A Day’s Toll: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

“It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class — in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding — but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.”

The morning my friend T texted me, “trump has covid,” I was pottering about my errands, my to-do list a swirl of dashed-off purple handwriting attempting to capture all that rushes through my head in the day-to-day of my job, now my work-from-home home-is-work reality that consumes my days from dawn to dawn.

And that day, a portal seemed to open that would take me into a new reality. Of course, I was recently accustomed to looking for portals into new realities. Arundhati Roy found that metaphor for us, drew it out of some eternal, crystal-clear pool of metaphors that writers go to when the world is suffering and we need images. Published April 3, 2020 in Financial Times, Roy’s essay begins, without fanfare: “Who can use the term ‘gone viral’ now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs?”

Roy was not the first, nor the last, in the line of writers who would help us to grapple through the pitched darkness of our period, but her image of the portal was the most memorable for me, and for many, who shared excerpts of the FT piece all over social media. You must read the piece in its entirety, for I am sure it will go down as one of the essential pieces of hybrid essay-journalism from this era -- and whew, yes, that’s saying a lot.

But if you only read this excerpt, here is Roy’s extension of her metaphor, of her assertion that “the pandemic is a portal”: 

“We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

I think about what it means to publish this metaphor in a journal such as FT, in all that its audience connotes. For as many other writers and luminaries have reminded us this year, the pandemic made things much worse for everyone, but crises of its like have ravaged communities and nations all the while, and simultaneously. History’s always happening, but the bourgeoisie of the United States for instance -- myself included -- has its way of forgetting that behind the walls of our fortresses, in the cafés of our gentrified cities, and, perhaps most impenetrable, behind psychological bulwarks, the holes of which are masoned with guilt, or lies, or numbness, suffering is everywhere and acute. And it’s a good question to wonder which side of the bulwark is more dehumanizing, in the end, for one side may be protected, but the souls feel nothing, embalmed.

There are portals between these worlds, Roy reminds us. Pandemics open them. And we will walk through, or perhaps be dragged.

Mohsin Hamid’s novel, Exit West, is also a book about portals. There are some precious surprises this book doles out, and I am not here to spoil them for you. So instead I will just set the scene, which really is only the scene of the first handful of pages.

Saeed and Nadia are both students taking business classes and working in an unnamed city. The quote that opens this post is the second paragraph of the book. As our third-person narrator wastes no time alluding, this book opens not only in media res, but centimeters from a tipping point.

Or maybe “tipping point” is too simplistic a phrase, too clichéd after a year of tipping, and tipping further, and then...somehow tipping still. The word that formed in my mind when I imagined writing about this novel is inexorable. A word not unlike the word “exit.” Un-exit-able. No way out. A word often followed by words like “slide,” “decay,” “tide.” Nature swallowing civilization whole; that moment in middle school where they teach you the word “entropy” and it names an inchoate sense one has of the world’s direction.

Saeed and Nadia’s country is “still mostly at peace, or at least not openly at war.” And as Hamid describes their nameless city -- a backdrop to their potential love affair, but also a character in and of itself -- we consider the surface of our own cities, and what roils beneath. “War would soon erode the façade of their building as though it had accelerated time itself,” Hamid writes, “a day’s toll outpacing that of a decade.” Saeed and Nadia will traverse a universe of suffering, in the smallest of steps, in the space of a day, but in the opening pages of this novel, they are just business students getting up the courage to go out for coffee together.

And to open a book there, with an omniscient narrator foreshadowing the worst to come in no uncertain terms yet also coinhabiting, even submitting to, the “transient beginnings” -- this is the mood of 2020. This is why, the day I heard of the president’s illness, I felt something many of us who read often feel: I need a book for this. I reached for Hamid’s novel again because I needed infrastructure to feel this mood, this inexorable tide, of late 2020, on the edge of an election, knowing I will look back and read this post in a few weeks and experience it as staring back into the mute and inscrutable hole of the portal, wondering who was on the other side and marveling, once again, at her calm.