Mohsin Hamid - How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

You are relieved. A hurdle has been crossed and the negotiation can now begin. But you pretend otherwise.

“Sir,” you say, “we meet the conditions…”

“Have you previously been a municipal vendor?”

“We’ve been in the water business almost twenty years.”

“Have you previously been a municipal vendor?”

“No.”

“Are you authorized to be a municipal vendor?”

“Not yet.”

“No.” He propels a perfect smoke ring with an unhurried flick of his jaw.

“All your requirements have been satisfied.”

“All our quantifiable requirements. It is my duty to ensure our unquantifiable requirements are also met. Reputational requirements, for example.”

“Our reputation is that we’re friendly.”

“Good.”

You observe him. He is nearer sixty than fifty, and so less than a decade your senior, but with the velvet-cushion newborn grip of a man who has eschewed not merely manual labor and racket sports but even carrying his own briefcase.

He directs, with a tap of his finger, your attention to the piece of paper between you. These days, regrettably, it is difficult to know when a conversation is being recorded. He prefers to keep impropriety inaudible. You make a show of pausing in consideration before inscribing a sum you feign is impressive. The bureaucrat rejects it with a curt shake of his head, scribbling a vastly greater, but reduced, figure. You feel a glow of satisfaction. In not dismissing you out of hand he has slid off his viceroy’s throne and into a salesman’s stall. You are his buyer, and though you must not squeeze, you have him by his enormous, greedy, and extremely useful balls. You haggle, but magnanimously.

The bureaucrat cannot, however, act without the approval of his political masters, and therefore, the following week, after another meeting with you to fill in the specifics of your arrangement, he dispatches you to the home of a politician familiar to you from TV and newspapers. You are driven by your driver in your hulking and only slightly secondhand luxury SUV. Positioned beside him is a uniformed guard normally employed by you to open and shut the gate of your house. You sit in the back, ostensibly browsing e-mails on your computer, hoping to make a substantial impression.

Fears of terrorism have led the politician to take measures to secure his residence, strong-arming his neighbors into selling him their properties, erecting a razor-wire-topped boundary wall far in excess of permissible heights, and placing illegal barricades at either end of the street. Police officers mill about on foot, and a heavily armed rapid-response unit idles in a pickup truck, ready to accompany him on the move. You are allowed to proceed, but without your vehicle and retainers, much to your disappointment, and you are frisked twice on your way in.

The politician’s working environment is structured in the manner of the courts of princes of old, namely with one set of waiting rooms for commoners, another for those of rank, and an inner sanctum occupied by him and a contingent of his advisers. Your transaction is conducted simultaneously with multiple unrelated strands of endeavor, some public, some personal, and some apparently without purpose, or rather with no purpose other than amusement. An extended lunch is under way, and so everything happens to the sounds of chewing and with repeated gestures that look like multi-fingered snaps but are in reality attempts to dislodge grease, rice, and bits of edible residue without the use of water or tissues. None of this surprises you or throws you off, the bureaucrat having prepared you well, and in any case your dominant feeling is one of achievement at being with people of such importance.

Your deal is concluded in an uncomplicated, if seemingly whimsical, fashion, the politician asking one of his henchmen for an opinion with a laugh and raised eyebrow, much as he might ask him to assess the desirability of a mid-priced prostitute. A number is thrown out. This is accepted by you with obsequious murmurs and bows of the head, precisely as you have been instructed to do by the bureaucrat. And that is that.

As you drive off, under a beautiful, orange, polluted sky, riding high in your SUV above lesser hatchbacks and motorcycles, you start to hum, only the presence of your employees preventing you from bursting into full-blown song. What a long way you have come. Your offices loom ahead, the entire second floor of a centrally located emporium, atop a bustling array of shops. Security men and parking attendants salute you, elevator doors spring apart for your arrival, and your nods to a select few of your managers, as you stride by their desks, spark a buzz of chatter. Yes, your meeting was a success.

Your son is delivering an address on the lawn when you get home. It is twilight, a moment adored by mosquitoes, and he wears shorts and a T-shirt, the sight of his bare brown flesh worrying you until he runs over and into your arms, granting you the pleasure of lifting his solid little form, his vertebrae clicking softly as gravity tugs them apart, and sniffing on his skin the synthetic lemon-lime aroma of insect repellent. Your son is a big-cheeked, bowl-haircut-sporting, navel-high orator, and this evening he has assembled about him not just his nanny but the cook and bearer as well, all of whom become markedly more formal in your presence. The boy is subjecting them to a political speech modeled after one he must have seen on TV.

“When I am your leader…”

You watch and listen, wishing as always that you had more time with him, that you could take him with you to work or, even better, stay here with him and his toys, and also thinking of your parents, realizing that they must have experienced, half a century ago, the same emotions you feel now, except in their case with more trepidation, for while disease or violence could of course strike down your son, the probability of his early death has, through your attainments, been reduced dramatically.

Interrupting his performance, you charge at him with a roar. He flees into the house, squealing, and you yell that you will eat him up, but you quieten as you pass inside, parked cars on your street having alerted you to an ongoing meeting. Your wife sits with a dozen other women, their heads covered and in several cases their faces too, engaged in heated debate. Your greeting elicits a verbal response from her, but her eyes rest upon your son, and it is he alone she favors with a smile as the two of you proceed upstairs, followed, scooter in hand, by his nanny. The conversation around your wife subsides at this sudden claim on her attention, but resumes with equal vigor when she tilts her head and gestures to her collaborators with upraised palms, as though marshalling some unseen but weighty force, or communicating a deep and shared sense of exasperation, or otherwise supporting a pair of invisible breasts.

It has been five years, the age of your son, since you last entered your wife’s body. Intercourse between you had already been infrequent, and only a lucky roll of the biological dice explains why she conceived so quickly after completing her studies and removing her contraceptive coil. Childbirth, however, was less easy. A severe third-degree perineal tear damaged your wife’s anal sphincter. With reconstructive surgery and endless hours of physiotherapy, she defeated the resulting incontinence, and she is now free of the diapers she was forced to wear, galling for a woman so young. But you were almost entirely absent from this process, clumsily semi-aware, at best, of the details of her condition. Consumed by your work, made hesitant by your upbringing and gender, and in any case pining for that other woman beyond your reach, you readily paid for whatever needed paying for, but did no more.