Exit West

by Mohsin Hamid

  “I think he’s looking at young ladies,” Saeed’s father said to his mother.

  “Behave yourself, Saeed,” said his mother.

  “Well, he is your son.”

  “I never needed a telescope.”

  “Yes, you preferred to operate short-range.”

  Saeed shook his head and tacked upward.

  “I see Mars,” he said. And indeed he did. The second-nearest planet, its features indistinct, the color of a sunset after a dust storm.

  Saeed straightened and held up his phone, directing its camera at the heavens, consulting an application that indicated the names of celestial bodies he did not know. The Mars it showed was more detailed as well, though it was of course a Mars from another moment, a bygone Mars, fixed in memory by the application’s creator.

  In the distance Saeed’s family heard the sound of automatic gunfire, flat cracks that were not loud and yet carried to them cleanly. They sat a little longer. Then Saeed’s mother suggested they return inside.

  • • •

  WHEN SAEED AND NADIA finally had coffee together in the cafeteria, which happened the following week, after the very next session of their class, Saeed asked her about her conservative and virtually all-concealing black robe.

  “If you don’t pray,” he said, lowering his voice, “why do you wear it?”

  They were sitting at a table for two by a window, overlooking snarled traffic on the street below. Their phones rested screens-down between them, like the weapons of desperadoes at a parley.

  She smiled. Took a sip. And spoke, the lower half of her face obscured by her cup.

  “So men don’t fuck with me,” she said.

  TWO

  WHEN NADIA WAS A CHILD, her favorite subject was art, even though art was taught only once a week and she did not consider herself particularly talented as an artist. She had gone to a school that emphasized rote memorization, for which she was by temperament particularly ill-suited, and so she spent a great deal of time doodling in the margins of her textbooks and notebooks, hunched over to hide curlicues and miniature woodland universes from the eyes of her teachers. If they caught her, she would get a scolding, or occasionally a slap on the back of the head.

  The art in Nadia’s childhood home consisted of religious verses and photos of holy sites, framed and mounted on walls. Nadia’s mother and sister were quiet women and her father a man who tried to be quiet, thinking this a virtue, but who nonetheless came to a boil easily and often where Nadia was concerned. Her constant questioning and growing irreverence in matters of faith upset and frightened him. There was no physical violence in Nadia’s home, and much giving to charity, but when after finishing university Nadia announced, to her family’s utter horror, and to her own surprise for she had not planned to say it, that she was moving out on her own, an unmarried woman, the break involved hard words on all sides, from her father, from her mother, even more so from her sister, and perhaps most of all from Nadia herself, such that Nadia and her family both considered her thereafter to be without a family, something all of them, all four, for the rest of their lives, regretted, but which none of them would ever act to repair, partly out of stubbornness, partly out of bafflement at how to go about doing so, and partly because the impending descent of their city into the abyss would come before they realized that they had lost the chance.

  Nadia’s experiences during her first months as a single woman living on her own did, in some moments, equal or even surpass the loathsomeness and dangerousness that her family had warned her about. But she had a job at an insurance company, and she was determined to survive, and so she did. She secured a room of her own atop the house of a widow, a record player and small collection of vinyl, a circle of acquaintances among the city’s free spirits, and a connection to a discreet and nonjudgmental female gynecologist. She learned how to dress for self-protection, how best to deal with aggressive men and with the police, and with aggressive men who were the police, and always to trust her instincts about situations to avoid or to exit immediately.

  But sitting at her desk at the insurance company, on an afternoon of handling executive auto policy renewals by phone, when she received an instant message from Saeed asking if she would like to meet, her work posture was still hunched over, as it had been when she was a schoolgirl, and she was still doodling, as always, in the margins of the printouts before her.

  • • •

  THEY MET at a Chinese restaurant of Nadia’s choosing, this not being a class night. The family that used to run the place, after arriving in the city following the Second World War, and flourishing there for three generations, had recently sold up and emigrated to Canada. But prices remained reasonable, and the standard of food had not yet fallen. The dining area had a darkened, opium-den ambience, in contrast to other Chinese restaurants in the city. It was distinctively lit by what looked like candle-filled paper lanterns, but were in fact plastic, illuminated by flame-shaped, electronically flickering bulbs.

  Nadia arrived first and watched Saeed enter and walk to her table. He had, as he often did, an amused expression in his bright eyes, not mocking, but as though he saw the humor in things, and this in turn amused her and made her warm to him. She resisted smiling, knowing it would not be long for him to smile, and indeed he smiled before reaching the table, and his smile was then returned.

  “I like it,” he said, indicating their surroundings. “Sort of mysterious. Like we could be anywhere. Well, not anywhere, but not here.”

  “Have you ever traveled abroad?”

  He shook his head. “I want to.”

  “Me too.”

  “Where would you go?”

  She considered him for a while. “Cuba.”

  “Cuba! Why?”

  “I don’t know. It makes me think of music and beautiful old buildings and the sea.”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  “And you? Where would you pick? One place.”

  “Chile.”

  “So we both want to go to Latin America.”

  He grinned. “The Atacama Desert. The air is so dry, so clear, and there’s so few people, almost no lights. And you can lie on your back and look up and see the Milky Way. All the stars like a splash of milk in the sky. And you see them slowly move. Because the Earth is moving. And you feel like you’re lying on a giant spinning ball in space.”

  Nadia watched Saeed’s features. In that moment they were tinged with wonder, and he looked, despite his stubble, boy-like. He struck her as a strange sort of man. A strange and attractive sort of man.

  Their waiter came to take their order. Neither Nadia nor Saeed chose a soft drink, preferring tea and water, and when their food arrived neither used chopsticks, both being, at least while under observation, more confident of their skills with a fork instead. Despite initial instances of awkwardness, or rather of disguised shyness, they found it mostly easy to talk to one another, which always comes as something of a relief on a first proper date. They spoke quietly, cautious not to attract the attention of nearby diners. Their meal was finished too soon.

  They next faced the problem that confronted all young people in the city who wanted to continue in one another’s company past a certain hour. During the day there were parks, and campuses, and restaurants, cafés. But at night, after dinner, unless one had access to a home where such things were safe and permitted, or had a car, there were few places to be alone. Saeed’s family had a car, but it was being repaired, and so he had come by scooter. And Nadia had a home, but it was tricky, in more ways than one, to have a man over.

  Still, she decided to invite him.

  Saeed seemed surprised and extremely excited when she suggested he come.

  “Nothing is going to happen,” she explained. “I want to make that clear. When I say you should come over, I’m not saying I want your hands on me.”

  “No. Of course
.”

  Saeed’s expression had grown traumatized.

  But Nadia nodded. And while her eyes were warm, she did not smile.

  • • •

  REFUGEES HAD OCCUPIED many of the open places in the city, pitching tents in the greenbelts between roads, erecting lean-tos next to the boundary walls of houses, sleeping rough on sidewalks and in the margins of streets. Some seemed to be trying to re-create the rhythms of a normal life, as though it were completely natural to be residing, a family of four, under a sheet of plastic propped up with branches and a few chipped bricks. Others stared out at the city with what looked like anger, or surprise, or supplication, or envy. Others didn’t move at all: stunned, maybe, or resting. Possibly dying. Saeed and Nadia had to be careful when making turns not to run over an outstretched arm or leg.

  As she nosed her motorcycle home, followed by Saeed on his scooter, Nadia did have several moments of questioning whether she had done the right thing. But she didn’t change her mind.

  There were two checkpoints on their way, one manned by police and another, newer one, manned by soldiers. The police didn’t bother with them. The soldiers stopped everyone. They made Nadia remove her helmet, perhaps thinking she might be a man disguised as a woman, but when they saw this was not the case, they waved her through.

  Nadia rented the top portion of a narrow building belonging to a widow whose children and grandchildren all lived abroad. This building had once been a single house, but it was constructed adjacent to a market that had subsequently grown past and around it. The widow had kept the middle floor for herself, converted the bottom floor into a shop that she let out to a seller of car-battery-based residential-power-backup systems, and given the uppermost floor to Nadia, who had overcome the widow’s initial suspicions by claiming that she too was a widow, her husband a young infantry officer killed in battle, which, admittedly, was less than entirely true.

  Nadia’s flat comprised a studio room with an alcove kitchenette and a bathroom so small that showering without drenching the commode was impossible. But it opened onto a roof terrace that looked out over the market and was, when the electricity had not gone out, bathed in the soft and shimmying glow of a large, animated neon sign that towered nearby in the service of a zero-calorie carbonated beverage.

  Nadia told Saeed to wait at a short distance, in a darkened alley around the corner, while she unlocked a metal grill door and entered the building alone. Once upstairs she threw a quilt over her bed and pushed her dirty clothes into the closet. She filled a small shopping bag, paused another minute, and dropped it out a window.

  The bag landed beside Saeed with a muffled thump. He opened it, found her spare downstairs key, and also one of her black robes, which he furtively pulled on over his own outfit, covering his head with its hood, and then, with a mincing gait that reminded her of a stage-play robber, he approached the front door, unlocked it, and a minute later appeared at her apartment, where she motioned him to sit.

  Nadia selected a record, an album sung by a long-dead woman who was once an icon of a style that in her American homeland was quite justifiably called soul, her so-alive but no longer living voice conjuring up from the past a third presence in a room that presently contained only two, and asked Saeed if he would like a joint, to which he fortunately said yes, and which he offered to roll.

  • • •

  WHILE NADIA AND SAEED were sharing their first spliff together, in the Tokyo district of Shinjuku where midnight had already come and gone, and so, technically, the next day had already commenced, a young man was nursing a drink for which he had not paid and yet to which he was entitled. His whiskey came from Ireland, a place he had never been to but evinced a mild fondness for, perhaps because Ireland was like the Shikoku of a parallel universe, not dissimilar in shape, and likewise slung on the ocean-ward side of a larger island at one end of the vast Eurasian landmass, or perhaps because of an Irish gangster film he had gone to see repeatedly in his still-impressionable youth.

  The man wore a suit and a crisp white shirt and therefore any tattoos he had or did not have on his arms would not be visible. He was stocky but, when he got to his feet, elegant in his movements. His eyes were sober, flat, despite the drink, and not eyes that attracted the eyes of others. Gazes leapt away from his gaze, as they might among packs of dogs in the wild, in which a hierarchy is set by some sensed quality of violent potential.

  Outside the bar he lit a cigarette. The street was bright from illuminated signage but relatively quiet. A pair of drunk salarymen passed him at a safe distance, then an off-the-clock club hostess, taking quick steps and staring at the pavement. The clouds above Tokyo hung low, reflecting dull red back at the city, but a breeze was now blowing, he felt it on his skin and in his hair, a sense of brine and slight chill. He held the smoke in his lungs and released it slowly. It disappeared in the wind’s flow.

  He was surprised to hear a noise behind him, because the alley to his rear was a cul-de-sac and empty when he came outside. He had examined it, out of habit and quickly, but not carelessly, before turning his back. Now there were two Filipina girls, in their late teens, neither probably yet twenty, standing beside a disused door to the rear of the bar, a door that was always kept locked, but was in this moment somehow open, a portal of complete blackness, as though no light were on inside, almost as though no light could penetrate inside. The girls were dressed strangely, in clothing that was too thin, tropical, not the kind of clothing you normally saw Filipinas wear in Tokyo, or anyone else at this time of year. One of them had knocked over an empty beer bottle. It was rolling, high-pitched, in a scurrying arc away.

  They did not look at him. He had the feeling they did not know what to make of him. They spoke in hushed tones as they passed, their words unintelligible, but recognized by him as Tagalog. They seemed emotional: perhaps excited, perhaps frightened, perhaps both—in any case, the man thought, with women it was difficult to tell. They were in his territory. Not the first time this week that he had seen a group of Filipinos who seemed oddly clueless in his bit of town. He disliked Filipinos. They had their place, but they had to know their place. There had been a half-Filipino boy in his junior high school class whom he had beaten often, once so badly that he would have been expelled, had someone been willing to say who had done it.

  He watched the girls walk. Considered.

  And slipped into a walk behind them, fingering the metal in his pocket as he went.

  • • •

  IN TIMES OF VIOLENCE, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real. For Nadia this person was her cousin, a man of considerable determination and intellect, who even when he was young had never cared much for play, who seemed to laugh only rarely, who had won medals in school and decided to become a doctor, who had successfully emigrated abroad, who returned once a year to visit his parents, and who, along with eighty-five others, was blown by a truck bomb to bits, literally to bits, the largest of which, in Nadia’s cousin’s case, were a head and two-thirds of an arm.

  Nadia did not hear of her cousin’s death in time to attend the funeral, and she did not visit her relatives, not for lack of emotion but because she wanted to avoid being the cause of unpleasantness. She had planned to go to the graveyard alone, but Saeed had called her and asked through her silences what was the matter, and she had somehow told him, and he had offered to join her, insisted without insisting, which strangely came as a kind of relief. So they went together, very early the following morning, and saw the rounded mound of fresh earth, garlanded with flowers, above her cousin’s partial remains. Saeed stood and prayed. Nadia did not offer a prayer, or scatter rose petals, but knelt down and put her hand on the mound, damp from the recent visit of a grave-tender with a watering can, and shut her eyes for a long while, as the sound of a jetliner descending to the nearby airport came and w
ent.

  They had breakfast at a café, coffee and some bread with butter and jam, and she spoke, but not of her cousin, and Saeed seemed very present, comfortable being there on that unusual morning, with her not talking of what was most of consequence, and she felt things change between them, become more solid, in a way. Then Nadia went to the insurance company that employed her, handled fleet policies until lunch. Her tone was steady and businesslike. The callers she dealt with only rarely said words that were inappropriate. Or asked her for her personal number. Which, when they did, she would not give.

  • • •

  NADIA HAD BEEN SEEING a musician for some time. They had met at an underground concert, more a jam session really, with perhaps fifty or sixty people crammed into the soundproofed premises of a recording studio that specialized increasingly in audio work for television—the local music business being, for reasons of both security and piracy, in rather difficult straits. She had, as was by then usual for her, been wearing her black robe, closed to her neck, and he had, as was by then usual for him, been wearing a size-too-small white T-shirt, pinned to his lean chest and stomach, and she had watched him and he had circled her, and they had gone to his place that night, and she had shuffled off the weight of her virginity with some perplexity but not excessive fuss.

  They rarely spoke on the telephone and met only sporadically, and she suspected he had many other women. She did not want to inquire. She appreciated his comfort with his own body, and his wanton attitude to hers, and the rhythm and strum of his touch, and his beauty, his animal beauty, and the pleasure he evoked in her. She thought she mattered little to him, but in this she was mistaken, as the musician was quite smitten, and not nearly so unattached to her as she supposed, but pride, and also fear, and also style, kept him from asking more of her than she offered up. He berated himself for this subsequently, but not too much, even though after their last meeting he would not stop thinking of her until his death, which was, though neither of them then knew it, only a few short months away.