Explanation and Analysis This passage appears shortly after Saeed and Nadia’s city enforces a curfew that keeps the young couple from seeing one another at night. Unable to spend time together, their courtship flares into something stronger, something that has force Saeed, for his part, interprets this as love, and perhaps it is—after all, their relationship lasts fora longtime and is arguably a positive thing in Saeed’s life, though it eventually sours. Because the relationship doesn’t end up working out, this moment is worth considering, for Hamid underhandedly suggests that Nadia and Saeed’s courtship prematurely advances because of the dramatic circumstances in which they’ve found themselves. He claims that such dramatic circumstances”—meaning the violence and turmoil that keeps the budding lovers from spending time together—lead to dramatic emotions,” ultimately heightening passion As such, he illustrates the extent to which Nadia and Saeed’s love is shaped by their situation as imminent refugees. Their bond, it seems, is strengthened by the fact that there is something dividing them from one another. When they finally travel to new countries together, though, there’s nothing keeping them apart—in fact, they’re forced to spend the vast majority of their time together. This is perhaps why their relationship doesn’t workout it was originally built upon the premise that they must fight to be together, and so they’re unprepared when suddenly they find themselves in new circumstances when there is nothing keeping them apart. Chapter 5 Quotes Saeed’s father encountered each day objects that had belonged to his wife and so would sweep his consciousness out of the current others referred to as the present, a photograph or an earring or a particular shawl worn on a particular occasion, and Nadia encountered each day objects that took her into Saeed’s pasta book or a music collection or a sticker on the inside of a drawer, and evoked emotions from her own childhood, and jagged musings on the fate of her parents and her sister, and Saeed, for his part, was inhabiting a chamber that had been his only briefly, years ago, when relatives from afar or abroad used to come to visit, and being billeted here again conjured up for him echoes of abetter era, and so in these several ways these three people sharing this one apartment splashed and intersected with each other across varied and multiple streams of time.