Nadia and Saeed, too, discussed these rumors and dismissed them. But every morning, when she woke, Nadia looked over at her front door, and at the doors to her bathroom, her closet, her terrace. Every morning, in his room, Saeed did much the same. All their doors remained simple doors, on/off switches in the flow between two adjacent places, binarily either open or closed, but each of their doors, regarded thus with a twinge of irrational possibility, became partially animate as well, an object with a subtle power to mock, to mock the desires of those who desired to go far away, whispering silently from its door frame that such dreams were the dreams of fools. – Exit West (73), Mohsin Hamid
Hamid writes this passage with no small amount of foreshadowing for what happens later in the novel, with Nadia and Saeed’s use of the teleportation doors to move from their war-torn homeland. Although the protagonists dismiss the doors’ capabilities, they are also hopeful while defeatist. Hamid creates this mood through asyndeton, sentence structure, and personification. First, the asyndeton of “her bathroom, her closet, her terrace” conveys that Nadia looks at her doors every morning in a hurried fashion — she is almost desperately hopeful. For Saeed, this feeling is similar, and when the doors remain simple doors, their hopes are dashed. The parallelism for Nadia and Saeed’s actions explain their relationship as one of “star-crossed lovers,” connected to each other by an invisible thread even when apart. The hurried and desperate mood is further developed by the length and commas used in the last sentence in the paragraph. Hamid’s point is that this process is continual and daily. Finally, the personification of the door contributes to the complex mood of the passage. The door whispers “silently,” telling Nadia and Saeed that the doors could never bring them out of the misery they currently experience. Ending the paragraph on such a somber note combines any possibility of hope that the doors can be liberating with an attitude of defeat. In the context of the book as a whole, the paragraph situates the despair of the current situation while also invoking the mechanism by which Nadia and Saeed leave the city.