Brief biography of mohsin hamid was born in Pakistan, but he spent much of his
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| Nadia and Saeed’s respective desires to travel denote a yearning to step away from their everyday lives. Like anybody, they want to broaden their horizons by journeying to remote destinations and seeing new things. While this desire is quite average, it’s clearly heightened by the fact that their own country is slipping into chaos. As such, the idea of travel becomes similar to escape. After all, even the owners of the Chinese restaurant they’re sitting in have abandoned their family business in order to flee the country, a fact that makes it all the more apparent that Nadia and Saeed’s longing to travel is perhaps related to their city’s tenuous circumstances. When the meal is over, Nadia invites Saeed to her house. “Nothing is going to happen she states. I want to make that clear. When I say you should come over, I’m not saying I want your hands on me Saeed agrees, and they start making their way through the streets, which are lined by refugees intents and lean-tos. These migrants try to recreate the rhythms of a normal life, as though it were completely natural to be residing, a family of four, under a sheet of plastic propped up with branches and a few chipped bricks As Saeed and Nadia progress through the city, they’re stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint, but easily pass through. Saeed and Nadia’s trek through the city forces them to confront the fact that war, violence, and fear surround them even as they go about living their everyday lives in the exciting first stages of their budding romance. There is, it seems, no ignoring the many refugees who have trickled into the city. By giving readers a glimpse of these migrants’ lives, Hamid reveals the hardships that await people who are forced to sneak into cities that are not their own. Living in squalor, they’re clearly cutoff from the resources that might have sustained them in their home countries before whatever violence that occurred finally pushed them out. Now, these refugees must reestablish the rhythms of a normal life despite the fact that they’re living intents and lean-tos in the streets of a completely foreign city. As such, Hamid frames the act of crossing borders and divisions as perilous and trying. When Nadia obtained her apartment, she told her widowed landlord that she too was a widow, claiming her husband was killed in battle. In order to avoid the landlord’s suspicion, then, she can’t have men over, a problem she circumvents by going upstairs and dropping down to Saeed a key wrapped in a black robe, which he puts on and uses to cover his head. In this manner, Saeed sneaks into the building and into Nadia’s apartment, where they listen to old American vinyl records. When Nadia asks him if he’d like to smoke a joint, he accepts and even offers to roll it. Once again, Hamid puts on display the gradual progression of Saeed and Nadia’s romance. As they bond over vinyl and marijuana, their connection essentially offers them a psychological escape from what they’ve just seen in the streets squalor and sadness. As such, readers seethe ways in which people existing in conflict areas turn to everyday things—like flirtatious courtship or recreational drug use—to cope with their stressors. Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com ©2018 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com Page 24 Meanwhile, in the district of Shinjuku in Tokyo, a man in a crisp white shirt concealing his many tattoos sits at a bar and drinks whiskey he didn’t pay for but is, apparently, entitled to drink. It’s past midnight, and the man steps out fora cigarette in the alleyway. Ashe lights up, he hears something behind him, which is odd, since the alley is a dead-end—a dead-end he checked for people when he originally came outside. Nonetheless, two Filipina teenagers are standing next to a disused door to the rear of the bar, a door that is always kept locked, but is in this moment somehow open, a portal of complete blackness The girls speak in scared voices as they walk by the smoking man without looking at him. Touching a knife in his pocket, he sinisterly follows them as they walkaway in their “tropical” clothing. Download 0.56 Mb. Share with your friends:
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