Hamid - Exit West

NOVELS

Moth Smoke

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

ESSAYS

Discontent and Its Civilizations

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Copyright 2017 by Mohsin Hamid

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Ebook ISBN: 9780735212183

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hamid, Mohsin, author.

Title: Exit west : a novel / Mohsin Hamid.

Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016036296 | ISBN 9780735212176 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: RefugeesFiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Political. | FICTION / Cultural Heritage. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Love stories.

Classification: LCC PS3558.A42169 E95 2017 | DDC 813/.54dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036296

p. cm.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Version_1

FOR NAVED AND NASIM

I N A CITY SWOLLEN BY REFUGEES but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her. For many days. His name was Saeed and her name was Nadia and he had a beard, not a full beard, more a studiously maintained stubble, and she was always clad from the tips of her toes to the bottom of her jugular notch in a flowing black robe. Back then people continued to enjoy the luxury of wearing more or less what they wanted to wear, clothing and hair wise, within certain bounds of course, and so these choices meant something.

It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to classin this case an evening class on corporate identity and product brandingbut 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.

Saeed noticed that Nadia had a beauty mark on her neck, a tawny oval that sometimes, rarely but not never, moved with her pulse.

N OT LONG AFTER NOTICING THIS , Saeed spoke to Nadia for the first time. Their city had yet to experience any major fighting, just some shootings and the odd car bombing, felt in ones chest cavity as a subsonic vibration like those emitted by large loudspeakers at music concerts, and Saeed and Nadia had packed up their books and were leaving class.

In the stairwell he turned to her and said, Listen, would you like to have a coffee, and after a brief pause added, to make it seem less forward, given her conservative attire, in the cafeteria?

Nadia looked him in the eye. You dont say your evening prayers? she asked.

Saeed conjured up his most endearing grin. Not always. Sadly.

Her expression did not change.

So he persevered, clinging to his grin with the mounting desperation of a doomed rock climber: I think its personal. Each of us has his own way. Or... her own way. Nobodys perfect. And, in any case

She interrupted him. I dont pray, she said.

She continued to gaze at him steadily.

Then she said, Maybe another time.

He watched as she walked out to the student parking area and there, instead of covering her head with a black cloth, as he expected, she donned a black motorcycle helmet that had been locked to a scuffed-up hundred-ish cc trail bike, snapped down her visor, straddled her ride, and rode off, disappearing with a controlled rumble into the gathering dusk.

T HE NEXT DAY , at work, Saeed found himself unable to stop thinking of Nadia. Saeeds employer was an agency that specialized in the placement of outdoor advertising. They owned billboards all around the city, rented others, and struck deals for further space with the likes of bus lines, sports stadiums, and proprietors of tall buildings.

The agency occupied both floors of a converted townhouse and had over a dozen employees. Saeed was among the most junior, but his boss liked him and had tasked him with turning around a pitch to a local soap company that had to go out by email before five. Normally Saeed tried to do copious amounts of online research and customize his presentations as much as possible. Its not a story if it doesnt have an audience, his boss was fond of saying, and for Saeed this meant trying to show a client that his firm truly understood their business, could really get under their skin and see things from their point of view.

But today, even though the pitch was importantevery pitch was important: the economy was sluggish from mounting unrest and one of the first costs clients seemed to want to cut was outdoor advertisingSaeed couldnt focus. A large tree, overgrown and untrimmed, reared up from the tiny back lawn of his firms townhouse, blocking out the sunlight in such a manner that the back lawn had been reduced mostly to dirt and a few wisps of grass, interspersed with a mornings worth of cigarette butts, for his boss had banned people from smoking indoors, and atop this tree Saeed had spotted a hawk constructing its nest. It worked tirelessly. Sometimes it floated at eye level, almost stationary in the wind, and then, with the tiniest movement of a wing, or even of the upturned feathers at one wingtip, it veered.

Saeed thought of Nadia and watched the hawk.

When he was at last running out of time he scrambled to prepare the pitch, copying and pasting from others he had done before. Only a smattering of the images he selected had anything particularly to do with soap. He took a draft to his boss and suppressed a wince while sliding it over.

But his boss seemed preoccupied and didnt notice. He just jotted some minor edits on the printout, handed it back to Saeed with a wistful smile, and said, Send it out.

Something about his expression made Saeed feel sorry for him. He wished he had done a better job.

A S S AEED S EMAIL was being downloaded from a server and read by his client, far away in Australia a pale-skinned woman was sleeping alone in the Sydney neighborhood of Surry Hills. Her husband was in Perth on business. The woman wore only a long T-shirt, one of his, and a wedding ring. Her torso and left leg were covered by a sheet even paler than she was; her right leg and right hip were bare. On her right ankle, perched in the dip of her Achilles tendon, was the blue tattoo of a small mythological bird.

Her home was alarmed, but the alarm was not active. It had been installed by previous occupants, by others who had once called this place home, before the phenomenon referred to as the gentrification of this neighborhood had run as far as it had now run. The sleeping woman used the alarm only sporadically, mostly when her husband was absent, but on this night she had forgotten. Her bedroom window, four meters above the ground, was open, just a slit.