Summary
In Chapter 11, Changez says he returns to New York and quits his job at Underwood Samson. He feels refreshed at finally reaching a clear awareness of the imperial wrongdoings of the US and how he has served it as a kind of mercenary. However, at the same time, he feels regret about the life that he is leaving behind in quitting.
He visits the clinic after not hearing back from Erica and learns from the nurse that she has disappeared. He visits Erica's parents, who give him the manuscript of her novel. He reads it and finds that it is a simple, straightforward story of a girl making her way alone on an island—nothing like the kind of complex, bereaved autobiographical writing, likely about Chris, that Changez expected. In his remaining time in New York before returning to Pakistan, he throws himself headlong into feelings of frustration with the political climate. Around this time in his conversation with the American man, they are about to leave the market where they had dinner.
Just outside the airport, Changez leaves his jacket as a token in Erica's memory; he feels exasperated bemusement when he sees from inside the airport that this unattended jacket triggered a security alarm.
In Chapter 12, Changez leaves with the American man, who has become highly suspicious of many things going on around them, to head back to the latter's hotel. Changez tells him of how back in Pakistan he still thinks of Erica often and after getting a post as a university lecturer he has advocated for Pakistan's disengagement from the US. At one point, he went on TV and spoke out against Pakistan working with the US, which gained him great notoriety as an anti-American critic.
His activities attracted many politically minded students who came to ask him for advice, both personal and political. Eventually his outspoken political position made him feel that an assassin might be sent for him.
As he and the American man near the hotel, some people who have been following them begin to approach, and Changez admits that it is their waiter from the restaurant. The men running towards them seem to be signaling for Changez to detain the American. The American starts to take something metallic out of his jacket, and then the story ends, uncertain as to what happens next.
Analysis
These two final chapters act as a climax and epilogue to Changez's change of consciousness in the previous two chapters. Leaving Underwood Samson and the U.S., and not knowing Erica's exact whereabouts, Changez finds a place for himself speaking out against American imperialist policies in Pakistan. In this changed situation, Changez's basic personality remains essentially the same—polite but principled—as the removal from his American life that he had voluntarily chosen turns, without his own planning, into a confrontation with America that has in fact been framing the entire story all along.
Although the suspense of his walk back to the hotel with the American man, with uncannily familiar faces following them and the threatening pistol-like sound of a car's engine backfiring, seems to turn the story into a thriller, or a detective story that one should be able to solve to an unequivocal answer, the power of the storytelling reveals itself specifically in its ambiguity.
This ambiguity is, as it has built up over the course of the novel, represented mainly through Changez's polite but crafty way of speaking. The most prominent example of this agnostic tarrying with opposite possibilities is when he tells the American man, "Yes, those men are now rather close, and yes, the expression on the face of that one—what a coincidence; it is our waiter; he has offered me a nod of recognition—is rather grim. But they mean you no harm, I assure you. It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins" (183).
One should be able to agree with this anti-discriminatory statement in general, but that would not make any sense out of the present situation that the writer leaves us with at the end of the novel in which the reader, just like the American man, seems confronted in a moment seemingly outside of time (and actually outside of the novel) by a decision about who the narrator has been all along. However, the problem of identity cuts both ways: it could be that Changez is acting in self-defense against a man who has been sent to kill him.
Whichever it is, we can observe that throughout the novel, a strong rapport between the two presumed enemies—whether sincere or deceptive on either or both of their parts—has defined their relationship and the evening they spent together. Hamid leaves the reader more or less agnostic about what the actual situation is, though he has to argue against, and is able to play with, the typical expectations of an American reader, who would indeed assume that Changez may be deceptive and dangerous and would not think about whether his American interlocutor was in fact the one intending harm.
