Exit West: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

The usual funeral and formal grieving process for Saeed’s mother is truncated by the city’s dangerous circumstances. The relatives who visit do so only briefly, since it’s risky to travel through the streets. During these visits, Nadia busies herself with serving the guests, and nobody asks about the nature of her relationship with Saeed, though it’s clear they want to know. In this period, Saeed prays a fair amount, as does his father, but Nadia refrains from doing so. Still, she calls Saeed’s father “father,” and he calls her “daughter,” and all three of them get along despite the grief hanging over the house. At night, Nadia sleeps in the living room, apart from Saeed, though sometimes the young couple spends time together after Saeed’s father has fallen asleep, holdings hands and sometimes kissing but never advancing beyond this point.

Saeed and Nadia return to Nadia’s apartment to gather her belongings, taking with them—among other things—her record player and lemon tree, which they place on the balcony. As for the record player, Nadia hides it along with her records, since music is forbidden in the city by the militants, though there’s no longer any electricity anyway, so there’s no way to listen in the first place. Still, her conscientiousness proves wise, since the militants do appear one night to search the apartment, looking for a certain “sect.” After demanding to see everyone’s IDs, they leave—luckily, none of their names are “associated with the denomination being hunted.” Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for their upstairs neighbors; the militants cut the man’s throat and take his wife and daughter as hostages. Within two days, blood from the man’s severed neck starts seeping through the floorboards and into Saeed’s apartment. 

Horrified at the violence all around them, Saeed and Nadia start to transgress against their own agreement to remain chaste in his father’s apartment. Each night, they become intimate after his father has gone to bed, though they still stop before having sex. His father, it seems, is too preoccupied and sad to pay much attention to their amorous activities, and the young couple is only spurred on by the fact that the militants have started making violent examples out of unmarried lovers.

Public executions occur frequently as the militants cement their control over the city. Amidst the horror, Saeed’s father travels every day to his brother’s house, where he sits with other old men and old women and talks about the past, often reminiscing about his wife, whom they all knew. On his way back, he stops and lingers at her grave. While doing this one day, he witnesses a group of teenagers playing soccer in the street and feels warmed by the memory of having done this himself as a boy. When he looks closer, though, he sees the young men aren’t using a ball, but rather the severed head of a goat. Disgusted, he looks even closer before ripping his eyes away, for what he sees leaves him aghast: the young men aren’t playing soccer with a goat’s head—they’re playing with a human head. 

Nadia and Saeed resolve to find a passage out of the city. One of their friends puts them in touch with an agent who claims to have access to the mysterious doors that transport people to other lands, so they set out one evening wearing the garments and stylings required by the militants. Terrified, they pass a hanging body and try to carry themselves innocently, knowing all the while that they’re being watched by drones flying overhead. When they reach the place they were told to go, the agent tells them not to turn around, approaching them from behind and demanding that Nadia uncover her head. When the agent asks for the money, Saeed gives it to him and wonders whether he’s “making a down payment or being robbed.” 

While Saeed and Nadia wait to hear back from the agent—who’s busy searching for a new unguarded door—many people pass through doors around the world. One family in particular can be seen through a series of security cameras at a luxury resort in Dubai, where they emerge confusedly and walk outside into the bright light, where they’re then picked up by still more security cameras and hovering drones, which chart their progression along a beach boardwalk, past tanning vacationers. The family drifts in and out of the cellphone frames of people taking selfies, making their way through the strange resort area until they’re intercepted and taken away by officers who jump out of a van “with grilles on its windows.”

Saeed and Nadia are forced to go to the bathroom outside in trenches now, and Nadia’s lemon tree withers away on the balcony. And though they both desperately want to leave the city, their attitudes differ from one another. While Saeed has always wanted to leave, he has also always thought that he’d do so under different circumstances, “temporarily, intermittently, never once and for all.” He dislikes the idea of parting with his friends and “extended” family, seeing it all as “amounting to the loss of a home, no less, of his home.” Nadia, on the other hand, is more eager to migrate because the prospect of change is “at its most basic level exciting to her.” Still, she worries that doing so will mean having to depend upon others, putting her “at the mercy of strangers.”

“Nadia had always been, and would afterwards continue to be, more comfortable with all varieties of movement in her life than was Saeed, in whom the impulse of nostalgia was stronger,” Hamid notes. Still neither Saeed nor Nadia anticipate how Saeed’s father feels about the prospect of leaving; when a note arrives from the agent saying a door is open and that they must meet him the following day, Saeed’s father says: “You two must go, but I will not come.” Beside himself, Saeed threatens to carry his father over his shoulder, forcing the old man to go, but this doesn’t work. When Saeed asks him why he wants to stay, he replies, “Your mother is here.” At this, Saeed relents, understanding what it means for his father to stay in the city, and the two men spend the last night of their lives together.

After convincing his son to let him stay, Saeed’s father calls Nadia to his room and says he’s “entrusting her with his son’s life, and she, whom he call[s] daughter, must, like a daughter, not fail him, whom she call[s] father, and she must see Saeed through to safety, and he hope[s] she [will] one day marry his son and be called mother by his grandchildren, but this [is] up to them to decide.” All he asks, he says, is that she stay with Saeed until they’re out of danger. Nadia makes the promise, but in doing so feels as if she’s abandoning the old man, leaving him to die. “But that is the way of things,” Hamid writes, “for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”