Mohsin Hamid - How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Yet you have changed with the growth of your son. Medicalized, bloody, and enacted to the sound of screaming and the smell of disinfectant, his birth was like a death. It shook you. And, slowly, it unlocked forgotten capacities for feeling. Fatherhood has taught you the lesson that, even in middle age, love is practicable. It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past. And so, armed with this wisdom, you are attempting to woo your wife, to build a family on the strength of the bond that is your son, to win her joy and smiles and caresses, to entice her back to your side from her separate bed lying parallel to yours.

But when you began to turn to her again, to try to see her, as if for the first time, as an adult and a mother and indeed something wondrous, a warrior, striking in her maturing beauty and her indefatigable determination, and you sought to make conversation with her and to stroke her arm and her cheek and her thigh, you discovered your wife uninterested. She has never shouted at you in anger. In fact, she continues to exhibit a well-brought-up sympathy for your age, which, with your litany of minor ailments, ranging from your spine to your teeth to your knees, has started to seem further and further removed from her own. But she avoids discussions with you that are not practical in nature, finding troubling your attempts to engage in this manner, as though violative of the terms of your truce. The focus of her attention is elsewhere, on her son, and on her group of religiously-minded activists.

In their company, she conducts herself with a gravity that exceeds her years, enjoying an influential position despite the fact that many of them are her seniors. Her legal training and relative prosperity give her pertinent advantages, of course, but mostly it is her bearing, her self-sufficient fire and evident fearlessness, that others rally to, coupled with her disarming warmth, much sought-after and awarded only to a fortunate few.

You are aware, when she comes tonight, draped in her shawl, to read your son his bedtime story and put him to sleep, that you cling to him not just because of your feelings for the boy, which are powerful and true, but also because in this moment, with your arms around your child, you have something she wants, a precious sensation, and one you simultaneously desire to prolong while feeling sad, even ashamed, of engendering solely in this way.

Hoping it might positively impact your relations with your wife, some months ago you hired one of her brothers into your firm. He joined an already sizable band of kinfolk and clanspeople owing their paychecks to you, many without contributing notably to your enterprise. But from the outset his cleverness and education distinguished him from the others, so much so that you are considering grooming him as a potential deputy.

It is with him, after receiving from the bureaucrat your municipal vendor’s license and winning your first contract to augment the public water supply, that you travel to the coast to clear your equipment through customs. The two of you ride together to the airport. A new terminal sits across the runway from its predecessor, in what was formerly cropland but now lies within the ambit of the ring road, surrounded by housing developments, defense installations, slum-subsumed villages, golf courses, and the occasional hotly contested field, still free of construction and sprouting fronds of mustard, wheat, or corn.

Because of a hypertrophying middle class, bulging from the otherwise scrawny body of the population like a teenager’s overdeveloped bicep, there has been a surge in air traffic, demand the state carrier simply cannot meet. To get a flight at the time of your choosing you use one of several haphazardly regulated private operators. On board you find it difficult to ignore your jetliner’s probable military heritage, manifested among other things in its oddly shaped engine pods and rear-opening ramp, suitable perhaps for embarking howitzers or armored personnel carriers. You have always been fatalistic about flying, but as a father you dislike the idea of permanently leaving your son so soon, a possibility evoked in your imagination by juddering vibrations that roar through the fuselage as you ascend.

Your brother-in-law is visibly excited, pleased to be seated in business class and to be booked into a fancy hotel. He resembles your wife, albeit a plump, squat, mustachioed version of her. He is your wife compressed in height, expanded in depth and width, and masculinized, as though by a computer program in a science museum’s digital house of mirrors. He has the same pale complexion and sensuous mouth, the same verbal tics. Without being conscious of it, you have allowed yourself to become fond of him not for the content of his character but for the fidelity of his echo.

As you exit the baggage-claim area at the other end, a blast of hot briny air hits your face, thrilling you, as always, this place being in your estimation linked with money, with the big time. Around you is a crush of people more diverse than those you see at home, their languages more varied, their skin and lips and hair testifying to wider geographic swaths of evolution. They have been pulled to this colossal city by the commerce linked to its port, which straddles the shipping lanes binding rising Asia to Africa, Oceania, and beyond, and also by its gravity, the force exerted by its sheer mind-boggling size.

A limousine whisks you to your hotel, in a prestigious neighborhood, where cluster consulates and the offices of multinationals, united by colonial history and also by relatively easy access to naval evacuation should that be required. High in your room, you gaze out at the sea, mesmerizing to you, a man from the far-off plains, as you watch its fractured surface catch the light, scattered clouds repixelating its colors while speeding overhead. You nibble on tiny chocolates and an assortment of exotic berries, too delicate though to constitute much of a meal, and think, This must be success. In the distance you can make out the docks. There awaits your machinery.

At equal remove, but unknown to you, and in the opposite direction along the coast, is the residence of the pretty girl. She is sitting beside her lap pool, in the shade of a tree, wearing a fawn swimsuit and retro dark glasses while sipping a sugar-free cordial through a bendable straw. She has just returned from a journey through a series of peninsulas and archipelagos, the latest of the monthlong procurement trips she now embarks upon semi-annually, which typically require, for each week of travel, at least two in visa processing.

She and you reconnect on your visit, tangentially at least, through an executive who works in his family’s freight-forwarding business by day and is a fixture of the contemporary art and fashion scenes by night. In his office, as he tells you how lucky you are that your bureaucrat intervened with colleagues in customs to speed your goods through import inspections and minimize your demurrage charges, you see on his desk a photo of him at an award ceremony with a group of celebrities. You ask seemingly casually if he knows the pretty girl, and he says, why, yes, as a matter of fact he does.

Through him you learn, for she has not been on TV in some time, that she is well, and indeed busy, running a high-end home furnishings boutique, and also, since he has a keen eye for such things and knows at once your claim of being merely an old acquaintance is less than the entire truth, that she is the lover of a prominent and recently widowed architect.

For you these remarks bring her clearly into focus, even if that focus is a product only of memory and imagination, and you feel strongly, exactly what you are not sure, whether happiness or sadness or neither or both, but strongly, a breath-halting feeling, a sensation, like asthma, of being unable to empty your lungs. Her own response is not dissimilar, when, a few weeks later, the freight forwarder spies her at an afternoon seaside reception and glides up to her, eager to chat, certain she will be more than surprised at the name he is about to let slip, as by a gurgling fart during a passionate embrace.