Exit West(17)

After a brief interlude the family was picked up again by a second camera, traversing a hallway and pushing the horizontal bars that secured a heavy set of double fire-resistant doors, and as these doors opened the brightness of Dubai’s desert sunlight overwhelmed the sensitivity of the image sensor and the four figures seemed to become thinner, insubstantial, lost in an aura of whiteness, but they were at that moment simultaneously captured on three exterior surveillance feeds, tiny characters stumbling onto a broad sidewalk, a promenade, along a one-way boulevard on which slowly cruised two expensive two-door automobiles, one yellow, one red, the whining of their revving engines indirectly visible in the way they startled the girl and boy.

The parents held their children’s hands and seemed to be at a loss as to which direction to go. Perhaps they were from a coastal village themselves, and not from a city, for they gravitated towards the sea and away from the buildings, and they could be seen at multiple angles following a landscaped pathway through the sand, the parents whispering to one another from time to time, the children eyeing the mostly pale tourists lying on towels and loungers in a state of near-total undress—but in numbers far fewer than normal for the winter high season, though the children could not know this.

A small quadcopter drone was hovering fifty meters above them now, too quiet to be heard, and relaying its feed to a central monitoring station and also to two different security vehicles, one an unmarked sedan, the other a badged van with grilles on its windows, and from the latter vehicle a pair of uniformed men emerged and walked purposefully, but without undue or tourist-alarming haste, along a trajectory that would intersect with that of the Tamil-speaking family in a minute or so.

During this minute the family was also visible in the camera feeds of various tourists’ selfie-taking mobile phones, and they seemed to be not so much a cohesive unit but rather four disparate individuals, each behaving in a different way, the mother repeatedly making eye contact with the women she passed and then immediately glancing down, the father patting his pockets and the underside of his backpack as though checking for tears or leaks, the daughter staring at skydivers who were hurtling towards a nearby pier and pulling up at the last moment and landing at a sprint, the son testing the rubberized jogger-friendly surface beneath his feet with each step, and then the minute ended and they were intercepted and led away, apparently bewildered, or overawed, for they held hands and did not resist or scatter or run.

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FOR THEIR PART, Saeed and Nadia enjoyed a degree of insulation from remote surveillance when they were indoors, owing to their lack of electricity, but even so their home could still be searched by armed men without warning, and of course as soon as they stepped outside they could be seen by the lenses peering down on their city from the sky and from space, and by the eyes of militants, and of informers, who might be anyone, everyone.

One previously private function they now had to perform in public was the emptying of their bowels, for without piped water the toilets in Saeed and Nadia’s building no longer worked. Residents had dug two deep trenches in the small courtyard in the back, one for men and one for women, separated by a heavy sheet on a clothesline, and it was there that all had to squat to relieve themselves, under the clouds, ignoring the stench, face to the ground so that even if the act could be viewed, the identity of the actor might be kept somewhat to oneself.

Nadia’s lemon tree did not recover, despite repeated watering, and it sat lifeless on their balcony, clung to by a few desiccated leaves.

It might seem surprising that even in such circumstances Saeed’s and Nadia’s attitudes towards finding a way out were not entirely straightforward. Saeed desperately wanted to leave his city, in a sense he always had, but in his imagination he had thought he would leave it only temporarily, intermittently, never once and for all, and this looming potential departure was altogether different, for he doubted he would come back, and the scattering of his extended family and his circle of friends and acquaintances, forever, struck him as deeply sad, as amounting to the loss of a home, no less, of his home.

Nadia was possibly even more feverishly keen to depart, and her nature was such that the prospect of something new, of change, was at its most basic level exciting to her. But she was haunted by worries too, revolving around dependence, worries that in going abroad and leaving their country she and Saeed and Saeed’s father might be at the mercy of strangers, subsistent on handouts, caged in pens like vermin.

Nadia had long 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, perhaps because his childhood had been more idyllic, or perhaps because this was simply his temperament. Both of them, though, whatever their misgivings, had no doubt that they would leave if given the chance. And so neither expected, when a handwritten note from the agent arrived, pushed under their apartment door one morning and telling them precisely where to be at precisely what time the following afternoon, that Saeed’s father would say, “You two must go, but I will not come.”

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SAEED AND NADIA SAID this was impossible, and explained, in case of misunderstanding, that there was no problem, that they had paid the agent for three passages and would all be leaving together, and Saeed’s father heard them out but would not be budged: they, he repeated, had to go, and he had to stay. Saeed threatened to carry his father over his shoulder if he needed to, and he had never spoken to his father in this way, and his father took him aside, for he could see the pain he was causing his son, and when Saeed asked why his father was doing this, what could possibly make him want to stay, Saeed’s father said, “Your mother is here.”