Exit West

by Mohsin Hamid

for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.

long-distance relationships are well known for their potential to heighten passion, at least for a while,

even if he understood, at some level, that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.

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. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and 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, and so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope, but he felt that he could not express this to Nadia, that he did not know how to express this to Nadia, this mystery that prayer linked him to, and it was so important to express it,

We are all migrants through time.

All over the world people were slipping away from where they had been, from once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous battlefields, and slipping away from other people too, people they had in some cases loved, as Nadia was slipping away from Saeed, and Saeed from Nadia.

had been offered a reminder that race is a construct. It is brought into existence by our imaginations, and from there it is deployed with real consequences. There are darker and lighter skin colors, of course, but these skin colors are in and of themselves no more meaningful than blood types. It is we who invent race and its terrible meanings. But though potent, our inventions are not stable. They sprang into existence not so very long ago, they are constantly changing, and one day they will be gone.