Ten years ago, Mohsin Hamid took the Western hysteria over the clash of civilisations after 9/11 and turned it into an encounter between a Pakistani man and an American. Only, The Reluctant Fundamentalist was not a conversation, but an unnerving dramatic monologue: the Pakistani telling the story of a soured American dream. The 45-year-old’s new novel is again, uncannily, in step with the time. Exit West (Penguin Random House) follows a couple, Nadia and Saeed, as they escape a war-struck South Asian city (which could be Lahore) into cities of the West: Mykonos, London and California. This is not a world where children are washed ashore in perilous journeys, but where people walk through mysterious doors into other lands, “the passage both like dying and being reborn”. Hate and anxiety follow them into new lands, but Hamid’s vision is ultimately redemptive: it imagines a broken world healing itself. The author spoke to The Indian Express from Lahore about refugees and natives, and his distrust of purity. Excerpts: When did you start thinking about this novel of migrants, who move from one country to the other through doors? I moved back from London to Lahore about eight years ago. When I was leaving London, I was already struck by this growing anti-migrant feeling. You saw it in the newspapers, tabloids and television. Coming back to Pakistan, I met so many people who dreamt of moving abroad. I thought about the tension between the two things — so many people in southern places who wanted to move abroad and so many people in northern places who don't want anyone to come there. That was the starting point of the novel. The idea of the doors came around the same time. I don't know if I was getting off a flight, or Skypeing with somebody and looking at their face on the computer, when it seemed that these doors had already come into existence, that we can already move across distances. Were you writing during the Syrian refugee crisis? Did that influence you? Not just the Syrian crisis. When I was a child in Pakistan in the 1980s, there was the war in Afghanistan and millions of Afghan refugees came to Pakistan. They were a big part of my childhood. Subsequently, one has seen so many refugee movements — during the Iraq or the Syrian war. It is something I have seen my whole life. I guess I have always had this idea that people have to sometimes leave. You do not write about the dangerous journeys migrants make. What did you gain from that narrative choice? We often focus on these journeys: how does the Afghan refugee cross the Hindu Kush into Pakistan, how does the Syrian cross the Mediterranean? Those stories are important but it is also a way for us to think that these people are different from us [since] we have not made these journeys. And I wanted, instead, to explore the idea that maybe it’s not so different a story. So many of us consider moving from a place, and then we change when we go to a new place: that is the bulk of the experience of many humans. You write in the novel: “We are all migrants who move through time.” Living as we do in a world where there is so much tension between natives and migrants, I wanted to get at this idea that nobody is actually a native. That everybody’s ancestors were born in Africa and, from there, everyone has travelled across the world. A few centuries ago, there were no Europeans living in America. Even if you have lived in a place for 20 or 30 years, the place will change. Lahore is nothing like the Lahore of my childhood. The novel imagines a world of a million migrations and journeys. Is this how you see the future? I see it as the future as well as the past. What is India or Pakistan or America today? We are the result of centuries of migration. If we think of the future, what’s going to happen when sea levels rise (and they will)? That means people in Bangladesh and Indonesia, Karachi and Mumbai will have to move, some within their countries and some to new ones. There will be millions of people moving across countries, as they always have. My novel takes this inevitable future and compresses this movement of centuries into one year. You have lived in America and the UK and in Pakistan. How has that shaped your sense of home? I am partly at home and partly foreign in lots of places. Initially, I thought that made me a strange creature. But the truth is that many people feel like this. There are young progressive kids up in Lahore whose families are conservative. There are young kids who are gay whose families don't know. To be a human being is often to feel foreign. The doors of Exit West remind one of The Chronicles of Narnia. To you, does fantasy seem a more appropriate response to the current reality? It is very important to imagine futures. Individually and collectively, we have slipped into a state of depression. We no longer imagine a future we would like to live in. And, right now, that is the real danger. If you asked an American in the 1960s about what the future looked like, they would say, ‘We will be flying rocket ships or be super prosperous, or travelling to other planets’. But if you ask them today, they are most likely to say, ‘Well, I hope my kids can have the same quality of life that I had. I hope I can have the same retirement that my parents had’. Even in Lahore, and Delhi, people say, yes, there will be more economic prosperity but there will be terrible pollution. They are worried if their daughters will be able to drive home safely at night, if their sons will be sucked into xenophobic organisations. And so, what happens is when we are so afraid of the future, we are more vulnerable to nostalgia. Imagining a future which has potential for us is . one of the functions of fiction. It’s something that is progressive and is practical. In that sense, it is an entirely necessary response to the political problems of our time. What drew you back to Pakistan? My wife and I had just had our first child and we thought, if we ever wanted to move back, we should do it now. Then, I felt that I ought to live in Pakistan again to be able to write about it. And, also, my parents were growing old. Many of us South Asians have been brought up to be around parents and grandparents, and I thought this was the time in my life to do that. Will your next novel be on Pakistan? In many ways, Exit West is a book about Pakistan. My daughter is seven and she has said I should write a children’s book. Maybe I should write it while she wants to read it. Unlike your previous work, this novel is shot through with an awareness of mortality. Is this mellowness a part of who you are at this point of time? I think it is. I am living in a South Asian extended set-up: my parents are next door. I am the middle generation of a three-generation extended family. In a given month in Lahore, I am as likely to attend a funeral as I am to attend a birthday party. And that has made me think differently about mortality, life and childhood. And this book reflects that. It is less ironic than my previous work. In both The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West, you have responded to the politics that shapes the world. What is your politics? I am increasingly opposed to people who stand for purity — whether it is a pure India or a pure Pakistan, a pure Islam or Hinduism. These are very dangerous positions. I remember Zia-ul-Haq’s Pakistan and we are still living with so many of its tragedies, from the militants to intolerance and the repression of minorities. We see a similar trend in India, America or Britain. I am much less interested in tolerance than I was before and much more interested in genuine affection. India and Pakistan should not just tolerate each other, they should have extremely close and friendly relations. My political situation is shifting to one that celebrates different kind of things coming together, because out of that comes hybridity and most of human innovation and progress. How do you see the current political situation in India as a Pakistani artist? It worries me. Because India is making the same kind of mistakes that Pakistan did. Both India and America are becoming more Pakistan-like even as many Pakistanis are waking up and realising that we don't want that.
