Brief biography of mohsin hamid was born in Pakistan, but he spent much of his
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| During this period, Nadia and Saeed’s relationship apparently has a slight resurgence of fellow-feeling, an increase of kindness and mutual happiness. Unfortunately, this happens because both of them have seemingly accepted—on some level, at least—that their love lies elsewhere and that the relationship itself is doomed. Although they haven’t yet articulated this to themselves, each one has admitted internally to being attracted to other people, meaning that it’s only a matter of time before they recognize that their fidelity to one another is lacking. Saeed prays often throughout the day. For him, prayer is away to touch his parents, who cannot otherwise be touched.” When he was a child, he used to watch his parents pray and wonder what it was like. When he asked his mother, she taught him how to pray, and so until the end of his days, prayer sometimes reminds him of her It also reminds him of his father and his father’s friends, since when he was a teenager he started accompanying his father to communal prayers. As such, “prayer for him became about being a man, being one of the men, a ritual that connected him to adulthood and to the notion of being a particular sort of man, a gentleman, a gentleman, a man who stood for community and faith and kindness and decency, a man, in other words, like his father.” Hamid takes a moment at this point to clarify Saeed’s relationship to prayer, solidifying the idea that practicing religion enables him to connect with parts of his personal history that are otherwise long gone. It’s no wonder, then, that his interest in prayer has steadily increased throughout the novel, for as he has moved farther and farther from his home country, the more and more he has prayed. What’s more, religious practice also factors into his very concept of what it means to be a man meaning that he has essentially structured his entire identity on a model of piety. Part of why Saeed prays is because it feels like away of restoring to humanity a sense of unity. As such, he prays as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope However, he feels incapable of expressing this to Nadia, despite how important it is to communicate this mystery that prayer links him to,” which he finds himself able to articulate to the preacher’s daughter when she asks him—during a remembrance for her [dead] mother”—to describe her mother’s country to her. This question leads to along, meaningful conversation that lasts late into the night. Since prayer is something that Saeed turns to as he slowly grows apart from Nadia, it makes perfect sense that his initial conversations with his new love interest would revolve around spiritual practice. Indeed, the preacher’s daughter represents the path Saeed has already embarked upon, and the only thing keeping him from fully following this path is his relationship with Nadia. Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com ©2018 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com Page 51 Neither Saeed nor Nadia talk about the fact that they’re “drifting apart since they don’t want to inflict a fear of abandonment though they both feel the fear of the severing of their tie, the end of the world they have built together, a world of shared experiences in which no one else can share.” At the same time, what keeps them together is also a desire to make sure that the other first establishes him- or herself as an individual in Marin. And although they continue to argue and become jealous now and again, they mostly give each other space. Nadia and Saeed’s relationship no longer provides them with emotional nourishment, but they do still care about each other. This is obvious by the way they worry about leaving the other behind, Download 0.56 Mb. Share with your friends:
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