The Doorways to Life

Book Review - Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

"That is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind." For the first sixty pages, one really doubts what's so special about this book that it features on Booker and DSC prizes shortlist. Anyone carrying a baggage of mixed reviews in head this book garnered, can easily put it aside. When you persist through the fourth chapter, there on the mastery and skill of the writer unfolds in distinct layers.

Fleeing war and persecution, leaving ones' homeland in hope of a better future in a distant, unfamiliar land where one's clearly unwelcome can be depicted with heart wrenching emotions or gut wrenching details of violence and gory bloodshed. But the picture of human displacement, its effects on interpersonal relationships and largely life itself, be dealt with as in this book is nothing ordinary. And that is where Exit West stands to earn all appreciation.

For a young couple - Nadia and Saeed, love begins to blossom in a city not yet openly at war, but situation worsens over time. Death of a loved one gets them closer, makes them take few very difficult decisions; death of another slowly grates their beings, changes them in ways that they fall apart. The change is slow, subtle and largely inevitable;  highly realistic too as the author chooses the right words to express it all, no empty theatrics or dramatic overtures in name of emotions.

It is through the couple's lenses that we see the world in violently changing times,  times of migrants versus natives, underprivileged vs affluent, man pitted against man, those guarding the doors to escape vs those passing through the same doors. The doors that appear quite routinely in the book are only metaphors for a journey embarked upon, a transient phase in life or gateways that one moves through during difficult times, swerving around blind and dangerous corners.

We believe we all are connected, across countries of the globe only to realize how fiercely we fight marking our territories, how this heart which loves to wander also yearns to stay rooted to where it beat first. Quirky, even weird at places, kindling imagination and introspection alike, Exit West is a good read and Mohsin Hamid is an author I look up to with admiration.