Mohsin Hamid - How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

In person you sometimes appear timid, hesitant, though whether this change is due to your economic misfortune or the decline in your health, it is impossible to say. You have encountered the reality that with age things are snatched from a man, often suddenly and without warning. You do not rent a home for yourself or buy a secondhand car. Instead you remain in your hotel, with few possessions, no more than might fit in a single piece of luggage. This suits you. Having less means having less to anesthetize you to your life.

Near the hotel is an internet cafe. You walk there now, slowly. Because you are easily winded and must pause to rest, you carry the ultra-light shaft of plastic and metal your doctor refers to, perhaps nostalgically, as a cane. You have spent more time on this earth than have all three of the young technicians who work in the cafe combined. Their T-shirts and tattoos and stylized whiskers are symbols of a clan with which you are unfamiliar. They are not pleased to see you. But their leader, a youth with a notch razored into his brow, at least rises with a semblance of respect.

“If you wouldn’t mind helping me again,” you say.

He nods. “Number five.”

His manner is brusque, but he is thorough as he ensures you are set up and ready to proceed. You are seated in a cubicle, on a chair of firm yet comfortable mesh. In front of you is a flat monitor with a readout of time utilized and money owed. Invisible below the surface of your desk, but touchable with your feet, is a shin-tall computer from which you carefully pivot away lest you do some harm. Though small, these cubicles have partitions higher than those in your late firm’s offices, designed to afford users a maximum of privacy. The cafe is dark, with no active source of illumination other than its screens, and smells vaguely of women’s hair spray, sweat, and semen.

Your son materializes before you at an angle suggesting you are looking down at him from above. You sit straighter, unconsciously trying to raise your head to a height from which this perspective would be normal, but it has no effect on your sense of slight disorientation. You do not know what to do with your hands, so you grip the armrests of your chair. Your son freezes, pixelates, and then, flowing again, speaks.

“Dad.”

“My boy.”

He is in his apartment, a warehouse of a room sparsely furnished with reappropriated building materials, his dining table two stacks of cinder blocks supporting a horizontal door with hinges intact. Outside his windows it is night. He inquires concernedly after your health, you reassure him that all is well, and you chat about politics, the economy, his cousins. He has been unable to visit you because his visa status is linked to a long-standing asylum petition. A trip home would undermine his claim that he is in danger.

“Have you spoken to your mother?” you ask.

“No. Not in a while.”

“You should. She misses you.”

“I’m sure she does, in her way.”

Your son’s friend passes behind him, shirtless, unshaven, sleepy. The friend is brushing his teeth, preparing for bed. He waves to you and you lift a palm in reply. Your son smiles, half turns to his friend, voices something inaudible, and redirects himself to the camera of his computer.

“It’s getting late,” he says apologetically.

“Yes, don’t let me keep you.”

“When’s your next doctor’s visit?”

“Today.”

“Promise to text me how it goes.”

You say you will. The sticky headphones on your ears emit an aquatic plop and your son’s image disappears as though it has been sucked down a hole the size of a single pixel in the center of your screen. Where before there were brightness and movement there is now only stillness, save for the time and money counters ticking along in a corner. You settle your bill and pass on.

At this moment the pretty girl is also scrutinizing a computer, reviewing with her assistant the month’s sales figures, which make for somber reading. Tonight she too will journey to a hospital, though of course presently she does not know it.

“It’s shaping into quite a drop,” she says. She smiles tightly. “I hope you’re ready for the bounce.”

“More than ready,” her assistant says.

She considers. “Doesn’t look like we have a choice.”

“No.”

“Fine. Cancel the spring procurement trip.”

The two of them are silent.

“There’s always the fall,” her assistant says.

The pretty girl nods. “Yes. There’s always that.”

She leaves her furniture boutique at her customary hour, five o’clock, her driver making haste to beat the traffic, though his efforts must contest with dug-up roads. The pretty girl peers out her window at recurring series of slender pits. Cabling is going in, seemingly everywhere, mysterious cabling, black- or gray- or orange-clad, snaking endlessly off spools into the warm, sandy soil. She wonders what on earth it binds together.

It is her assistant’s job to close the boutique, later that evening, and her assistant has done so, and is supervising the manager’s counting of the day’s take, in preparation for placing it overnight in the safe, when a brick is thrown beneath half-lowered steel shutters to smash the glass shop door. The pretty girl’s assistant hears this in a small office out back and sees, in crisp monochrome, on a CCTV display, three armed men enter, their faces partially concealed. Instinctively, she activates a silent alarm, locks the money away, and spins the combination wheel, all to the horror of the manager, who now fears getting out of this situation alive.

The armed men appear to know an alarm has been triggered, and perhaps as a result their leader makes as if to shoot the manager through the forehead without a word. But he thinks better of it and tells the pretty girl’s assistant to open the safe. When, out of confusion rather than bravery, she hesitates, he hits her on the temple with the butt of his rifle, not too forcefully, given her age and gender, but firmly enough to knock her to the floor. She rises and complies. The armed men pocket the money. In total, the robbery lasts no longer than five minutes. Private guards arrive in nine, the pretty girl in twenty-two, and the police in thirty-eight.

As a precaution, due to the blow her assistant has received, the pretty girl brings her to an emergency room. She puts her hand on her assistant’s in the car, holds her fingers gently, the less elderly woman stunned and staring straight ahead, mostly unspeaking. A harried nurse glances at the pretty girl’s assistant, says it is a bruise, nothing more, suggests an ice pack and some analgesics, and sends them on their way. During the drive home, her assistant complains of dizziness and nausea. The pretty girl takes her back to the hospital, her assistant convulses and loses consciousness in transit, and when a doctor pries open her eyelids and shines a torch at her pupils she is already past revival and soon dead.

It is on this evening that the pretty girl’s forty-year affair with her adopted metropolis comes to an end, though she does not leave right away. Time passes as her decision gathers within her. She must also sell her shop and conclude certain practical matters. But something has changed, and her direction is not in doubt. She will sit alone in her living room, gazing out through bars at the night, at the lights of aircraft ascending in the sky, and feel a tug, of what she cannot say, no, not exactly, only that it pulls her with soft finality, and that it emanates from the city of her birth.

I SUPPOSE I SHOULD CONSIDER AT THIS STAGE CONFESSING to certain false pretenses, to certain subterfuges that may have been perpetrated here, certain of-hands that may have been, um, sleighted. But I won’t. Not just yet. Though filthy richness is admittedly gone from your grasp, this book is going to maintain a little longer its innocence, or at least the non-justiciability of its guilt, and continue offering, through economic advice, help to two selves, one of them yours, the other mine.