Exit West

by Mohsin Hamid

Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians.

In their phones were antennas, and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and would never be.

and above all of children who went to sleep unfed but could see on some small screen people in foreign lands preparing and consuming and even conducting food fights with feasts of such opulence that the very fact of their existence boggled the mind.

“I couldn’t find flowers,” he said. She smiled at last, a half-smile, and asked, “Do you have a gun?”

Saba

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.

Saeed wished Nadia had been able to meet his mother, and his mother able to meet her.

for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.

“Why would we want to move?” she said. “To be among our own kind,” Saeed answered. “What makes them our kind?” “They’re from our country.” “From the country we used to be from.” “Yes.” Saeed tried not to sound annoyed. “We’ve left that place.” “That doesn’t mean we have no connection.”

She wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not.

To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and await its fate, if only for a while.

he wondered if she believed him or if she thought, no, dearest, that is not what you think at all.

Now, though, in Marin, Saeed prayed even more, several times a day, and he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way.