Exit West: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

While Saeed uses his phone quite often to contact Nadia, he limits himself when it comes to browsing the internet. For him, the virtual world is too distracting, too deeply alluring. He prefers the present, and so he only allows himself one hour per day of internet surfing, otherwise using only the few applications he’s left on his phone like the one that helps him identify constellations in the sky. Nadia, on the other hand, uses her phone quite actively, reveling in its ability to keep her company; “she rode it far out into the world on otherwise solitary, stationary nights,” Hamid writes. “She watched bombs falling, women exercising, men copulating, clouds gathering.” She even orders magic mushrooms using her phone from a drug dealer who, in a few short months, is decapitated and strung up in public.

The day before Nadia receives her mushrooms—which she and Saeed will take together—she finds herself trapped at a red light next to a man who starts yelling at her after she ignores his greeting. He swears at her, telling her only whores drive motorcycles and growing increasingly angry. He becomes so angry that Nadia worries he’s going to attack her, but she simply remains calm on her bike, gripping the throttle and staying behind the safety of her tinted visor. After a while, the man shakes his head and drives away, letting loose a “sort of strangled scream, a sound that could [be] rage, or equally could [be] anguish.”

The day Nadia’s shrooms arrive, militant radicals take siege of the city’s stock exchange. While Nadia follows the conflict on TV with her coworkers, she texts Saeed about the unfolding horror. By afternoon, the government descends upon the exchange in full force, having decided that the death of the hostages is a price they’ll have to pay in order to establish power and send a message of strength to militants and citizens alike. When all is said and done, “initial estimates put the number of dead workers at probably less than a hundred.” Saeed and Nadia naturally assume there will be a curfew placed upon the city, but the government holds off from implementing one that evening, perhaps as a way of showing citizens they have the situation controlled. As such, Nadia invites Saeed over, and he drives to her apartment in the family car.

Once inside Nadia’s house, Saeed puts food in the oven so that it’ll stay warm. They then go onto the balcony, where Nadia asks him if he’s going to take off the robe she dropped down to him. He says he’ll take his off if she does the same, so they both slip out of the robes, only to discover that they’re both wearing sweaters and jeans. For the first time ever, Saeed looks at Nadia without her robe on, trying hard not to let his eyes wander below her face. They then sit down and Nadia opens her hand to reveal the shrooms. “Have you ever done psychedelic mushrooms?” she asks.

They take the mushrooms, but after a while, Saeed still feels nothing and determines he must be immune to their effects. Because of this belief, he finds himself unprepared when suddenly a “feeling of awe” washes over him as he regards the small lemon tree on Nadia’s balcony. Floored by the thought of the tree’s roots in the clay pot and the unity of the pot and plant with the balcony and, thus, with the very earth the building stands upon, he feels that the tree itself is reaching up in “a gesture so beautiful” he can’t help but be “filled with love, and reminded of his parents, for whom he suddenly [feels] such gratitude, and a desire for peace, that peace should come for them all, for everyone, for everything, for we are so fragile, and so beautiful, and surely conflicts could be healed if others had experiences like this.”

Thinking this way, Saeed turns his attention to Nadia and sees that she’s looking back at him. Her eyes, he thinks, are like great worlds unto themselves. When Saeed partially returns to himself several hours later, he and Nadia hold hands while facing each other. Looking into one another’s faces, they lean in and kiss. In doing so, they realize morning has come and that they’re kissing in broad daylight, so they go back inside where, finally, they eat the food Saeed brought all those hours ago. 

While Saeed and Nadia are high on mushrooms, Saeed’s phone dies, meaning that his parents are unable to reach him. Panicked, they call and text him with “terror,” worrying something has happened to him after the tumultuous hostage situation the previous day. When Saeed finally returns home, his father goes to bed and “in his bedside mirror glimpse[s] a suddenly much older man.” His mother, for her part, is “so relieved to see her son that she [thinks], for a moment, she should slap him.” 

Later that same day, an old man stands with a Naval officer on the perimeter of his own property, staring at his house in La Jolla, California, which is surrounded by other soldiers. The old man himself used to be in the Navy, but the officer standing next to him pays little attention to him, brushing off his questions when he asks whether Mexicans or Muslims are the ones “coming through.” The officer tells him that he can’t answer such queries, and the old man asks what he can do to help. “I’ll let you know,” the officer says, offering to take the old man to stay with relatives or friends. As he goes to answer the question, the old man realizes he has nowhere to go.

Not long after the stock exchange siege, the militant radicals start “taking over and holding territory throughout the city.” Nobody knows how these fighters are arriving in such vast numbers and so quickly. The city finally institutes a curfew and installs checkpoints with razor wire and “infantry fighting vehicles.” On the first Friday of curfew, Saeed goes with his father to a communal prayer while his mother stays and prays at home, “newly particular about not missing a single one of her devotions.”

Work slows down for both Nadia and Saeed because so many clients are fleeing the country. Nadia’s two bosses have even fled themselves, never returning from their holiday vacations and leaving their workers to pass the time in the office, where Nadia spends the majority of her days on her phone. In the midst of all this, Nadia and Saeed start meeting during the day, often at a burger restaurant between their offices. Sometimes beneath the table they touch each other, Saeed putting his hand on the inside of Nadia’s thigh, Nadia placing her palm on his zipper. Unfortunately, they can’t see one another at night unless Saeed stays over until morning—something he doesn’t want to do because he doesn’t want to make up an excuse to his parents and also because he fears leaving them alone.

For the first two weeks of the curfew, Nadia and Saeed don’t see each other on the weekends because fighting between their neighborhoods makes travel impossible. Finally, though, Saeed is able to visit on the third weekend, when the couple gets into Nadia’s bed and takes off their clothes. After a little while, Nadia asks if Saeed has brought a condom, but he tells her he doesn’t think they should have sex until they’re married. She laughs at this, but he merely shakes his head. “Are you fucking joking?” she asks. Then, calming down, she smiles and sees that Saeed is mortified by her reaction. “It’s okay,” she says. “We can see.”

Lying in bed together, Saeed shows Nadia photos on his phone of famous city skylines with all the lights turned off and bright stars overhead. When Nadia asks how the photographer got everybody to turn off their lights, Saeed explains that the photographs are edited, that the photographer takes pictures of the sky in a deserted place where the stars are brightest. These sections of the sky, he explains, are the exact sections that will slide over the city in several hours. In this way, the photographer is able to capture the same sky that will blanket the city, but he avoids the city’s blinding qualities by editing out the lights from the buildings. “Nadia thought about this,” Hamid writes. “They were achingly beautiful, these ghostly cities […]. Whether they looked like the past, or the present, or the future, she couldn’t decide.”

A week later, all cellphone service in the city vanishes. An announcement is made on TV that the government has decided to do this as a “temporary antiterrorism measure.” Worse, internet service also disappears. Because neither Saeed nor Nadia have working landlines, they suddenly find themselves cut off from one another, “deprived of the portals to each other and to the world provided by their mobile phones.” Stuck in their apartments each night because of the curfew, they begin to feel “marooned and alone and much more afraid.”