After strange incidents with the flow of time, the narrator performs an experiment to discover how the brain works and why memories disappear if air runs out. In “Exhalation,” each person uses two lungfuls of air each day and refills them directly from an underground reservoir. Fuwaad fails to change events, but this knowledge changes him. As he weeps, a young woman approaches with a message from Najya: “while her life was short, it was made happy by the time she spent with you” (34). He hopes to affect events, but his caravan is delayed and he reaches Baghdad after the accident. While he travelled, she died in a mosque wall collapse. At that time, he and his beloved wife Najya had argued about his participation in the slave trade. Raniya teaches the young Hassan the bedroom skills he will use to woo her on their wedding night.īased on these stories, Fuwaad goes through the Gate in Cairo, then travels to the Baghdad of his youth. Raniya and her future self return with duplicates of the necklace, convincing the thieves that the necklace design is common and saving Hassan’s life. She overhears thieves discussing it and realizes the treasure he found belonged to them. She finds the young Hassan selling a necklace she recognizes. In “The Tale of the Wife and Her Lover,” Hassan’s wife, Raniya, decides to step back through the Gate of Years to experience youthful passion again. The couple pledges to pay back their benefactor, but scrimping for decades eventually embitters them. When Taahira is kidnapped, Ajib uses the remaining money to ransom her. Ajib steals it and begins a life of luxury with his new wife, Taahira.

In “The Tale of the Weaver Who Stole from Himself,” Ajib is shocked to learn that his older self lives shabbily and hoards his money.

Hassan uses the money to live a long and virtuous life.

The older Hassan tells the younger to dig under a specific tree, where he finds treasure. In “The Tale of the Fortunate Rope-Maker,” the young Hassan travels forward to meet his wealthy older self, who gives him advice. In “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” Bashaarat tells the cloth merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas three stories about his invention, a Gate of Years in Cairo that allows someone to step back or forward twenty years. The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Chiang, Ted.

Exhalation stories by ted chiang