Mohsin Hamid - How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

You have used the contacts with retailers you forged during your years as a non-expired-labeled expired-goods salesman to enter the bottled-water trade. Your city’s neglected pipes are cracking, the contents of underground water mains and sewers mingling, with the result that taps in locales rich and poor alike disgorge liquids that, while for the most part clear and often odorless, reliably contain trace levels of feces and microorganisms capable of causing diarrhea, hepatitis, dysentery, and typhoid. Those less well-off among the citizenry harden their immune systems by drinking freely, sometimes suffering losses in the process, especially of their young and their frail. Those more well-off have switched to bottled water, which you and your two employees are eager to provide.

Your front room has been converted into a workshop-cum-storage depot. There, in sequence, are a pipe bringing in tap water, a proscribed donkey pump to augment the sputtering pressure from outside, a blue storage tank the size of a baby hippopotamus, a metal faucet, a lidded cooking pot, a gas-cylinder-fired burner to boil the water, which you do for five minutes as a general rule, a funnel with a cotton sieve to remove visible impurities, a pile of used but well-preserved mineral-water bottles recovered from restaurants, and, finally, a pair of simple machines that affix tamper-resistant caps and transparent safety wrapping atop your fraudulent product.

You are leaning over your technician as he conducts an experiment.

“It stinks,” you say.

He shrugs. “It’s fuel.”

“It’ll make our water smell like a motorcycle’s wet fart.”

He lowers the flame. “Now?”

“Too much soot. Turn it off.”

You look at the portable petrol stove he has borrowed, dull brass and round as the base of an artillery shell. A shortage of natural gas has yet again brought your operation to a standstill. Petrol, had it worked, might have been an affordable stopgap. But it has not worked. So you try to think of other options as you play with the thread around your neck, fingering the key to your bedroom, where sit your client list and register, a modest pile of cash, and an unlicensed revolver with four chambered rounds.

Your technician scratches his armpit pensively. “Maybe we skip the boiling today,” he suggests.

“No. We don’t boil, we don’t sell.” You know quality matters, especially for fakes. Shops would stop buying if their customers began falling sick.

Your technician does not question your decision. He is a bicycle mechanic by background, untrained in the nuances of business, which is why he works for you, and also because, as the father of a trio of little girls and the youngest son of a freelance bricklayer who died of exposure sleeping rough at too advanced an age, he values a steady income.

Were, uncharacteristically, your technician to press you to reconsider, you would likely respond by falling silent, waiting for the pause to grow uncomfortable enough for him to glance in your direction. You would then meet his gaze, holding his eyes until he flicked them floorward and increased the curvature of his spine, gestures which, among teams of humans as among packs of dogs, signify one mammal’s submissiveness to another. Mercifully, however, you probably would not sniff his anus or inspect his genitals.

Your runner arrives, announcing the good news that a nearby depot will be refilling gas cylinders for an hour later this afternoon, and also bringing with him the aroma of food, fried-bread lunch rolls sweating translucent their newspaper wrappings. The three of you eat together in fellowship, chatting among yourselves like siblings, which in a way you are, since these two are your clansmen, distant relatives bound by blood, and so yes, like siblings, except of course that when you tell these siblings to finish quickly, they must and do obey.

After the meal, you head to the depot to get in line. Your conveyance is a micro pickup truck older than you are, the side panels of its rear bed holed through in intricate, rusted filigree, but its noisy two-stroke engine rebuilt and reliable. You are at an intersection when your phone rings. Seeing who it is, you pull over, kill the motor, and answer.

“Are you free for dinner?” the pretty girl asks.

Her voice shifts your sense of place, rendering your immediate surroundings less substantial.

“Yes,” you say.

“You don’t need to know when?”

“Oh. When?”

“Tonight.”

You smile, hearing her smile. “Yes, I figured.”

“I’m in town. You can come to my hotel.”

That evening you get a haircut, opting for a buzz, which the barber claims is both the rage these days and guaranteed to flatter a man as fit as yourself. You purchase extravagantly priced tight jeans and a nylon jacket with the words “Man Meat” on the back from a boutique with impressive cars parked outside. At home you conclude the jeans are too short and you rush to swap them for a longer pair, but the assistant looks you over and, without pausing her online chat on the shop’s computer, refuses on the grounds that you have removed the tags.

You decide to wear them in any case, unfastening their top button, concealed beneath your belt, and pulling them lower on your hips. They squeeze up a small roll of your flesh, a mini-potbelly, and you wonder if it was a mistake to buy them. A fortnight’s wage outlay for two items of clothing does seem fiendishly unbalanced. But you are getting late, so now you must speed on to your rendezvous.

The hotel is the city’s most exclusive, its old wing temporarily closed and scaffolded since a massive truck bomb shattered windows and ignited fires inside, but its new wing, sitting farther from the street, already repainted and open for business.

After the attack, given the importance of the hotel as a meeting place for politicians and diplomats and businesspeople, and also because of its significance as the outpost of a leading international chain, a bridge with lofty, illuminated blue signage to the outside world, it was decided to push the city away, to make the hotel more of an island, insofar as that is possible in a densely packed metropolis such as this. Two lanes formerly intended for traffic have accordingly been appropriated on all sides. The outer of these is fenced with concrete bollards and filled with waist-high anti-vehicular steel barriers, like sharp-edged jacks from the toy room of some giant’s child, forming thereby a cross between a dry castle moat and a fortified beach meant to resist armored invasion. The inner lane, meanwhile, features gates, speed bumps, ground-mounted upward-looking CCTV cameras, and sandbag-reinforced wooden pillboxes the color of petunias.

Around this citadel, constricted and slow, traffic seethes. Bicyclists, motorcyclists, and drivers of vehicles with three wheels and four maneuver forward, sometimes bumping, sometimes honking, sometimes rolling down windows and cursing. Every so often their slow crawl gives way to a complete standstill as space is cleared for a bigwig to pass, and then looks of resignation, frustration, and not infrequently anger can be seen. It is from this snarled horde that, nearing the first checkpoint, you seek to detach yourself and enter.

The guard glances at your ride and asks what you want.

“I want to go inside,” you say.

“You? Why?”

“I’m meeting someone for dinner.”

“Really.”

He calls over his supervisor. The taillights of a sleek, gleaming chariot, bearing perhaps a senator or tribune or centurion, flash red as it navigates through the search stations ahead. The supervisor tells you to reverse. He is younger than you, shorter than you, and flimsier than you. But you bite down on your pride, flanked as you are by submachine guns, and plead with him. After a phone call to the pretty girl and a painstaking examination of your diminutive workhorse you are grudgingly permitted to proceed, but only to the secondary parking lot in the rear, from where you must walk.