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H ALF A CENTURY LATER Nadia returned for the first time to the city of her birth, where the fires she had witnessed in her youth had burned themselves out long ago, the lives of cities being far more persistent and more gently cyclical than those of people, and the city she found herself in was not a heaven but it was not a hell, and it was familiar but also unfamiliar, and as she wandered about slowly, exploring, she was informed of the proximity of Saeed, and after standing motionless for a considerable moment she communicated with him, and they agreed to meet. They met at a café near her old building, which still stood, though most of the others close by had changed, and they sat beside one another on two adjacent sides of a small square table, under the sky, and they looked at each other, sympathetic looks, for time had done what time does, but looks of particular recognition, and they watched the young people of this city pass, young people who had no idea how bad things once were, except what they studied in history, which was perhaps as it should be, and they sipped their coffees, and they spoke. Their conversation navigated two lives, with vital details highlighted and excluded, and it was also a dance, for they were former lovers, and they had not wounded each other so deeply as to have lost their ability to find a rhythm together, and they grew younger and more playful as the coffee in their cups diminished, and Nadia said imagine how different life would be if I had agreed to marry you, and Saeed said imagine how different it would be if I had agreed to have sex with you, and Nadia said we were having sex, and Saeed considered and smiled and said yes I suppose we were. Above them bright satellites transited in the darkening sky and the last hawks were returning to the rest of their nests and around them passersby did not pause to look at this old woman in her black robe or this old man with his stubble. They finished their coffees. Nadia asked if Saeed had been to the deserts of Chile and seen the stars and was it all he had imagined it would be. He nodded and said if she had an evening free he would take her, it was a sight worth seeing in this life, and she shut her eyes and said she would like that very much, and they rose and embraced and parted and did not know, then, if that evening would ever come.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mohsin Hamid is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and the essay collection Discontent and Its Civilizations. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have won or been short-listed for numerous prizes, including the Man Booker Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, and the Betty Trask Award. Hamid’s essays and fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Granta, and many other publications. Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California. Facebook.com/MohsinHamidOfficialPage mohsinhamid.com
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ALSO BY MOHSIN HAMID NOVELS Moth Sm
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FOR NAVED AND NASIM
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ONE
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• • • THE NEXT DAY, at work,
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sunlight. It was the sort of view t
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more detailed as well, though it wa
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WHEN NADIA WAS A CHILD, her favorit
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“No. Of course.” Saeed’s expr
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young had never cared much for play
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THREE
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the night they first became physica
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so beautiful, and surely conflicts
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Saeed’s mother prayed at home, ne
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adio, a temporary antiterrorism mea
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T HE EVENING CLASS Saeed and Nadia
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And both of them grinned. But when
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Many windows were broken already, a
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FIVE
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emotions from her own childhood, an
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which she featured prominently, and
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women she passed and then immediate
Page 45 and 46: killing him, but that is the way of
Page 47 and 48: T HEY SLEPT LITTLE that night, the
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Page 51 and 52: traded one of their smallish backpa
Page 53 and 54: holding Nadia’s arm as though it
Page 55 and 56: THEY EMERGED in a bedroom with a vi
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Page 59 and 60: perhaps, a degree of order could be
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Page 73 and 74: T HAT SUMMER it seemed to Saeed and
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Page 87 and 88: Saeed hesitated, then took Nadia’
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