Author Mohsin Hamid wants India and Pakistan to feel real affection for each other

Mohsin Hamid PicGETTY IMAGESHours before making a call to Lahore Pakistan two stories on a leading dailys website catch this writers attention In the first around 250 African migrant men all between the ages of 16 and 24 were reportedly feared to have drowned in the Mediterranean after two partially submerged dinghies were found off Libya Not very far away in northern Iraq terrified families fleeing fierce fighting in the city of Mosul were drugging their children with sedatives or taping their mouths shut to prevent their cries from alerting Islamic State militantsLater when we connect with author Mohsin Hamid on the phone to talk about his latest release Exit West Hamish HamiltonPenguin Random House India we cant help but wish that the mysterious doors and windows he imagines in this novel that allow you to walk effortlessly from one country to another had existed in the real world May be then the 200odd men wouldnt have died and hopefully no parent would ever have to drug their child againHamids fourth novel takes us through one such nameless country once beautiful and alive like any other in the world suddenly ravaged by warring militants A romance between the protagonists Saeed and Nadia blossoms at a rather inopportune moment But like two defiant lovers they try to make it work And this is their story Hamids book is also a tale of migrants of wartorn lands for whom the pursuit of happiness in linked with the search of a home We are all migrants he tells us But the characters of this book are different They remind you of the people whose deaths though accounted for in record books have become so commonplace that we begin to overlook it only because it is convenient He admits that he used his own home city Lahore as the model for his nameless city the circumstances that unravel here bring to mind presentday Aleppo or Mosul I wanted to present the agony of what it must be like to live in a place that collapses in that way to go from a modern urban environment to a state of disaster he says Not naming this city he said was deliberate so that people imagined this world for themselves Setting a love story against this backdrop gives this otherwise politically relevant narrative poignancy All my novels have been love stories Hamid admits This one is something that many of us have experienced first love between two young people And like we all know first loves are very difficult to sustain because both individuals are changing very rapidly It becomes easier to leave each other in such a relationship His protagonists however dont not so easily at least They swim through the tide together walking through imagined doorways banishing modern means of transport to jump one country to another before finally winding up in America These doors are symbolic of our lives today says Hamid The modern technological reality of our times is a reality in which geographical distance is collapsing and disappearing Right now we are several hundred miles away but we are still speaking as if we are next door to each other And if we were on Skype we would be looking at each other through that digital window The doors and windows in my novel reflect this contemporary reality he saysAnd yet we have walls The walls that the US has recently built against immigrants and the gates that India recently shut for Pakistan one that even keeps the Lahorebased author from coming here For Lahorebased Hamid who has had a peripatetic life having lived in Pakistan America and UK migration he says is a fundamental state of being human I saw a growing antimigrant feeling in the US when I lived there he says This book is in response to that rising nativist sentiment that has been building up for years now he adds And its everywhereCloser home India and Pakistan are trying hard to deny each other he says Just then the phone line disconnects and we struggle to make contact again But Hamid is insistent we speak about it As a person who has walked across that border several times I think the tragedy of our time is the terrible and horrific attempt to keep ourselves separated Pakistan can learn so much by coming to India I certainly have and India can too Neither country is perfect The land that we sit on doesnt end at that border Closing it does a horrible disservice to people of both countries he says We shouldnt limit ourselves to tolerance we should be hoping for real affection and anything lesser than that is a failure of imagination Hamid addsThen there is also Hamids lyrical prose Sometimes pages go devoid of punctuations Its a novel in which boundaries begin to disappear and so in that sense it is natural that the boundaries didnt exist in paragraphs Yet more than that as I was writing the novel it began to seem like an incantation like a prayer And so it acquired its own rhythm and that probably is the reason for the long sentencesWith Exit West hitting the shelves and already earning rave reviews Hamid feels its time for a short break Usually when I finish one book I give myself a year before I start another After having been monogamous with one story for several years it would be nice to play the field