Portals of War and Peace

A WRITER'S WIT
Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?
​Karen Armstrong
​Born November 14, 1944

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Larry Towell / Magnum

​November 14, 2016, Mohsin Hamid, “Of Windows and Doors”: Saeed and Nadia, a young unmarried couple, seek to escape their war-torn city. ¶ Hamid’s elegant prose and subtle omniscience take the reader inside the war of collateral damage. Both have lost family and friends. As the title suggests, both windows and doors figure importantly. Windows, once broken out by bombs or bullets, are really not capable of being resealed, but people attempt to do so with bookshelves, mattresses, or packaging tape and cardboard. 

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“A window was the border through which death was possibly likeliest to come. Windows could not stop even the most flagging round of ammunition: any spot indoors with a view of the outside was a spot potentially in the crossfire” (71).

Doors, too, alter in their significance, become a means of escape
​. . . or doom, life or death: 

“Nadia, who had not considered the order of their departure until that moment, and realized that there were risks to each, to going first and to going second, did not argue but approached the door, and drawing close she was struck by its darkness, its opacity, the way that it did not reveal what was on the other side and also did not reflect what was on this side, and so felt equally like a beginning and an end, and she turned to Saeed and found him staring at her, and his face was full of worry and sorrow, and she took his hands in hers and held them tight, and then, releasing them, and without a word, she stepped through” (76-7).

The story limns not only all wars but specifically the war that threatens one the most, the war happening where one lives now. Hamid’s novel, Exit West, comes out in March 2017.
Photography by Larry Towell/Magnum.

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