Exit West

by Mohsin Hamid

  Saeed would seek her out in the mornings, when he arrived for work, and they would talk and smile sidelong, and she might touch his elbow, and they would sit together at the communal lunch, and in the evenings when their work was done for the day they would walk through Marin, hike up and down the paths and the streets that were forming, and once they walked past Saeed’s shanty, and he told her it was his, and the next time they walked by she asked to see the inside of it, and they went in, and they shut the plastic flap behind them.

  The preacher’s daughter found in Saeed an attitude to faith that intrigued her, and she found the expansiveness of his gaze upon the universe, the way he spoke of the stars and of the people of the world, very sexy, and his touch as well, and she liked the cut of his face, how it reminded her of her mother and hence her childhood. And Saeed found her remarkably easy to talk to, not just because she listened well or spoke well, which she did, but because she prompted him to want to listen and speak, and he had from the outset found her so attractive that she was almost difficult to look at, and also, though he did not say this to her, or even care to think it, there were aspects of her that were much like Nadia.

  The preacher’s daughter was among the local campaign leaders of the plebiscite movement, which sought a ballot on the question of the creation of a regional assembly for the Bay Area, with members elected on the principle of one person one vote, regardless of where one came from. How this assembly would coexist with other preexisting bodies of government was as yet undecided. It might at first have only a moral authority, but that authority could be substantial, for unlike those other entities for which some humans were not human enough to exercise suffrage, this new assembly would speak from the will of all the people, and in the face of that will, it was hoped, greater justice might be less easily denied.

  One day she showed Saeed a little device that looked to him like a thimble. She was so happy, and he asked her why, and she said that this could be the key to the plebiscite, that it made it possible to tell one person from another and ensure they could vote only once, and it was being manufactured in vast numbers, at a cost so small as to be almost nothing, and he held it on his palm and discovered to his surprise that it was no heavier than a feather.

  • • •

  WHEN NADIA WALKED AWAY from their shanty, she and Saeed did not communicate for the rest of the day, nor on the day that followed. It was the longest cessation of contact between them since they had left the city of their birth. On the evening of their second day apart Saeed called her to ask how she was doing, to inquire if she was safe, and also to hear her voice, and the voice he heard was familiar and strange, and as they spoke he wanted to see her, but he withstood this, and they hung up without arranging a meeting. She called him the following evening, again a brief call, and after that they messaged or spoke to one another on most days, and while their first weekend apart passed separately, on the second weekend they agreed to meet for a walk by the ocean, and they walked to the sound of the wind and the crashing waves and in the hiss of the spray.

  They met again for a walk the weekend after that, and again the weekend after that, and there was a sadness to these meetings, for they missed each other, and they were lonely and somewhat adrift in this new place. Sometimes after they met Nadia would feel part of herself torn inside, and sometime Saeed would feel this, and both teetered on the cusp of making some physical gesture that would bind them each to the other again, but both in the end managed to resist.

  The ritual of their weekly walk was interrupted, as such connections are, by the strengthening of other pulls on their time, the pull of the cook on Nadia, of the preacher’s daughter on Saeed, and of new acquaintances. While the first shared weekend walk that they skipped was noticed sharply by them both, the second was not so much, and the third almost not at all, and soon they were meeting only once a month or so, and several days would pass in between a message or a call.

  They lingered in this state of tangential connection as winter gave way to spring—though seasons in Marin seemed sometimes to last only for a small portion of a day, to change in the time that one took off one’s jacket or put on one’s sweater—and they lingered still in this state as a warm spring gave way to a cool summer. Neither much enjoyed catching unexpected glimpses of their former lover’s new existence online, and so they distanced themselves from each other on social networks, and while they wished to look out for each other, and to keep tabs on each other, staying in touch took a toll on them, serving as an unsettling reminder of a life not lived, and also they grew less worried each for the other, less worried that the other would need them to be happy, and eventually a month went by without any contact, and then a year, and then a lifetime.

  • • •

  OUTSIDE MARRAKESH, in the hills, overlooking the palatial home of a man who might once have been called a prince and a woman who might once have been called a foreigner, there was a maid in an emptying village who could not speak and, perhaps for this reason, could not imagine leaving. She worked in the great house below, a house that had fewer servants now than it did in the year before, and fewer then than in the year before that, its retainers having gradually fled, or moved, but not the maid, who rode to work each morning on a bus, and who survived by virtue of her salary.

  The maid was not old, but her husband and daughter were gone, her husband not long after their marriage, to Europe, from which he had not returned, and from which he had eventually stopped sending money. The maid’s mother had said it was because she could not speak and because she had given him a taste of the pleasures of the flesh, unknown to him before their marriage, and so she had armed him as a man and been disarmed by nature as a woman. But her mother had been hard, and the maid had not thought the trade a bad one, for her husband had given her a daughter, and this daughter had given her companionship on her journey through life, and though her daughter too had passed through the doors, she returned to visit, and each time she returned she told the maid to come with her, and the maid said no, for she had a sense of the fragility of things, and she felt she was a small plant in a small patch of soil held between the rocks of a dry and windy place, and she was not wanted by the world, and here she was at least known, and she was tolerated, and that was a blessing.

  The maid was of an age at which men had stopped seeing her. She had had the body of a woman when she was still a girl, when she was married off, so young, and her body had ripened further after she birthed and nursed her child, and men had once paused to look at her, not at her face, but at her figure, and she had often been alarmed by those looks, in part because of the danger in them, and in part because she knew how they changed when she was revealed to be mute, and so the end of being seen was mostly a relief. Mostly, almost entirely, yet not entirely, for life had given the maid no space for the luxuries of vanity, but even so, she was human.

  The maid did not know her age, but she knew she was younger than the mistress of the house where she worked, whose hair was still jet and whose posture was still erect and whose dresses were still cut with the intention to arouse. The mistress seemed not to have aged at all in the many years the maid had worked for her. From a distance she might be mistaken for a very young woman, while the maid seemed to have aged doubly, perhaps for them both, as if her occupation had been to age, to exchange the magic of months for bank notes and food.

  In the summer that Saeed and Nadia were parting into separate lives, the maid’s daughter came to see the maid in that village where almost everyone had gone and they drank coffee under the evening sky and looked out at the reddening dust rising in the south and daughter asked mother again to come with her.

  The maid looked at her daughter, who looked to her as though she had captured the best of her, and of her husband too, for she could see him in her, and of her mother, whose voice came from her daughter’s mouth, strong and low, but not her words, for her daughter’s words were utterly unlike her mother
’s had been, they were quick and nimble and new. The maid placed her hand on her daughter’s hand and brought it to her lips and kissed it, the skin of her lips clinging for an instant to the skin of her child, clinging even as she lowered her daughter’s hand, the shape of lips being mutable in this way, and the maid smiled and shook her head.

  One day she might go, she thought.

  But not today.

  TWELVE

  HALF A CENTURY LATER Nadia returned for the first time to the city of her birth, where the fires she had witnessed in her youth had burned themselves out long ago, the lives of cities being far more persistent and more gently cyclical than those of people, and the city she found herself in was not a heaven but it was not a hell, and it was familiar but also unfamiliar, and as she wandered about slowly, exploring, she was informed of the proximity of Saeed, and after standing motionless for a considerable moment she communicated with him, and they agreed to meet.

  They met at a café near her old building, which still stood, though most of the others close by had changed, and they sat beside one another on two adjacent sides of a small square table, under the sky, and they looked at each other, sympathetic looks, for time had done what time does, but looks of particular recognition, and they watched the young people of this city pass, young people who had no idea how bad things once were, except what they studied in history, which was perhaps as it should be, and they sipped their coffees, and they spoke.

  Their conversation navigated two lives, with vital details highlighted and excluded, and it was also a dance, for they were former lovers, and they had not wounded each other so deeply as to have lost their ability to find a rhythm together, and they grew younger and more playful as the coffee in their cups diminished, and Nadia said imagine how different life would be if I had agreed to marry you, and Saeed said imagine how different it would be if I had agreed to have sex with you, and Nadia said we were having sex, and Saeed considered and smiled and said yes I suppose we were.

  Above them bright satellites transited in the darkening sky and the last hawks were returning to the rest of their nests and around them passersby did not pause to look at this old woman in her black robe or this old man with his stubble.

  They finished their coffees. Nadia asked if Saeed had been to the deserts of Chile and seen the stars and was it all he had imagined it would be. He nodded and said if she had an evening free he would take her, it was a sight worth seeing in this life, and she shut her eyes and said she would like that very much, and they rose and embraced and parted and did not know, then, if that evening would ever come.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mohsin Hamid is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and the essay collection Discontent and Its Civilizations. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have won or been short-listed for numerous prizes, including the Man Booker Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, and the Betty Trask Award. Hamid’s essays and fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Granta, and many other publications. Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.

  Facebook.com/MohsinHamidOfficialPage

  mohsinhamid.com

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