Mohsin Hamid - How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

The website in question is registered in another city, to the residential address of its owner, who like many, perhaps most, computer users has never concerned herself overmuch with such matters as firewalls, system updates, or anti-malware utilities. Accordingly, her laptop, sleek and high-end machine though it is, is simply teeming with digital fauna, much in the same manner as its keyboard is teeming with unseen bacteria and microorganisms, except that among its uninvited coded squatters is a military program that allows the machine’s built-in camera and microphone to be activated and monitored remotely, something no single-celled protozoan could likely pull off, transforming the laptop, in effect, into a covert surveillance device or, depending on the intent of the administrator of its monitoring software, into an originator of voyeuristic striptease and porn.

Currently, however, nothing so titillating seems to be in the offing. The computer sits open on a counter, and through its camera a woman can be seen by herself at a low table, finishing off a meal and a bottle of red wine. The pretty girl sits attentively, not looking at her hands or her food, but music is audible, and then conversation, and then a rainstorm, until it becomes obvious that she is watching a film. When it is over she turns off the lights and disappears from view. A running faucet can vaguely be heard. She emerges into her bedroom, visible through its open doorway, wearing pajamas and cleansing her face with a series of round cotton pads and liquid from a transparent vial. She shuts her bedroom door, locking it, the sound of a sliding bolt registering on her laptop’s microphone. A lamp is extinguished and the glow seeping out around her door frame comes to an end.

The following night the pretty girl arrives home late, dressed as though she has attended a party, in a high-necked, sleeveless top baring arms supple and veiny and strong. But the night after that the pretty girl is again alone, consuming a solitary meal with wine while watching a film, and on this third night she receives a phone call. The caller is a woman, easily identified as the pretty girl’s assistant, for the mobile she uses is linked to an e-mail account with messages chronicling her activities for the pretty girl’s boutique.

A recording of their conversation reveals a tone of warmth, these two clearly being not just colleagues but friends. They discuss a purchasing trip to a tropical country famed for its lush forests, its numerous islands, and its volcanic mountains, as well as, presumably, its furniture. From her laptop’s camera the pretty girl appears animated, excited, these trips abroad seeming to be something she looks forward to. Her assistant informs her that their visas have arrived, their flights and hotels are booked, and their local contacts are notified and ready. The names of restaurants are mentioned, and of a type of music they intend to see performed. Departure is only a week away.

The pretty girl smiles after their chat. Her laptop is angled away from her bedroom, so this evening her pre-sleep rituals cannot be seen. What can be seen are the steel bars on her windows, heavy in gauge and narrowly spaced, and a square motion sensor mounted high on her wall. Beneath it, near her front door, is a keypad belonging to her home alarm system. A light on the control panel goes from green to red, signaling that it is now armed. Perhaps this happens automatically, at a preprogrammed time. Or perhaps the pretty girl has activated it from a sister unit kept close at hand.

On the streets outside, a phone call reporting gunfire is being made to a police station. No one is immediately dispatched to investigate. Elsewhere a headless body missing the fingers of both hands will be recovered from a beach. Crime statistics will confirm that a significant number of prosperous residents are presently in the process of being burgled or robbed. Contact between extremes of wealth and poverty fuels such incidents, of course. But the organized underworld’s battles for turf overshadow any individual attempts at the armed redistribution of jewelry or mobile phones, and so, even in this most unequal city, the vast majority of tonight’s violence will be inflicted upon neighborhoods whose residents are reliably poor.

Paramilitary forces are deployed to prevent such battles from spilling over too easily into areas deemed vital to national security, the port, for example, or upscale housing enclaves, or those premier commercial avenues from which rise headquarters of major corporations and banks. Indeed a paramilitary checkpoint is, at this moment, in operation a stone’s throw from the towering headquarters of the bank that holds the accounts of the pretty girl, her boutique, and her assistant.

An examination of its records reveals that the pretty girl, while not swimming in cash, has a decent buffer set aside for a rainy day, and that the revenues of her boutique fluctuate but manage on average to stay ahead of expenses. Her assistant has a capped signing authority on the boutique’s account, indicative of a rare level of trust, and a respectable salary that has been raised steadily over the course of the decade and a half she has been in the pretty girl’s employ. Her assistant’s monthly payments of home utilities, and of rent, coupled with a complete absence of expenditure on children’s schooling, suggests she too may live alone, or perhaps with elderly parents, for her credit card also shows frequent medical costs, charges from a variety of doctors and diagnostic centers and hospitals, charges at times exceeding her wages, yet on a regular basis paid off in full by the pretty girl, with a direct transfer of the required amount from her personal account to that of her assistant.

Atop the bank’s skyscraping offices are blinking lights meant to ward off passing aircraft, lights that glow serenely, high above the city. Below, as seen through helipad security cameras, parts of the metropolis are in darkness, electricity shortages meaning that the illumination of entire areas is turned off on a rotating basis, usually but not always on the hour, and in these inky patches, at this late time, little can be seen, just the odd building with its own generator, the bright headlamp-lit artery of a main road, or, on a winding side street, so faint as possibly to be imagined, the red-tracer swerve of a lone motorcycle seeking to avoid some danger unknown.

A week later the city is a sun-drenched maze of beiges and dirty creams receding beneath a jetliner on which the pretty girl and her assistant are registered passengers as it climbs into the sky and heads out to sea. It is picked up by the radar of a warship in international waters, identified as a commercial flight posing no immediate threat, and then for the most part ignored, the naval vessel using its antennae to continue to sniff the pheromone-like emissions of electrons wafting from coastal military installations instead.

The jetliner rises through a bank of scattered clouds. At roughly the same altitude, albeit far inland, an experimental unmanned aerial vehicle cruises in the opposite direction. It is small and limited in range. Its chief advantages are its low cost, allowing it to be procured in large numbers, and its comparative quietness, permitting it to function unobtrusively. There are high hopes for its success in the export market, in particular among police forces and cash-strapped armies engaged in urban operations.

On the outskirts of the city over which this drone is today validating its performance parameters, a crowd is gathering at a graveyard. Two vehicles stand out among those parked nearby. One is a van, emblazoned with the name and phone number of a commercial spray painter, possibly even belonging to the deceased, for it is being used as a hearse to transport his white-shrouded body. The other is a luxury automobile from which emerges a pair of male figures in suits, a man in his sixties and a slender, teenage boy, perhaps his grandson. These two are conspicuously well dressed, contrasting with most of the other mourners, yet they must be closely related to the fellow who has died, since they lend their shoulders to the task of bearing his corpse to the fresh-dug pit. The elder of them now commences to sob, his torso flexing spasmodically, as though wracked by a series of coughs. He looks up to the heavens.