Mohsin Hamid - How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

As luck would have it, this advice is unaffected by the loss of your wealth, since it applies to those of modest means too. And the advice is this. Focus on the fundamentals. Blow through the fluff, see the forest for the trees, prioritize what’s core to your operation. Right now, in your case, that means cutting costs to the bone.

You have done so admirably well. At the two-star hotel that is your residence, you have negotiated a long-term, month-by-month room rental for less than half the standard rate, taking full advantage of both your willingness to pay cash and the fact that you once gave a job to the hotel manager’s late father, who described you with undying, referring of course to the sentiment, not the man, veneration. You also eat sparingly, your metabolism having slowed enough for you to make do with a single meal a day, you scrimp on transportation by using taxis instead of bearing the expense of owning and operating a car, and you avoid being saddled with hefty phone bills by conducting your weekly conversations with your son from an internet cafe. Thus the majority of your limited savings remains untouched, available for doctor’s visits, tests, and medications, and it seems not improbable that in the race between death and destitution, you can look forward to the former emerging victorious.

Your one indulgence is the serving of tea and biscuits you provide to your supplicants, without fail, in the cramped lobby of your hotel. The building itself is perhaps ten years in age, though it could equally easily be thirty, pressed between two other structures of similarly four-storied height, malnourished width, and indeterminate date of construction, on what was formerly an access road to a quiet market but now lies within the ever-expanding boundaries of a bustling and amorphously amoeba-shaped zone of commerce. Nearby, animals are slaughtered, pastries baked, high-fidelity speaker crossovers tweaked, fake imported cigarettes distributed, and blast-resistant window film retailed, the last with promises of free installation, a not insignificant plus, given that precise and labor-intensive squeegeeing is needed to expel unsightly air bubbles.

The clansmen who come to you are often, but not always, recently arrived from their villages, unskilled or semi-skilled hands in search of jobs in construction or transport or domestic service, and so they look around at the worn common areas of your hotel with awe, taking the mechanical door and steel buttons of its non-functional elevator and the daintiness of its teacups and saucers as confirmation that you are, as they have been told, an important man, an impression further reinforced by the fine tailoring of your clothes and the distinguished bearing that you, despite your age and setbacks, have mostly managed to retain. You help them as best you can, making calls, putting in a good word, and answering in painstaking detail their many questions.

But not all of your supplicants are rural youngsters. Some are city boys, first generation, as you once were, or second, with jaunty haircuts and savvy, quick-moving faces. Others are older, professionals, managers even, on occasion dressed in suit and tie. For these more urbane callers your abode is something of a disappointment, but their misgivings usually abate in conversation, when it becomes clear you are a man who speaks knowledgeably, and a generous listener too, albeit one slightly hard of hearing. They are eager to mine your network of business and government contacts, a diminishing vein you are nonetheless content to prospect on their behalf, and it is not altogether infrequent that you turn up a nugget of assistance.

You accept no financial reward for your contributions, no placement fees or referral tokens, nor do you hunger after the expressions of gratitude bestowed upon you. Your motivations stem from different sources, from lingering desires to connect and to be of use, from the need to fill a few of the long hours of the week, and from curiosity about the world beyond, about the comings and goings and toings and froings of that great city outside your hotel, in which you have passed almost the entirety of your life, and of which you once knew so much.

You hear reports that the water table continues to drop, the thirst of many millions driving bore after steel bore deeper and deeper into the aquifer, to fill countless leaky pipes and seepy, unlined channels, phenomena with which you are intimately familiar and from which you have profited, but which are now contributing in places to a noticeable desiccation of the soil, to a transformation of moist, fertile, hybrid mud into cracked, parched, pure land. Meanwhile similar attempts, both official and non, seem to be under way to try to desiccate society itself, through among other things creeping restrictions on festivals and the public pursuit of fun, with a similar result, cracks, those widening fissures evident between young people, who appear to you divided as never before, split into myriad, incomprehensible tribes, signaling their affiliations with an automobile sticker, a bare shoulder, or some arcane permutation in the possibilities for facial hair.

You often do not know, when you venture forth into the streets on your errands, who among them stands for what. Nor is it at all clear to you that they themselves, beneath the poses they strike, really know what they stand for either, any more than you did at their age. But what you do sense, what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth afforded by ubiquitous television, and partly of the change in mentality that results from an outward shift in the supply curve for firearms. At times, watching the stares that follow a luxury SUV as it muscles its way down a narrow road, you are nearly relieved to have been already separated from your fortune.

If, while I write, I can’t be certain that you have had no inkling of your proximity to the pretty girl, still it stands to reason that this should be true. She resides about thirty minutes from your hotel as the crow flies, but since the urban crow tends to fly circuitously, and with many pauses, she may not be that far, or she may be much farther. She owns a small townhouse, of which she is landlady, renting her two spare rooms at below-market rates to a pair of women, one a singer, the other an actress, early in their careers and neither quite yet a success. Between her savings and this rental income, the pretty girl gets by.

Perhaps because of a persistent twinge in her hip, she ventures out less than she formerly did. She leaves most household chores to her factotum, a diminutive, middle-aged man who cooks, drives, shops, and occupies a servant quarter next to her kitchen. She does however make a daily round of her favorite park, walking slowly but erectly, in the evenings during summer and fall, and in the mornings during winter and spring, when she particularly enjoys observing the youthful lovers who gather there for hurried, furtive liaisons before they report to class or to work.

At home she watches movies and, especially, listens to the radio, often turning the volume high enough that it amuses her tenants, who might take a break from their busy lives to chat with her for a few moments as she nods her head to the beat and puffs along on her cigarette. Sometimes one of them will share with her their latest work, a video clip or demo of a song, but this is rare. She is never invited to a set or a studio. Her townhouse is at the end of a cul-de-sac, and from her upstairs lounge she can see all the way down her street, past a stretch of shops and restaurants, to a telecommunications center from which red and white masts soar mightily, towering above satellite dishes, like electromagnetic spars built to navigate the clouds. She bought her place for its view.