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

CHAPTER The usual funeral and formal grieving process for Saeed’s mother is truncated by the city’s dangerous circumstances. The relatives who visit do so only briefly, since it’s risky to travel through the streets. During these visits, Nadia busies herself with serving the guests, and nobody asks about the nature of her relationship with Saeed, though it’s clear they want to know. In this period, Saeed prays a fair amount, as does his father, but Nadia refrains from doing so. Still, she calls Saeed’s father father and he calls her daughter and all three of them get along despite the grief hanging over the house. At night,
Nadia sleeps in the living room, apart from Saeed, though sometimes the young couple spends time together after
Saeed’s father has fallen asleep, holdings hands and sometimes kissing but never advancing beyond this point.
As his life gradually becomes more and more challenging, Saeed
throws himself into prayer. Although in the beginning of the novel he
hardly seemed interested in religion, now he turns to it in this time
of grief. Nadia, for her part, clearly retains her skepticism regarding
religion, though she doesn’t let this interfere with Saeed’s newfound
commitment to prayer. In this way, Hamid implies that Saeed was
correct when he upheld, in his first conversation with Nadia, that
prayer and spiritual practice are personal and flexible.
Saeed and Nadia return to Nadia’s apartment to gather her belongings, taking with them—among other things—her record player and lemon tree, which they place on the balcony. As for the record player, Nadia hides it along with her records, since music is forbidden in the city by the militants, though there’s no longer any electricity anyway, so there’s noway to listen in the first place. Still, her conscientiousness proves wise, since the militants do appear one night to search the apartment, looking fora certain sect After demanding to see everyone’s IDs, they leave—luckily, none of their names are associated with the denomination being hunted Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for their upstairs neighbors the militants cut the man’s throat and take his wife and daughter as hostages. Within two days,
blood from the man’s severed neck starts seeping through the floorboards and into Saeed’s apartment.
At this point in Exit West, fear begins to play a more significant role
in Saeed and Nadia’s lives. After all, they now live under the
constant threat of violence. Their neighbor’s death signifies the
militants’ strong belief in the importance of affiliation—because this
man’s name is somehow related to a certain sect they kill him and
kidnap his family. In turn, readers see that the militants seek to
divide the population of Saeed and Nadia’s city into various groups,
some of which they condemn and subsequently kill.
Horrified at the violence all around them, Saeed and Nadia start to transgress against their own agreement to remain chaste in his father’s apartment. Each night, they become intimate after his father has gone to bed, though they still stop before having sex. His father, it seems, is too preoccupied and sad to pay much attention to their amorous activities, and the young couple is only spurred on by the fact that the militants have started making violent examples out of unmarried lovers.

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