by Mohsin Hamid
Saeed and Nadia meanwhile had dedicated themselves single-mindedly to finding a way out of the city, and as the overland routes were widely deemed too perilous to attempt, this meant investigating the possibility of securing passage through the doors, in which most people seemed now to believe, especially since any attempt to use one or keep one secret had been proclaimed by the militants to be punishable, as usual and somewhat unimaginatively, by death, and also because those with shortwave radios claimed that even the most reputable international broadcasters had acknowledged the doors existed, and indeed were being discussed by world leaders as a major global crisis.
Following a tip from a friend, Saeed and Nadia headed out on foot at dusk. They were dressed in accordance with the rules on dress and he was bearded in accordance with the rules on beards and her hair was hidden in accordance with the rules on hair, but they stayed in the margins of the roads, in the shadows as much as possible, trying not to be seen while trying not to look like they were trying not to be seen. They passed a body hanging in the air and could hardly smell it until they were downwind, when the odor became almost unbearable.
Because of the flying robots high above in the darkening sky, unseen but never far from people’s minds in those days, Saeed walked with a slight hunch, as though cringing a tad at the thought of the bomb or missile one of them might at any moment dispatch. By contrast, because she wanted not to appear guilty, Nadia walked tall, so that if they were stopped and their ID cards were checked and it was pointed out that her card did not list him as her husband, she would be more believable when she led the questioners home and presented the forgery that was supposedly their marriage certificate.
The man they were looking for called himself an agent, though it was unclear if this was due to his specializing in travel or to his operating in secret or to some other reason, and they were to meet him in the labyrinthine gloom of a burnt-out shopping center, a ruin with innumerable exits and hiding places, which made Saeed wish he had insisted Nadia not come and made Nadia wish they had brought a torch or, failing that, a knife. They stood, barely able to see, and waited with mounting unease.
They did not hear the agent approaching—or perhaps he had been there all along—and they were startled by his voice just behind them. The agent spoke softly, almost sweetly, his whisper bringing to mind that of a poet or a psychopath. He instructed them to stand still, to not turn around. He told Nadia to uncover her head, and when she asked why, he said it was not a request.
Nadia had the sense he was extremely close to her, as if he were about to touch her neck, but she could not hear his breathing. There was a small sound in the distance and she and Saeed realized the agent might not be alone. Saeed asked where the door was and where it led to, and the agent replied that the doors were everywhere but finding one the militants had not yet found, a door not yet guarded, that was the trick, and might take a while. The agent demanded their money and Saeed gave it to him, uncertain whether they were making a down payment or being robbed.
As they hurried home, Saeed and Nadia looked at the night sky, at the forcefulness of the stars and the moon’s pockmarked brightness in the absence of electric lighting and in the reduced pollution from fuel-starved and hence sparse traffic, and wondered where the door to which they had purchased access might take them, someplace in the mountains or on the plains or by the seaside, and they saw an emaciated man lying on the street who had recently expired, either from hunger or illness, for he did not appear wounded, and in their apartment they told Saeed’s father the potential good news but he was oddly silent in response, and they waited for him to say something, and in the end all he said was, “Let us hope.”
• • •
AS THE DAYS PASSED, and Saeed and Nadia did not hear from the agent again, and increasingly questioned whether they would hear from the agent again, elsewhere other families were on the move. One of these—a mother, father, daughter, son—emerged from the complete blackness of an interior service door. They were deep inside a vast pedestal floor, below a cluster of blond-and-glass towers filled with luxury apartments and collectively named, by their developer, Jumeirah Beach Residence. On a security camera the family could be seen blinking in the sterile artificial light and recovering from their crossing. They each had a slender build and upright posture and dark skin, and though the feed lacked audio input it was of sufficient resolution that lip-reading software could identify their language as Tamil.
After a brief interlude the family was picked up again by a second camera, traversing a hallway and pushing the horizontal bars that secured a heavy set of double fire-resistant doors, and as these doors opened the brightness of Dubai’s desert sunlight overwhelmed the sensitivity of the image sensor and the four figures seemed to become thinner, insubstantial, lost in an aura of whiteness, but they were at that moment simultaneously captured on three exterior surveillance feeds, tiny characters stumbling onto a broad sidewalk, a promenade, along a one-way boulevard on which slowly cruised two expensive two-door automobiles, one yellow, one red, the whining of their revving engines indirectly visible in the way they startled the girl and boy.
The parents held their children’s hands and seemed to be at a loss as to which direction to go. Perhaps they were from a coastal village themselves, and not from a city, for they gravitated towards the sea and away from the buildings, and they could be seen at multiple angles following a landscaped pathway through the sand, the parents whispering to one another from time to time, the children eyeing the mostly pale tourists lying on towels and loungers in a state of near-total undress—but in numbers far fewer than normal for the winter high season, though the children could not know this.
A small quadcopter drone was hovering fifty meters above them now, too quiet to be heard, and relaying its feed to a central monitoring station and also to two different security vehicles, one an unmarked sedan, the other a badged van with grilles on its windows, and from the latter vehicle a pair of uniformed men emerged and walked purposefully, but without undue or tourist-alarming haste, along a trajectory that would intersect with that of the Tamil-speaking family in a minute or so.
During this minute the family was also visible in the camera feeds of various tourists’ selfie-taking mobile phones, and they seemed to be not so much a cohesive unit but rather four disparate individuals, each behaving in a different way, the mother repeatedly making eye contact with the women she passed and then immediately glancing down, the father patting his pockets and the underside of his backpack as though checking for tears or leaks, the daughter staring at skydivers who were hurtling towards a nearby pier and pulling up at the last moment and landing at a sprint, the son testing the rubberized jogger-friendly surface beneath his feet with each step, and then the minute ended and they were intercepted and led away, apparently bewildered, or overawed, for they held hands and did not resist or scatter or run.
• • •
FOR THEIR PART, Saeed and Nadia enjoyed a degree of insulation from remote surveillance when they were indoors, owing to their lack of electricity, but even so their home could still be searched by armed men without warning, and of course as soon as they stepped outside they could be seen by the lenses peering down on their city from the sky and from space, and by the eyes of militants, and of informers, who might be anyone, everyone.
One previously private function they now had to perform in public was the emptying of their bowels, for without piped water the toilets in Saeed and Nadia’s building no longer worked. Residents had dug two deep trenches in the small courtyard in the back, one for men and one for women, separated by a heavy sheet on a clothesline, and it was there that all had to squat to relieve themselves, under the clouds, ignoring the stench, face to the ground so that even if the act could be viewed, the identity of the actor might be kept somewhat to oneself.
Nadia’s lemon tree did not recover, despite repeated watering, and it sat lifeless on their balcony,
clung to by a few desiccated leaves.
It might seem surprising that even in such circumstances Saeed’s and Nadia’s attitudes towards finding a way out were not entirely straightforward. Saeed desperately wanted to leave his city, in a sense he always had, but in his imagination he had thought he would leave it only temporarily, intermittently, never once and for all, and this looming potential departure was altogether different, for he doubted he would come back, and the scattering of his extended family and his circle of friends and acquaintances, forever, struck him as deeply sad, as amounting to the loss of a home, no less, of his home.
Nadia was possibly even more feverishly keen to depart, and her nature was such that the prospect of something new, of change, was at its most basic level exciting to her. But she was haunted by worries too, revolving around dependence, worries that in going abroad and leaving their country she and Saeed and Saeed’s father might be at the mercy of strangers, subsistent on handouts, caged in pens like vermin.
Nadia had long been, and would afterwards continue to be, more comfortable with all varieties of movement in her life than was Saeed, in whom the impulse of nostalgia was stronger, perhaps because his childhood had been more idyllic, or perhaps because this was simply his temperament. Both of them, though, whatever their misgivings, had no doubt that they would leave if given the chance. And so neither expected, when a handwritten note from the agent arrived, pushed under their apartment door one morning and telling them precisely where to be at precisely what time the following afternoon, that Saeed’s father would say, “You two must go, but I will not come.”
• • •
SAEED AND NADIA SAID this was impossible, and explained, in case of misunderstanding, that there was no problem, that they had paid the agent for three passages and would all be leaving together, and Saeed’s father heard them out but would not be budged: they, he repeated, had to go, and he had to stay. Saeed threatened to carry his father over his shoulder if he needed to, and he had never spoken to his father in this way, and his father took him aside, for he could see the pain he was causing his son, and when Saeed asked why his father was doing this, what could possibly make him want to stay, Saeed’s father said, “Your mother is here.”
Saeed said, “Mother is gone.”
His father said, “Not for me.”
And this was true in a way, Saeed’s mother was not gone for Saeed’s father, not entirely, and it would have been difficult for Saeed’s father to leave the place where he had spent a life with her, difficult not to be able to visit her grave each day, and he did not wish to do this, he preferred to abide, in a sense, in the past, for the past offered more to him.
But Saeed’s father was thinking also of the future, even though he did not say this to Saeed, for he feared that if he said this to his son that his son might not go, and he knew above all else that his son must go, and what he did not say was that he had come to that point in a parent’s life when, if a flood arrives, one knows one must let go of one’s child, contrary to all the instincts one had when one was younger, because holding on can no longer offer the child protection, it can only pull the child down, and threaten them with drowning, for the child is now stronger than the parent, and the circumstances are such that the utmost of strength is required, and the arc of a child’s life only appears for a while to match the arc of a parent’s, in reality one sits atop the other, a hill atop a hill, a curve atop a curve, and Saeed’s father’s arc now needed to curve lower, while his son’s still curved higher, for with an old man hampering them these two young people were simply less likely to survive.
Saeed’s father told his son he loved him and said that Saeed must not disobey him in this, that he had not believed in commanding his son but in this moment was doing so, that only death awaited Saeed and Nadia in this city, and that one day when things were better Saeed would come back to him, and both men knew as this was said that it would not happen, that Saeed would not be able to return while his father still lived, and indeed as it transpired Saeed would not, after this night that was just beginning, spend another night with his father again.
• • •
SAEED’S FATHER then summoned Nadia into his room and spoke to her without Saeed and said that he was entrusting her with his son’s life, and she, whom he called daughter, must, like a daughter, not fail him, whom she called father, and she must see Saeed through to safety, and he hoped she would one day marry his son and be called mother by his grandchildren, but this was up to them to decide, and all he asked was that she remain by Saeed’s side until Saeed was out of danger, and he asked her to promise this to him, and she said she would promise only if Saeed’s father came with them, and he said again that he could not, but that they must go, he said it softly, like a prayer, and she sat there with him in silence and the minutes passed, and in the end she promised, and it was an easy promise to make because she had at that time no thoughts of leaving Saeed, but it was also a difficult one because in making it she felt she was abandoning the old man, and even if he did have his siblings and his cousins, and might now go live with them or have them come live with him, they could not protect him as Saeed and Nadia could, and so by making the promise he demanded she make she was in a sense killing him, but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
SIX
THEY SLEPT LITTLE that night, the night before their departure from the city, and in the morning Saeed’s father embraced them and said goodbye and walked off with moist eyes, but without faltering, the old man thinking it best he leave the young people rather than make them agonize over stepping through the front door with him watching from behind. He would not say where he was going for the day, and so Saeed and Nadia found themselves alone, unable once he was gone to chase him down, and in the quietness of his absence Nadia checked and rechecked the smallish backpacks they would carry, smallish because they did not want to arouse suspicion, but each full to bursting, like a turtle imprisoned in too tight a shell, and Saeed ran his fingertips over the apartment’s furniture and the telescope and the bottle containing the clipper ship, and he also carefully folded a photograph of his parents to keep hidden inside his clothing, along with a memory stick containing his family album, and twice he prayed.
The walk to the rendezvous point was an interminable one, and as they walked Saeed and Nadia did not hold hands, for that was forbidden in public between genders, even for an ostensibly married couple, but from time to time their knuckles would brush at their sides, and this sporadic physical contact was important to them. They knew there was a possibility the agent had sold them out to the militants, and so they knew there was a possibility this was the final afternoon of their lives.
The rendezvous point was in a converted house next to a market that reminded Nadia of her former home. On the ground floor was a dentist’s clinic long lacking medicines and painkillers, and as of yesterday lacking a dentist as well, and in the dentist’s waiting room they had a shock because a man who looked like a militant was standing there, assault rifle slung over his shoulder. But he merely took the balance of their payment and told them to sit, and so they sat in that crowded room with a frightened couple and their two school-age children, and a young man in glasses, and an older woman who was perched erectly on her seat as though she came from money, even though her clothes were dirty, and every few minutes someone was summoned through to the dentist’s office itself, and after Nadia and Saeed were summoned they saw a slender man who also looked like a militant, and was picking at the edge of his nostril with a fingernail, as though toying with a callus, or strumming a musical instrument, and when he spoke they heard his peculiarly soft voice and knew at once that he was the agent they had met before.
The room was gloomy and the dentist’s chair and tools resembled a torture station. The agent gestured with his head to the blackness of a door that had once led to a supply cabinet and said to Saeed, “You go
first,” but Saeed, who had until then thought he would go first, to make sure it was safe for Nadia to follow, now changed his mind, thinking it possibly more dangerous for her to remain behind while he went through, and said, “No, she will.”
The agent shrugged as though it was of no consequence to him, and Nadia, who had not considered the order of their departure until that moment, and realized there was no good option for either of them, that there were risks to each, to going first and to going second, did not argue, but approached the door, and drawing close she was struck by its darkness, its opacity, the way that it did not reveal what was on the other side, and also did not reflect what was on this side, and so felt equally like a beginning and an end, and she turned to Saeed and found him staring at her, and his face was full of worry, and sorrow, and she took his hands in hers and held them tight, and then, releasing them, and without a word, she stepped through.
• • •
IT WAS SAID in those days that the passage was both like dying and like being born, and indeed Nadia experienced a kind of extinguishing as she entered the blackness and a gasping struggle as she fought to exit it, and she felt cold and bruised and damp as she lay on the floor of the room at the other side, trembling and too spent at first to stand, and she thought, while she strained to fill her lungs, that this dampness must be her own sweat.
Saeed was emerging and Nadia crawled forward to give him space, and as she did so she noticed the sinks and mirrors for the first time, the tiles of the floor, the stalls behind her, all the doors of which save one were normal doors, all but the one through which she had come, and through which Saeed was now coming, which was black, and she understood that she was in the bathroom of some public place, and she listened intently but it was silent, the only noises emanating from her, from her breathing, and from Saeed, his quiet grunts like those of a man exercising, or having sex.