Exit West

by Mohsin Hamid

  She and Saeed were fortunate that their homes remained for a while in government-controlled neighborhoods, and so were spared much of the worst fighting and also the retaliatory air strikes that the army was calling in on localities thought not merely to be occupied but disloyal.

  Saeed’s boss had tears in his eyes as he told his employees that he had to shutter his business, apologizing for letting them down, and promising that there would be jobs for them all when things improved and the agency was able to reopen. He was so distraught that it seemed to those collecting their final salaries that they were in fact consoling him. All agreed he was a fine and delicate man, worryingly so, for these were not times for such men.

  At Nadia’s office the payroll department stopped giving out paychecks and within days everyone stopped coming. There were no real goodbyes, or at least none that she was part of, and since the security guards were the first to melt away, a sort of calm looting, or payment-in-hardware, began, and people left with what they could carry. Nadia hefted two laptop computers in their carrying cases and her floor’s flat-screen TV, but in the end she did not take the TV because it would have been difficult to load onto her motorcycle, and passed it instead to a somber-faced colleague who thanked her politely.

  • • •

  ONE’S RELATIONSHIP to windows now changed in the city. A window was the border through which death was possibly most likely to come. Windows could not stop even the most flagging round of ammunition: any spot indoors with a view of the outside was a spot potentially in the crossfire. Moreover the pane of a window could itself become shrapnel so easily, shattered by a nearby blast, and everyone had heard of someone or other who had bled out after being lacerated by shards of flying glass.

  Many windows were broken already, and the prudent thing would have been to remove those that remained, but it was winter and the nights were cold, and without gas and electricity, both of which were in increasingly short supply, windows served to take some of the edge off the chill, and so people left them in place.

  Saeed and his family rearranged their furniture instead. They placed bookshelves full of books flush against the windows in their bedrooms, blocking the glass from sight but allowing light to creep in around the edges, and they leaned Saeed’s bed over the tall windows in their sitting room, mattress and all, upright, at an angle, so that the bed’s feet rested on the lintel. Saeed slept on three rugs layered on the floor, which he told his parents suited his back.

  Nadia taped the inside of her windows with beige packing tape, the sort normally used to seal cardboard boxes, and hammered heavy-duty rubbish bags into place over them, pounding nails into the window frames. When she had had enough electricity to charge her backup battery, she would lounge around and listen to her records in the light of a single bare bulb, the harsh sounds of the fighting muffled somewhat by her music, and she would then glance at her windows and think that they looked a bit like amorphous black works of contemporary art.

  The effect doors had on people altered as well. Rumors had begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this death trap of a country. Some people claimed to know people who knew people who had been through such doors. A normal door, they said, could become a special door, and it could happen without warning, to any door at all. Most people thought these rumors to be nonsense, the superstitions of the feeble-minded. But most people began to gaze at their own doors a little differently nonetheless.

  Nadia and Saeed, too, discussed these rumors and dismissed them. But every morning, when she woke, Nadia looked over at her front door, and at the doors to her bathroom, her closet, her terrace. Every morning, in his room, Saeed did much the same. All their doors remained simple doors, on/off switches in the flow between two adjacent places, binarily either open or closed, but each of their doors, regarded thus with a twinge of irrational possibility, became partially animate as well, an object with a subtle power to mock, to mock the desires of those who desired to go far away, whispering silently from its door frame that such dreams were the dreams of fools.

  • • •

  WITHOUT WORK there was no impediment to Saeed and Nadia meeting during the day except for the fighting, but that impediment was a serious one. The few remaining local channels still on the air were saying that the war was going well but the international ones were saying that it was going badly indeed, adding to an unprecedented flow of migrants that was hitting the rich countries, who were building walls and fences and strengthening their borders, but seemingly to unsatisfactory effect. The militants had their own pirate radio station, featuring a smooth-voiced announcer with a deep and unnervingly sexy voice, who spoke slowly and deliberately, and claimed in a decelerated but almost rap-like cadence that the fall of the city was imminent. Whatever the truth, being out and about was risky, so Saeed and Nadia typically met at Nadia’s place.

  Saeed had once more asked her to move in with him and his family, telling her that he could explain things to his parents, and she could have his room, and he would sleep in the sitting room, and they would not have to marry, they would only, out of respect for his parents, have to remain chaste in the house, and it would be safer for her, for this was no time for anyone to be alone. He had not added that it was especially unsafe for a woman to be alone, but she knew both that he thought it and that it was true, even as she parried his suggestion. He could see that the matter unsettled her, so he did not say it again, but the offer stood, and she considered it.

  Nadia was herself coming to acknowledge that this was no longer a city where the risks facing a young woman living independently could be thought of as manageable, and equally importantly she worried for Saeed each time he drove over to see her and back again. But part of her still resisted the idea of moving in with him, with anyone for that matter, having at such great difficulty moved out in the first place, and become quite attached to her small flat, to the life, albeit often lonely, that she had built there, and also finding the idea of living as a chaste half lover, half sister to Saeed in close proximity to his parents rather bizarre, and she might have waited much longer had Saeed’s mother not been killed, a stray heavy-caliber round passing through the windshield of her family’s car and taking with it a quarter of Saeed’s mother’s head, not while she was driving, for she had not driven in months, but while she was checking inside for an earring she thought she had misplaced, and Nadia, seeing the state Saeed and Saeed’s father were in when Nadia came to their apartment for the first time, on the day of the funeral, stayed with them that night to offer what comfort and help she could and did not spend another night in her own apartment again.

  FIVE

  FUNERALS WERE SMALLER and more rushed affairs in those days, because of the fighting. Some families had no choice but to bury their dead in a courtyard or at the sheltered margin of a road, it being impossible to reach a proper graveyard, and so impromptu burial grounds grew up, one extinguished body attracting others, in much the same way that the arrival of one squatter on a disused patch of government land can give rise to an entire slum.

  It was customary for a home that had suffered a bereavement to be filled with relatives and well-wishers for many days, but this practice was presently circumscribed by the dangers involved in making a journey in the city, and while people did come to see Saeed’s father and Saeed, most came furtively, and could not stay long. It was not the sort of occasion to ask what precisely Nadia’s relationship was to the husband and son of the deceased, so no one did, but some did inquire with their glances, and their eyes followed Nadia as she moved around the apartment in her black robe, serving tea and biscuits and water, and not praying, though not ostentatiously not praying, more as if she were busy looking after people’s earthly needs and might do so later.

  Saeed prayed a great deal, and so did his father, and so did their guests, and some of them wept, but Saeed had wept only once, when he first saw his
mother’s corpse and screamed, and Saeed’s father wept only when he was alone in his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though by a stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his sense of loss was boundless, and his sense of the benevolence of the universe was shaken, and his wife had been his best friend.

  Nadia called Saeed’s father “father” and he called her “daughter.” This began when they first met, the terms seeming appropriate both to her and to him, and being acceptable forms of address between the young and the old, even when not related, and in any case Nadia had taken one look at Saeed’s father and felt him like a father, for he was so gentle, and evoked in her a protective caring, as if for one’s own child, or for a puppy, or for a beautiful memory one knows has already commenced to fade.

  • • •

  NADIA SLEPT in what had been Saeed’s room, on a pile of carpets and blankets on the floor, having refused Saeed’s father’s offer to give up his bed, and Saeed slept on a similar though thinner pile in the sitting room, and Saeed’s father slept by himself in his bedroom, a room where he had slept for most of his life but where he could not recall the last instance he had slept alone and which for this reason was no longer completely familiar to him.

  Saeed’s father encountered each day objects that had belonged to his wife and so would sweep his consciousness out of the current others referred to as the present, a photograph or an earring or a particular shawl worn on a particular occasion, and Nadia encountered each day objects that took her into Saeed’s past, a book or a music collection or a sticker on the inside of a drawer, and evoked emotions from her own childhood, and jagged musings on the fate of her parents and her sister, and Saeed, for his part, was inhabiting a chamber that had been his only briefly, years ago, when relatives from afar or abroad used to come to visit, and being billeted here again conjured up for him echoes of a better era, and so in these several ways these three people sharing this one apartment splashed and intersected with each other across varied and multiple streams of time.

  Saeed’s neighborhood had fallen to the militants, and small-scale fighting had diminished nearby, but large bombs still dropped from the sky and exploded with an awesome power that brought to mind the might of nature itself. Saeed was grateful for Nadia’s presence, for the way in which she altered the silences that descended on the apartment, not necessarily filling them with words, but making them less bleak in their muteness. And he was grateful too for her effect on his father, whose politeness, when he recalled he was in the company of a young woman, would jar him from what otherwise were interminable reveries and would bring his attention back for a while to the here and now. Saeed wished Nadia had been able to meet his mother, and his mother able to meet her.

  Sometimes when Saeed’s father had gone to sleep Saeed and Nadia sat together in the sitting room, their sides pressed close for connection and warmth, perhaps holding hands, at most exchanging a kiss on the cheek as a farewell before bed, and often they were silent, but often they spoke in low voices, about how to escape from the city, or about the endless rumors of the doors, or about nothings: the precise color of the refrigerator, the increasingly sorry state of Saeed’s toothbrush, the loudness of Nadia’s snore when she had a cold.

  One evening they were huddled together in this way, under a blanket, in the flickering light of a paraffin lamp, for there was no grid electricity in their part of the city anymore, and no piped gas or water, municipal services having entirely broken down, and Saeed said, “It feels natural to have you here.”

  “For me too,” Nadia replied, resting her head on his shoulder.

  “The end of the world can be cozy at times.”

  She laughed. “Yes. Like a cave.”

  “You smell a bit like a caveman,” she added later.

  “And you smell like a wood fire.”

  She looked at him and felt her body tighten, but she resisted the urge to caress.

  When they heard that Nadia’s neighborhood had fallen to the militants as well, and that the roads between the two were mostly clear, Saeed and Nadia returned to her flat so she could collect some things. Nadia’s building had been damaged, and parts of the wall that faced the street were gone. The backup-battery shop on the ground floor had been looted, but the metal door to the stairway had not been forced, and the overall structure looked more or less sound—in need of substantial repair, certainly, but not on the verge of collapse.

  The plastic rubbish bags that covered Nadia’s windows were still in place, except for one, which, along with the window itself, had been destroyed, and where the window had formerly been a gash of blue sky was now visible, unusually clear and lovely, except for a thin column of smoke rising somewhere in the distance. Nadia took her record player and records and clothes and food, and her parched but possibly revivable lemon tree, and also some money and gold coins, which she had left hidden in the tree’s clay plot, buried within the soil. These items she and Saeed loaded onto the backseat of his family’s car, the top of the lemon tree sticking out of a lowered window. She did not remove the money and coins from the pot in case they were searched at a militant checkpoint on the way, which they were, but the fighters who stopped them appeared exhausted and wired and accepted canned supplies as payment to pass.

  When they reached home Saeed’s father saw the lemon tree and smiled for what seemed like the first time in days. Together the three of them placed it on their balcony, but quickly, because a band of armed men who looked like foreigners had begun to gather on the street below, arguing in a language they could not understand.

  • • •

  NADIA KEPT HER RECORD PLAYER and records out of sight in Saeed’s room, even after the customary mourning period for Saeed’s mother was over, because music was forbidden by the militants, and their apartment could be searched without warning, indeed it had been once already, militants banging on the door in the middle of the night, and in any case even if she had wanted to play a record there was no electricity, not even enough to charge the apartment’s backup batteries.

  The night the militants came they were looking for people of a particular sect, and demanded to see ID cards, to check what sort of names everyone had, but fortunately for Saeed’s father and Saeed and Nadia their names were not associated with the denomination being hunted. The neighbors upstairs were not so lucky: the husband was held down while his throat was cut, the wife and daughter were hauled out and away.

  The dead neighbor bled through a crack in the floor, his blood appearing as a stain in the high corner of Saeed’s sitting room, and Saeed and Nadia, who had heard the family’s screams, went up to collect and bury him, as soon as they dared, but his body was gone, presumably taken by his executioners, and his blood was already fairly dry, a patch like a painted puddle in his apartment, an uneven trail on the stairs.

  The following night, or perhaps the night after that, Saeed entered Nadia’s room and they were unchaste there for the first time. A combination of horror and desire subsequently impelled him back each evening, despite his earlier resolution that they do nothing that was disrespectful to his parents, and they would touch and stroke and taste, always stopping short of sex, upon which she no longer insisted, and which they had by now found ample means to circumvent. His mother was no more, and his father seemed not to concern himself with these romantic matters, and so they proceeded in secret, and the fact that unmarried lovers such as they were now being made examples of and punished by death created a semi-terrified urgency and edge to each coupling that sometimes bordered on a strange sort of ecstasy.

  • • •

  AS THE MILITANTS secured the city, extinguishing the last large salients of resistance, a partial calm descended, broken by the activities of drones and aircraft that bombed from the heavens, these networked machines for the most part invisible, and by the public and private executions that now took place almost continuously, bodies hanging from streetlamps
and billboards like a form of festive seasonal decoration. The executions moved in waves, and once a neighborhood had been purged it could then expect a measure of respite, until someone committed an infraction of some kind, because infractions, although often alleged with a degree of randomness, were invariably punished without mercy.

  Saeed’s father went each day to the home of a cousin who was like an elder brother to Saeed’s father and his surviving siblings, and there he sat with the old men and old women and drank tea and coffee and discussed the past, and they all knew Saeed’s mother well and had stories to relate in which she featured prominently, and while Saeed’s father was with them he felt not that his wife was alive, for the magnitude of her death impressed itself upon him again with every morning, but rather that he could share some small measure of her company.

  Saeed’s father tarried at her grave each evening on the way home. Once as he stood there he saw some young boys playing football and this cheered him, and reminded him of his own skill at the game when he was their age, but then he realized that they were not young boys, but teenagers, young men, and they were not playing with a ball but with the severed head of a goat, and he thought, barbarians, but then it dawned upon him that this was the head not of a goat but of a human being, with hair and a beard, and he wanted to believe he was mistaken, that the light was failing and his eyes were playing tricks on him, and that is what he told himself, as he tried not to look again, but something about their expressions left him in little doubt of the truth.