Exit West

by Mohsin Hamid

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

They reminded him of when he was their age and had their strength and their suppleness of movement and their certainty of purpose and their bond with one another, that bond he and his friends used to say was like that of brothers, but was in some ways stronger than that of brothers, or at least than his bond with his own brother, his kid brother, who had passed last spring from cancer of the throat that had withered him to the weight of a young girl, and who had not spoken to the old man for years, and when the old man had gone to see him in the hospital could no longer speak, could only look, and in his eyes was exhaustion but not so much fear, brave eyes, on a kid brother the old man had never before thought of as brave.

Perhaps he had been selfish, his notion of helping the youth and the country through teaching and research merely an expression of vanity, and the far more decent path would have been to pursue wealth at all costs.

He was ready to die, but he did not plan on dying, he planned on living, and he planned on doing great things while he did.

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,

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,

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.

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.

And yet while all this occurred there were volunteers delivering food and medicine to the area, and aid agencies at work, and the government had not banned them from operating, as some of the governments the migrants were fleeing from had, and in this there was hope.

Saeed and Nadia knew what the buildup to conflict felt like, and so the feeling that hung over London in those days was not new to them, and they faced it not with bravery, exactly, and not with panic either, not mostly, but instead with a resignation shot through with moments of tension, with tension ebbing and flowing, and when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.

in these trees there were now dark bodies too, children who climbed and played among the boughs, like little monkeys, not because to be dark is to be monkey-like, though that has been and was being and will long be slurred, but because people are monkeys who have forgotten that they are monkeys, and so have lost respect for what they are born of, for the natural world around them,

the ferocity of the little was sometimes all that kept them safe from the predations of the big.

to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.

they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process, and too many native parents would not after have been able to look their children in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done.

And so, irrespective of the reason, decency on this occasion won out, and bravery, for courage is demanded not to attack when afraid,

But mostly there was little to report, just the day-to-day goings-on of countless people working and living and aging and falling in and out of love, as is the case everywhere, and so not deemed worthy of headline billing or thought to be of much interest to anyone but those directly involved.

One time, as evening approached and the work for the day wound down, Saeed went up to his foreman and thanked him for all he was doing for the migrants. The foreman did not say anything. In that instant Saeed was reminded of those soldiers he had seen in the city of his birth, returning on leave from battle, who, when you pestered them for stories about where they had been and what they had done, looked at you as if you had no idea how much you were asking.

Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.

we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity’s potential for building a better world,

their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.

when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time.

It has been said that depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself,

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.

In order to have futures that do not cling monstrously to nostalgias for the past, we must imagine our futures—or rather, we must permit our imaginations futures to play with.