of a ribbon shredded into narrower and narrower strands.
He had never heard of MACC and its executive director, Issam Malik, until he had watched that televised debate on Fox with Yuki. At the time, Malik had struck Mo as the slick front man for a special interest, even if that interest happened to be Mo’s own. But in the wake of his meeting with Paul, Mo reconsidered. Perhaps Malik was the man to make the case that Mo had the same right as any other American to win. He had decided, in that French fun house of a restaurant where he’d met Rubin, that he would not give in to pressure to withdraw, nor would he reassure anyone that he was “moderate” or “safe” or Sufi, whatever adjective would allow Americans to sleep without worrying that he had placed a bomb under their pillow. It was exactly because they had nothing to worry about from him that he wanted to let them worry.
The walls of MACC’s third-floor suite were covered with framed posters from the ad campaign that the council had launched in subways and newspapers right after the attack. “Safeguard us and we’ll safeguard you” had been the motto, its image two giant hands clasping. At the time Mo had considered it misguided—threatening in a way he was sure they hadn’t intended; naïve in proposing to strike a bargain when Americans were in anything but a bargaining mood. As he wandered down the hall, the clasped hands brought to mind Issam Malik, who in photo after photo was shown gripping the hands of governors, mayors, movie stars, even the president, as if locking them all into agreement.
Mo found Malik on the phone behind the prow of a huge V-shaped desk afloat in a vast office. “Asalamu alaikum,” he said, hanging up the phone. Three televisions flickered—CNN, MSNBC, Fox News—but all were on mute. Three remotes were lined up neatly on the desk.
“How’s it going,” Mo muttered.
Malik rose and came around the desk to shake hands. His grip was firm. He was as well groomed and well built as he had appeared on television. But shorter.
Mo had cold-called him, feeling like a fugitive wanting to turn himself in. “I’m the Muslim,” he’d said when he finally got Malik on the phone. And, when Malik didn’t get it: “The Mystery Muslim. The memorial.”
“Ohhh,” Malik had said. “Wow.”
The gleam that had been in Malik’s voice then was in his eyes now. He led Mo into a room where MACC’s executive committee had assembled. The council was an umbrella organization for assorted Muslim groups, some political, some theological, others legal. The group was striking in its diversity: South Asians, African Americans, Arabs; bearded men and clean-shaven, in suits and in djellabas; two women in headscarves and one—striking and black-haired in an aubergine suit—without. Mo’s eyes lingered on her dark eyes, full lips, and prominent but appealing nose, and registered a nod that suggested conditional approval.
At Malik’s request, Mo recounted his story. “I sympathize,” an older man, who had introduced himself as Imam Rashid, responded immediately. “You tried to do the right thing—make a gesture of reconciliation. After the attack, I went to the site. I volunteered. I got other imams to do the same. Then the FBI put an informant in my mosque.”
“Allah will reward you,” said another. “You’ve done something good for the ummah, to show that Muslims want to live in peace in America.”
“But does America want to live in peace with Muslims?” a man named Ansar, who ran a foreign-policy lobby, asked in a more challenging tone. “Since we’re talking about memorials, where is the memorial to the half-million Iraqi children killed by U.S. sanctions? To the thousands of innocent Afghans killed in response to this attack, or the Iraqis killed on the pretext of responding to this attack? Or to all the Muslims slaughtered in Chechnya, or Kashmir, or Palestine, while the U.S. stood by? We keep hearing that it takes three hours to read the names of the dead from this attack. Do you know how long it would take to read the names of half a million dead Iraqi children? Twenty-one days.”
“We’re far afield,” Malik murmured.
“No, this is the field,” Ansar said. “The attack here becomes no less tragic if we acknowledge these other tragedies and demand equal time, equal care for them. They say that when you watch the movies, you root for the cowboys, but when you read the history, you root for the Indians. Americans are locked in a movie theater watching Westerns right now, and we’ve got to break down the walls.”
“I’m an architect, not a politician,” Mo said, hoping to redirect the conversation. “And I’m an American, so it was the attack on America I was moved to commemorate. The Afghans, the Iraqis, the others you mentioned—they are free to design their own memorials.”
“It’s hard to think about memorials when you’re under occupation or bombardment,” Ansar said.
“We can’t ask Mohammad to carry water for every Muslim cause, or country,” Laila Fathi, the bareheaded woman, said. Her voice had a lilting quality that Mo suspected made people underestimate her. “Right now, he is the cause. If they take away his victory, which is clearly what they want to do, or if his opponents pressure them into taking it away, the message is that we’re lesser Americans.”
“We are lesser Americans,” a man in a djellaba said. “Eid is not a school holiday.”
Malik turned on him. “Do you have to bring that up at every meeting?”
“As a matter of fact I do, until it changes. I’m guessing Mohammad doesn’t want to speak out on that issue, either.”
“I’m basically secular,” Mo said.
A woman in a tightly wrapped beige headscarf looked at him curiously, then raised her hand. This was Jamilah Maqboul, MACC’s vice president. “I just wonder if we have considered whether Mr. Khan’s battle is productive—or constructive—for the Muslim community. He’s shown no interest, here at least, in taking on issues that matter to Muslims. All he’s done is remind us that he’s not particularly interested in Islam—that he’s not political, that he’s secular.”
“Exactly,” Ansar said. “Do we use our limited capital to fight for his right to design a memorial that, by ignoring the far greater death toll in the Muslim world from American actions, obscures America’s complicity in its own tragedy?”
“All the while picking an unnecessary fight with the families of victims, a constituency we gain nothing from offending,” Jamilah added.
“This is about amassing capital, not squandering it,” Malik said. “We’re just starting to see the polarization from this, and to be blunt that’s when you need to rally your base, do fund-raising, make the apolitical majority of our brothers and sisters realize that their rights are at stake, that they need to organize, and that they need us to defend them. The media attention allows us to talk about other issues that impact Muslims. And how can we ignore the Islamophobia this has touched off?”
“He won,” Laila Fathi said. “And if this organization is just going to sit back and leave him twisting in the wind like some … some piñata for people to take whacks at, then this isn’t the organization for me.”
Mo saw looks pass among some of the men.
“This is how history works,” Malik picked up. “Cases—battles—emerge from unexpected places. Rosa Parks was tired. Mohammad Khan was inspired.” He paused. “Tired, inspired. Not a bad slogan.”
“But that story’s not true, about her just being tired. She was chosen to be the face of a movement,”
said Aisha, an African American woman, also in a headscarf.
“You all can work out the historical verities,” Malik said. Having checked his watch and his BlackBerry, he was all business now. “As you can see, Mohammad, we favor healthy debate here. All in favor of taking on Mohammad’s case, please raise your hand.”
Seven of the twelve hands went up. Jamilah hesitated, then raised hers.
“Excellent,” Malik said. “We have a two-thirds majority. Now we need a strategy. Laila, can you walk us through the options on the legal front?”
She was brief and to the point. Their best bet, she said, was to create the fear of a lawsuit without actually filing one. Mo, she said, should publicly identify himself as the winner, which would force the jury’s hand. “You have a press conference, introduce me to imply the legal threat, or maybe have me take the questions—”
“I don’t think that’s the right approach,” Ansar said.
“We should have the committee leadership—Issam, Jamilah—up there, or people will mistake Ms. Fathi for the face of MACC,” Imam Rashid said.
An awkward, even unpleasant, mood had taken hold in the room. Mo looked at Laila. She was studying, too intently, her notes.
“I think it’s an excellent idea,” he said. “Ms. Fathi will answer all the questions for me.” She compressed her lips. Mo couldn’t tell if she was pleased.
“The committee should be up there,” Imam Rashid said. “Issam?”
The meeting broke up soon after, and Mo managed to walk out with Laila. “What was going on in there between you and them?” His much longer legs had to work to keep pace with hers.
“Which of these things is not like the other.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You didn’t notice I was the only uncovered woman in there? It’s a big deal for me to even be in that room. Those other women fought for seats on the council, and they couldn’t have won if they weren’t wearing the hijab. I’m new. Malik got me in there because I’ve been getting high-profile cases involving Muslims. Because I’m good. But it’s tense, as you noticed.”
