Exit West

This chapter begins with Nadia’s family history. She is estranged from her family, having announced to them after college that she plans to live alone, even while being unmarried. Her family, who are traditional, do not react well to this news, and from this point on, Nadia and her family consider one another to no longer exist. We are also told that “the impending descent of their city into the abyss” (18) will come before they have a chance to reconcile.

Nadia and Saeed go out on a first date, to a Chinese restaurant that Nadia has selected. They get on well, and Nadia invites Saeed home to her apartment to smoke marijuana and to listen to records. As Nadia lives on the top floor of a building belonging to a pious widow—who believes that she is also a widow—she and Saeed must employ some subterfuges. She goes in to the building before Saeed, then tosses a robe and veil down on to the street from her window for him to put on so that he can pretend to be a visiting female friend.

The scene then shifts to a rough and deserted neighborhood in Tokyo, Japan. An unnamed sinister man, perhaps a gangster, is standing outside of a restaurant; he is described as having “sober, flat” eyes that make other people keep their distance from him: “Gazes leapt away from his gaze, as they might among packs of dogs in the wild, in which a hierarchy is set by some sensed quality of violent potential” (26). The man sees some young Filipino girls come out of the restaurant, reflects that he does not especially like Filipinos, and starts to follow them.

Nadia’s cousin dies, along with eighty-five other people, in a truck bombing. Because Nadia is estranged from her family, she does not want to attend the funeral and call too much attention to herself; however, she visits his grave the following day, and Saeed accompanies her. His quiet support makes Nadia regard him in a new way, and she decides to end a relationship with a musician whom she has been casually seeing (whom we are told will die in the oncoming war). Before they break up, they have sex one last time. The chapter ends with a scene of helicopters rising over Nadia and Saeed’s city.    

This chapter opens with a meditation on mobile phones and the ways in which they alter space and time: “In their phones were antennas, and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and never would be” (35). More immediately, mobile phones are a way for Saeed and Nadia to get in touch with one another. Nadia is slightly more dependent on her phone than Saeed is on his.

Nadia buys psychedelic mushrooms as a preparation for another date with Saeed; we learn that the seller will be beheaded in the upcoming war. On his way over to Nadia’s house that evening, Saeed gets cut off by a mysterious and menacing figure in an SUV; it seems initially that he will be killed by an armed guard, but at the last minute the guard is called back into the car and the car then drives off.

Saeed spends the night at Nadia’s place, causing his parents to worry about him. Their city has become increasingly more volatile and dangerous. Militants have taken over the city stock exchange, and a curfew has been imposed by the government. At the chapter’s end, all mobile phone signals in the city suddenly vanish, as an anti-terrorism measure imposed by the government. Saeed and Nadia are then left without a way to communicate.

Saeed and Nadia’s story is once again interrupted by a scene from the life of a seemingly unrelated stranger. This time, the stranger is an elderly man in San Diego, California, whose house has been surrounded by barbed wire, in order to keep out migrants. The man is being forced by armed guards—toward whom he is strangely sympathetic—to leave his house. 

With their phones turned off, and their city increasingly taken over by warring factions, Saeed and Nadia struggle to make contact. They also struggle to find provisions for their new state of emergency. Nadia goes to buy groceries and to get out emergency money at the bank; there is a mob of waiting customers at the bank, and in the darkness and confusion of the mob she is sexually assaulted.

That evening, Saeed meets her in front of her apartment. She is startled by him at first, as she is still shaken by her encounter at the bank. She lets him in to her apartment, and the two of them are intimate without having intercourse. Saeed tells her that he does not believe in sex before marriage, and then asks her to marry him. She demurs, without being quite sure what it is that is causing her to hesitate.

There is an isolated scene of two unnamed men, perhaps militants, inside an apartment. One man, who is referred to only as “the brave man” (63) waits just outside the door with a weapon. A second man emerges from a dark door at the other end of the apartment. This second man sneaks across the floor with a weapon of his own and is ushered outside by the first man to take part in a battle.

As the city becomes noticeably more fractured, Saeed and Nadia are both let go from their jobs. Windows and doors begin to take on new significance; windows are no longer sources of light and visibility but are now vulnerable holes in buildings that must be sheltered from bullets. Meanwhile, there is an underground rumor about doors scattered throughout the city that will deliver citizens to safer destinations. Saeed’s mother dies from a stray round of gunfire while searching for a stray earring in her car. Nadia then agrees to move in with Saeed and his grieving father. 

Nadia, Saeed, and his father form an improvised family of their own. Nadia refers to Saeed’s father as “father,” and he in turn refers to her as “daughter” (74). Her presence is stabilizing to him in his grief, almost because she is a strange young woman, forcing him to be on his best, most chivalrous behavior. She sleeps in Saeed’s room while he sleeps in his living room, and his father remains in the bedroom. Their windows are carefully shielded with mattresses.

During a cessation in the fighting, Nadia goes back to her own apartment to collect some spare items. She discovers that her building has been damaged, although her own room is still intact. Back at Saeed’s apartment, the three of them overhear their upstairs neighbors, who happen to belong to the wrong clan, being murdered by militants. Dead bodies have become increasingly commonplace in their city; corpses hanging from trees is a regular sight, and Saeed’s father, while paying a visit to his wife’s grave, sees young boys playing with a soccer ball that he gradually realizes is a human head.

Nadia and Saeed meet an agent who claims to be able to lead them to the mysterious escape doors about which they have been hearing. He demands a down payment and tells them that he will be in touch soon. They are skeptical but feel that they have no choice but to trust him. He eventually does contact them, as promised, with a note under their door, stating a time and a meeting place. Saeed’s father tells him that he will not go with them, as he does not want to weigh down their journey and wishes to be close to the memory of this wife.

There is another isolated scene, of a family in Dubai who appear to be migrants. They make their way through a luxury building and out on to a beach, monitored the entire time by drones and surveillance systems. They are eventually captured by a law officer and led away.