Mohsin Hamid - How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

It is said that in this hotel foreign women swim publicly in states of near nakedness and chic bars serve imported alcohol. You see no sign of such things, maybe because you halt in the lobby, or maybe because in your excitement you are focused on locating the pretty girl. She walks towards you now, high on her wedges, smiling coolly, her hair almost as close-cropped as yours.

She is a visitor to your city, having moved several years ago to an even larger megalopolis on the coast. Her modeling career has plateaued, or perhaps peaked is a better word, since even though the rates she commands remain good, her assignments are declining rapidly in frequency. She is trying therefore to transition to television, and has become a minor actress, minor for the reason that her acting is poor, with credits consisting mainly of bit parts in dramas and comedies. She could not normally stay at this hotel on a personal trip, but occupancy after the bombing has been so low that she secured a discount of fifty percent.

She kisses you on the cheek and observes you closely as she leads you to the restaurant. She notices, yes, that you are uncomfortable in your newly purchased and over-the-top attire, but also, conversely, that you are no longer uncomfortable in your own skin, there being something more mature about you, a sense of confidence, even of mastery, which you have added along with a few pounds and the odd fleck of gray. You seem to her properly a man, not a boy, although pleasingly your eyes have retained their animation, which of course she cannot know, even if she does suspect, owes a great deal to being at this moment in her presence.

You are seated by the headwaiter, who recognizes her and selects a table that maintains a pretense of being out of the way while ensuring she will be widely seen. He is rewarded with a nod from the pretty girl, and he unfolds your napkins personally, handing her hers with a slight bow, not presuming, as he does with yours, the right to place it in her lap.

“You look good,” she says to you.

“So do you.”

Indeed she does. As with the sun, you have always found it difficult to gaze upon her directly, but tonight you control your instinct to glance away, attempting instead to balance on that crumbly ledge between staring and shiftiness. What you see is a woman little changed by the years, not, obviously, because this is true, your first meeting having been half your lifetimes ago, but rather because your image of her is not entirely determined by her physical reality.

Tonight she wears a yellow spaghetti-strapped top that accents her collarbones and the knuckled indentation of her sternum, along with a single bangle of polished mahogany. A shawl covers the rim of her bag, and she reaches below it to retrieve a bottle of red wine, which she twists open with a sound like the snapping of a twig. You note a hint of uncertainty in her expression, and then it is gone.

“Have you been here before?” she asks.

“No, it’s my first time.”

She smiles. “So?”

“It’s unbelievable.”

“I remember my first time. The knives were so heavy, I thought they were silver. I stole one.”

“Are they really silver?”

She laughs. “No.”

“What else have you seen like that, amazing things regular people don’t get to see?”

She pauses, surprised by the stance of your question, the almost-forgotten, for her, terrain of wonder and lowliness it squats upon.

“Snow,” she says, grinning.

“You’ve seen snow?”

She nods. “In the mountains. It’s like magic. Like powdered hailstones.”

“Like what’s inside a freezer.”

“When it’s on the ground. When it’s falling, it’s like feathers.”

“Soft?”

“Soft. But it gets wet. If you walk around in it, it hurts.”

You envision her sauntering through a white valley, a mansion in the distance. The headwaiter returns and ties a striped cloth around your bottle, discreetly hiding all but its neck from view.

“What about you?” she asks, refilling your glasses. “What is this business of yours, exactly?”

“Bottled water.”

“You deliver it?”

“That too. I make it.”

“How?”

You tell her, nonchalantly, omitting mention of the many wrinkles, such as incessant natural gas shortages or long periods when the water pressure is too low and your pump screams idly, unable to fill your storage tank.

“That’s brilliant,” she says, shaking her head. “And people actually buy it? Just like you were one of the big companies?”

“Just like that.”

“You’re a genius.”

“No.” You smile.

“At school everybody always said you were a genius.”

“You weren’t there often.”

“I went for long enough.”

You take a drink. “Did you stay in touch with anyone?”

“No.”

“Not even your parents?”

“No. They died.”

“I know. Mine too. I meant before that.”

“Some messages. From them, and later, when I started coming on TV, from relatives. Mostly abuse. Or asking for money.”

“So it’s just been me.”

“Just you.” She rests her long fingers on the back of your hand.

You have sampled alcohol only twice before, and never to the point of being drunk, so this sensation of flushed, relaxed glibness is new to you. The two of you eat and chat, occasionally guffawing at volumes disturbing to your fellow diners. Warmth and a craving, a consciousness of your proximity, build within you. But your meal is over too soon, as is the wine, and you are steeling yourself for the evening to end when she says, “I have another bottle in my room. Do you want to come up?”

“Yes.”

She tells you the number and asks you to wait a few minutes before joining her. You are confused how to get there exactly, and reluctant to attract the attention of security by asking for directions, but you reason that you must take the elevator, and from there you are able to follow signs in the halls. She opens her door when you knock, brings you inside, and kisses you hard on the mouth.

“I don’t have another bottle,” she says.

“That’s all right.”

You hold her, encompassing this familiar, unfamiliar woman, feeling her breathe, tasting the place her words are born. You caress her as you strip her naked. You smooth the curve of her hip, of her jaw. You cradle her pelvis with your palm. No, you are not strangers. You are where you should be, finally, and so you linger.

Sex with you seems transgressive, which heightens her desire, although she is too preoccupied fully to enjoy the act. There is a whiff of home about you, emotionally, but also physically, in for example your lack of deodorant, and for her home carries with it connotations of sorrow and brutality, connotations that elicit signals from her to you to be punishing, but these you misinterpret, and so they remain unacted upon.

She is passing through a fragile period. Gravity has begun to tug at the arc of her career, and for the first time she earned a fraction last year of what she did the previous. She is aware that her future is shaky, that she could well end up impoverished, aged, and solitary, an elderly lady in a single room, buying rice and flour in bulk once a season, or, no less frightening, the wife of some cocaine-snorting man-child too chronically insecure to appear in his father’s head office much earlier than eleven or to stay much later than three, prone to picking up teenage girls at parties in his muscular European limousine and to sobbing unpredictably when drunk.

Lying nude beside you, a used condom on the carpet and a lit cigarette in her hand, she strokes your hair tenderly as you doze. She does not let you spend the night, however. You ask when you will see her next and she is not dishonest, saying she does not know, but to your voiced hope that it be soon, she makes no reply. Afterwards she reclines alone in bed, recalling the comforting sensation of your figures pressed together. She imagines what a relationship with you might be like, whether you could possibly mix with her colleagues and acquaintances in the great city by the sea. She wonders also, as she inhales with shut eyes, the burrowing-termite crackle of paper and tobacco audible, if there will ever arrive a day she is not repelled by the notion of binding herself permanently to a man.