Brief biography of mohsin hamid was born in Pakistan, but he spent much of his
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| otherwise incontrollable context. What’s more, even Saeed seems to have changed his relationship to prayer. After all, he originally told Nadia that he frequently misses his daily prayers, but now he shows a renewed interest in religion as he goes to participate in a communal prayer—an act that he perhaps hopes will provide him with the feeling of interpersonal unity he wished for while high on mushrooms. Work slows down for both Nadia and Saeed because so many clients are fleeing the country. Nadia’s two bosses have even fled themselves, never returning from their holiday vacations and leaving their workers to pass the time in the office, where Nadia spends the majority of her days on her phone. In the midst of all this, Nadia and Saeed start meeting during the day, often at a burger restaurant between their offices. Sometimes beneath the table they touch each other, Saeed putting his hand on the inside of Nadia’s thigh, Nadia placing her palm on his zipper. Unfortunately, they can’t see one another at night unless Saeed stays over until morning—something he doesn’t want to do because he doesn’t want to makeup an excuse to his parents and also because he fears leaving them alone. Again, readers seethe ways in which Saeed’s personal connections come into conflict with one another. On the one hand, he wants to spend as much time as possible with Nadia, enthralled by the exciting initial stages of their relationship. On the other hand, he knows that spending time with Nadia means leaving his parents home alone, which ultimately worries him almost as much as it seems to worry them. With this dynamic at play, Saeed is forced to navigate the intersection of his closest relationships. For the first two weeks of the curfew, Nadia and Saeed don’t see each other on the weekends because fighting between their neighborhoods makes travel impossible. Finally, though, Saeed is able to visit on the third weekend, when the couple gets into Nadia’s bed and takes off their clothes. After a little while, Nadia asks if Saeed has brought a condom, but he tells her he doesn’t think they should have sex until they’re married. She laughs at this, but he merely shakes his head. Are you fucking joking she asks. Then, calming down, she smiles and sees that Saeed is mortified by her reaction. Its okay she says. “We can see.” Saeed and Nadia’s differing views regarding premarital sex are essentially the reversal of what people in public might assume about them. In other words, while a person might see Nadia’s religious robes and think she is against premarital sex, Saeed is actually the one who wants to wait until marriage to become intimate in this way. In the same way that Saeed believes religious practice is flexible from person to person, then, Hamid shows that people approach love, intimacy, and connection indifferent ways. Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com ©2018 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com Page 28 Lying in bed together, Saeed shows Nadia photos on his phone of famous city skylines with all the lights turned off and bright stars overhead. When Nadia asks how the photographer got everybody to turnoff their lights, Saeed explains that the photographs are edited, that the photographer takes pictures of the sky in a deserted place where the stars are brightest. These sections of the sky, he explains, are the exact sections that will slide over the city in several hours. In this way, the photographer is able to capture the same sky that will blanket the city, but he avoids the city’s blinding qualities by editing out the lights from the buildings. Nadia thought about this Hamid writes. They were achingly beautiful, these ghostly cities Whether they looked like the pastor the present, or the future, she couldn’t decide.” Download 0.56 Mb. Share with your friends:
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