Saeed and Nadia are forced to go to the bathroom outside in trenches now, and Nadia’s lemon tree withers away on the balcony. And though they both desperately want to leave the city, their attitudes differ from one another. While Saeed has always wanted to leave, he has also always thought that he’d do sounder
different circumstances, temporarily, intermittently,
never once and for all He dislikes the idea of parting with his friends and extended family, seeing it all as amounting to the loss of a home, no less, of his home Nadia, on the other hand, is more eager to migrate because the prospect of change is at its most basic level exciting to her Still, she worries that doing so will mean
having to depend upon others, putting her at the mercy of strangers.”
Saeed and Nadia’s differing views regarding escaping their countryreflect their divergent personalities. Whereas Nadia is independentand eager to make a change in her life because she can see that hercurrent circumstances are unfavorable and even dangerous, Saeedis conflicted because he has more of an attachment to his home.Indeed, his mother’s grave is in this city, as well as all the fondmemories he’s had in his apartment with his family. Of course,Nadia lives alone and has lost her family, with whom she had verylittle connection in the first place, a discrepancy that partiallyaccounts for their different viewpoints.“Nadia had always been, and would afterwards continue to be,
more comfortable with all varieties of movement in her life than was Saeed, in whom the impulse of nostalgia was stronger Hamid notes. Still neither Saeed nor Nadia anticipate how Saeed’s father feels about the prospect of leaving when a note arrives from the agent saying a door is open and that they must meet him the following day, Saeed’s
father says You two must go, but I will not come Beside himself, Saeed threatens to carry his father over his shoulder, forcing the old man to go, but this doesn’t work. When Saeed asks him why he wants to stay,
he replies, Your mother is here At this, Saeed relents,
understanding what it means for his father to stay in the city,
and the two men spend the last night of their lives together.
Saeed’s connection to his home—which stands in such opposition toNadia’s comparative easygoing attitude when it comes toleaving—mirrors his father’s unwillingness to escape the city.However, Saeed is younger than his father, so he has fewer thingskeeping him there. His father, on the other hand, would be leavingbehind a lifetime’s worth of memories and relationships—somethingthat is, in the end, so unfathomable to him that he refuses to depart,ultimately choosing to face fear instead of acting out of self-preservation.After convincing his son to let him stay, Saeed’s father calls
Nadia to his room and says he’s entrusting her with his son’s life, and she, whom he calls daughter, must, like a daughter,
not fail him, whom she calls father, and she must
see Saeed through to safety, and he hopes she will one day marry his son and be called mother by his grandchildren, but this is up to them to decide All he asks, he says, is that she stay with
Saeed until they’re out of danger. Nadia makes the promise, but in doing so feels as if she’s abandoning the old man, leaving him to die. But that is the way of things Hamid writes, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”
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