Exit West

by Mohsin Hamid

It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, 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.

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

Nadia at first thought there was no need to say goodbye, that saying goodbye involved a kind of presumption, but then she felt a small sadness, and knew she needed to say goodbye, not for him, for she doubted he would care, but for her.

Saeed partly resisted the pull of his phone. He found the antenna too powerful, the magic it summoned too mesmerizing, as though he were eating a banquet of limitless food, stuffing himself, stuffing himself, until he felt dazed and sick, and so he had removed or hidden or restricted all but a few applications. His phone could make calls. His phone could send messages. His phone could take pictures, identify celestial bodies, transform the city into a map while he drove. But that was it. Mostly.

he preferred to abide, in a sense, in the past, for the past offered more to him.

but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.

It was said in those days that the passage was both like dying and like being born,

“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.”

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

He was drawn to people from their country, both in the labor camp and online. It seemed to Nadia that the farther they moved from the city of their birth, through space and through time, the more he sought to strengthen his connection to it, tying ropes to the

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