Doors to nowhere

“In 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.” With these opening words, Mohsin Hamid excellently establishes the mise-en-place of his latest novel, Exit West . That young man is Saeed — docile, quiet and still living with his parents. The young woman is Nadia, who is independent, spirited, who rides a motorbike and covers herself fully so men won’t “f**k with” her. They do get talking, and meet outside the classroom — which itself is an after-work course in corporate identity and product branding. Through Nadia, Saeed discovers the slightly shady parts of town — a Chinese restaurant, lit like an opium den, for instance — and the slightly dubious ways of living; slipping on a burqa before slipping upstairs into the house, where she lives alone.

Through all this, the city increasingly begins to lose its peace. Soon enough, things are dire. There are dead bodies strung up on poles that no one would cut down, bombs that shatter window panes. The classes stop, and soon Saeed and Nadia’s workplaces close down. There are rumours about “doors”, magical spaces which help people get away from here to elsewhere. Finally, with no other real options before them, Saeed and Nadia pay a lot of money to an agent and walk through one of these doors. They find themselves first in Mykonos, Greece, and subsequently in Britain, where a nativist movement is going on and refugees such as Saeed and Nadia are their clear enemies. The young boy and girl struggle to negotiate the hostile new world in which they find themselves.

Through Saeed and Nadia’s eyes, Hamid sketches both the desperation of exiting to West as well as the hostility that pushes refugees and migrants to exit the West altogether. Right from the beginning, Hamid is reticent about where his characters come from. The city is never named in the book, it could be Homs or Aleppo or Mosul or Karachi. Anywhere where bombs go off routinely. Anywhere where at a certain time in the recent past, it has become clear that a “but” is a mandatory insertion that all refugees have considered. Anywhere but here.

Hamid’s use of the literary device of doors — magical, tactical exits from anywhere but here to somewhere out there — is jarring, though it is a good strategy to not limit the book to being one about the arduousness of the journey that refugees make. That might have been a tempting route to take for the author, but this allows him to focus on the post-journey trauma, a reminder to the reader that successfully arriving in Mykonos or London is not the happy ending one assumes for the millions fleeing war zones in West Asia and rest of Asia.

As they journey from one country to another, and eventually move to a whole new continent, there is less and less of the feistyness of Nadia or the gentle calm of Saeed. Hamid structurally strips his main characters of their character. Whether this is intentional or otherwise, what it does is highlight the dehumanising of refugees, rendering accomplished doctors and musicians, scientists and professors, loved sisters and sons to mere stick figures, all stuck under an umbrella identity that merely highlights their journey, their displacement. While this is an important commentary to make, the book itself suffers for this. Nadia, especially, starts off as such a promising character, consistently surprising the reader in the first few pages, that it is disappointing to not see more of that.

For several reasons, the two halves of the book seem rather distinct and, at times, disconnected from the other. Hamid seems in a hurry to get his characters out of dangerous situations and yet he doesn’t seem to know what to do once they’re out. The first half of the book is definitely the richer read. It made me wonder if Hamid started off writing a different book altogether and global headlines about the migrant crisis made him push Saeed and Nadia in that direction.

Plot inconsistencies notwithstanding, Hamid’s mastery of the lyrical sentence makes the book worthy. Each of these, some containing entire paragraphs within them, are precisely cut. Yet, the book does not match up to his early promise. Both The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Moth Smoke are much better novels. Nevertheless, despite its faults, Exit West is a useful commentary on the threat of otherness that seems to be enveloping the world right now. There are several Saeeds and Nadias who flicker past our television screens during news reports. It’s just a pity that this Saeed and Nadia are unlikely to stay in our minds for much longer than that.

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