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WHEN NADIA WAS A CHILD, her favorite subject was art, even though art was taught only once a week and she did not consider herself particularly talented as an artist. She had gone to a school that emphasized rote memorization, for which she was by temperament particularly ill-suited, and so she spent a great deal of time doodling in the margins of her textbooks and notebooks, hunched over to hide curlicues and miniature woodland universes from the eyes of her teachers. If they caught her, she would get a scolding, or occasionally a slap on the back of the head. The art in Nadia’s childhood home consisted of religious verses and photos of holy sites, framed and mounted on walls. Nadia’s mother and sister were quiet women and her father a man who tried to be quiet, thinking this a virtue, but who nonetheless came to a boil easily and often where Nadia was concerned. Her constant questioning and growing irreverence in matters of faith upset and frightened him. There was no physical violence in Nadia’s home, and much giving to charity, but when after finishing university Nadia announced, to her family’s utter horror, and to her own surprise for she had not planned to say it, that she was moving out on her own, an unmarried woman, the break involved hard words on all sides, from her father, from her mother, even more so from her sister, and perhaps most of all from Nadia herself, such that Nadia and her family both considered her thereafter to be without a family, something all of them, all four, for the rest of their lives, regretted, but which none of them would ever act to repair, partly out of stubbornness, partly out of bafflement at how to go about doing so, and partly because the impending descent of their city into the abyss would come before they realized that they had lost the chance. Nadia’s experiences during her first months as a single woman living on her own did, in some moments, equal or even surpass the loathsomeness and dangerousness that her family had warned her about. But she had a job at an insurance company, and she was determined to survive, and so she did. She secured a room of her own atop the house of a widow, a record player and small collection of vinyl, a circle of acquaintances among the city’s free spirits, and a connection to a discreet and nonjudgmental female gynecologist. She learned how to dress for self-protection, how best to deal with aggressive men and with the police, and with aggressive men who were the police, and always to trust her instincts about situations to avoid or to exit immediately. But sitting at her desk at the insurance company, on an afternoon of handling executive auto policy renewals by phone, when she received an instant message from Saeed asking if she would like to meet, her work posture was still hunched over, as it had been when she was a schoolgirl, and she was still doodling, as always, in the margins of the printouts before her. • • • THEY MET at a Chinese restaurant of Nadia’s choosing, this not being a class night. The family that used to run the place, after arriving in the city following the Second World War, and flourishing there
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Nadia’s, and whom Nadia had helpe
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“I don’t need to.” She releas
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The fury of those nativists advocat
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tub, which the council had designat
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T HAT SUMMER it seemed to Saeed and
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light a cigarette, when he saw emer
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asped as they were cinched and tied
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THE NORTHERN SUMMER EVENINGS were e
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TEN
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Saeed was more melancholic than he
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illness, in which case she prayed m
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Saeed hesitated, then took Nadia’
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ELEVEN
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Nadia knew people stayed at the coo
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vast numbers, at a cost so small as
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TW ELVE
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mohsin Hamid is th