Brief biography of mohsin hamid was born in Pakistan, but he spent much of his

CHAPTER While Saeed uses his phone quite often to contact Nadia, he limits himself when it comes to browsing the internet. For him,
the virtual world is too distracting, too deeply alluring. He prefers the present, and so he only allows himself one hour per day of internet surfing, otherwise using only the few applications he’s left on his phone like the one that helps him identify constellations in the sky. Nadia, on the other hand, uses her phone quite actively, reveling in its ability to keep her company she rode it far out into the world on otherwise solitary, stationary nights Hamid writes. She watched bombs falling, women exercising, men copulating, clouds gathering.”
She even orders magic mushrooms using her phone from a drug dealer who, in a few short months, is decapitated and strung up in public.
Living alone in a city undergoing violent conflict, Nadia embraces
her phone as a portal through which she can escape her everyday
life. To watch women exercising, men copulating, and clouds
gathering” is, to her, away of transcending her current
circumstances, which are otherwise stressful and emotionally
trying. Saeed, on the other hand, is able to resist his phone’s
distracting qualities to a certain extent because he has other things
to distract him, like his parents or the telescope.
The day before Nadia receives her mushrooms—which she and
Saeed will take together—she finds herself trapped at a red light next to a man who starts yelling at her after she ignores his greeting. He swears at her, telling her only whores drive motorcycles and growing increasingly angry. He becomes so angry that Nadia worries he’s going to attack her, but she simply remains calm on her bike, gripping the throttle and staying behind the safety of her tinted visor. After awhile, the man shakes his head and drives away, letting loose a sort of strangled scream, a sound that could be rage, or equally could
[be] anguish.”
In this moment, Nadia encounters the strong divisions that are
making their way through her own city. Indeed, citizens are
becoming highly critical of one another, a fact made clear by this
angry man’s inability to accept that Nadia—a woman—should be
allowed to ride a motorcycle. This kind of divisive thinking leads the
man into rage but Hamid also suggests that such a worldview
invites anguish as this pathetic man ultimately turns on his own
community when he directs such vitriol at Nadia, a fellow
countrywoman.
The day Nadia’s shrooms arrive, militant radicals take siege of the city’s stock exchange. While Nadia follows the conflict on
TV with her coworkers, she texts Saeed about the unfolding horror. By afternoon, the government descends upon the exchange in full force, having decided that the death of the hostages is a price they’ll have to pay in order to establish power and send a message of strength to militants and citizens alike. When all is said and done, initial estimates put the number of dead workers at probably less than a hundred.”
Saeed and Nadia naturally assume there will be a curfew placed upon the city, but the government holds off from implementing one that evening, perhaps as away of showing citizens they have the situation controlled. As such, Nadia invites Saeed over,
and he drives to her apartment in the family car.

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