Mohsin Hamid - How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

But the call you are waiting for does not come. And when you try calling the pretty girl, she does not answer.

Deflated, you go about the rest of your deliveries without enthusiasm. Only at the end of your shift, after midnight, does she ring.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi.”

“I want another movie.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know. Tell me about the one I just saw.”

“You want to see it again?”

She laughs. Twice in one night. You are pleased.

“No, you idiot. I want to know more about it.”

“Like what?”

“Like everything. Who’s in it? What else have they done? What do people talk about when they talk about it? Why is it popular?”

So you tell her. At first you stick to what you know, and when that runs out, and she asks for more, you say what you imagine could be plausible, and when she asks for even more, you venture into outright invention until she tells you she has heard enough.

“So how much of that was true?” she asks.

“Less than half. But definitely some.”

She laughs again. “An honest boy.”

“Where are your parents?”

“Why?”

“Just that they let you speak on the phone at this time.”

“My father’s out. And my mother’s asleep.”

“She doesn’t wake up when you talk?”

“I’m on the roof.”

You consider this. The image of her alone on a rooftop makes you somewhat breathless. But before you can think of anything appropriate to say, she speaks again.

“I’ll take another tomorrow. You pick. But a popular one.”

Thus begins a ritual that will last for several months. You meet on the way to work. Without stopping or exchanging a word, you either hand her a DVD or receive one she has just seen. At night you speak. Initially you feel like a professor of a subject in which you are barely literate, but because you give her only movies you have already partly seen, you are at least able to offer opinions of your own. Soon you find that she is helpfully filling in gaps in plot for you, telling you entire story lines, in fact. And your debates grow richer, and sometimes more heated. Your phone charges ought to be considerable, eating up most if not all of your tips, but she insists on being the one to call you, and so you spend nothing. She also insists the two of you do not discuss yourselves or your families.

The pretty girl’s father is a trained stenographer who has not taken dictation, or held any other kind of employment, for some time. He always had weaknesses for cards and moonshine, but a lack of funds ensured in his case that these remained minor vices. His undoing came when his employer, the owner of a small plastic-bottle-manufacturing business, sold the company and rewarded the workers with bonuses. The pretty girl’s father, having been in close daily contact with his departing boss, was treated with particular generosity, receiving over a year of his modest salary in a single lump sum. He never worked again.

A day in the life of the pretty girl’s father now begins by going to sleep, which he does at dawn, rising at dusk or even later. He seizes what money he can from his wife and daughter and heads out to the bar, an underground establishment run by illegal African immigrants in a room that moves around the neighborhood, relocating each time the police, despite the bribes they receive, feel enough pressure from religious activists to make a show of shutting it down. He drinks alone until about midnight, when the game begins. Then he makes his way to the shuttered stall where his friends deal him in. Some of them have beaten him brutally in the past, one of the consequences of this being that he cannot bend three fingers on his left hand. He currently owes a substantial sum to a local gangster, an unsmiling man who is decidedly not his friend, and he plays in the hope of winning back this amount, and in the fear of what will happen if he does not.

His wife, the pretty girl’s mother, suffers from severe and premature arthritis, a condition that makes her work as a sweepress, the only work she could find when circumstance thrust her relatively late in life into the paid labor force, an exercise in unmitigated agony. She no longer speaks to her husband, rarely speaks to the pretty girl except in occasional shrieks that can be heard up and down their street, and at her job pretends to be mute. She does speak to the divine, requesting to be released from her pain, and since she does so in public, mumbling seemingly to herself as she shuffles along, she is thought to be insane.

The pretty girl, not surprisingly, is planning her escape from her family. Her salary at the beauty salon is far more than what her mother makes, and she surrenders all of it to her parents without resistance. But the salon also caters to the needs of a number of lesser-known fashion photographers, so she has been exposed to their world, and has even been taken along to assist with hair and makeup on a few low-budget shoots. Through this she has become the mistress of a marketing manager responsible for a line of shampoo. He says he recognizes her potential to be a model, promises to make this happen, and in the meantime gives her gifts and cash. This cash the pretty girl has been saving, without telling either her parents or the marketing manager, believing that it represents her independence.

In exchange, the marketing manager demands physical favors. Initially these were kisses and permission to fondle her body. Then oral sex was required. This was followed by anal sex, which she believed, much to his surprise and delight, would allow her to preserve her virginity. But as the months passed, she came to doubt this logic, and eventually she permitted vaginal sex as well.

Whatever excitement and warmth the marketing manager once evoked in the pretty girl are now long gone. Her goal is sufficient funds to afford the rent of a place of her own, a goal she is now close to achieving. She also holds out some hope that the marketing manager will come through on his commitments to put her face in an ad and to introduce her to others who could further her career. But she is no fool, and she has been getting to know some of the photographers who use the services of her salon, more than one of whom has told her in no uncertain terms that she has potential.

What is clear to the pretty girl is that she must bridge a significant cultural and class divide to enter even the lower realms of the world of fashion. Hence her initial interest in movies, and in you. But she has discovered, beyond their educational value, that she actually enjoys films, and even more surprisingly, that she actually enjoys talking to you. In you she has made a friend, a person who renders her life in the neighborhood she hates more bearable.

She recognizes your feelings for her, however. She sees the way you look at her as you pass each other in the alley. Her own feelings for you, she tells herself, are rather different. She thinks of you with warmth and fondness, like a little brother, except of course that you are the same age, and not her brother at all. And you do have beautiful eyes.

Yes, she knows there is something. She is happy during her conversations with you, happier than at other times. She appreciates the lines of your body and how you carry yourself. She is amused by your manner. She is touched by your evident commitment. You are a door to an existence she does not desire, but even if the room beyond is repugnant, that door has won a portion of her affection.

So before she leaves the neighborhood for good, she gives you a call. This is itself not at all unusual. What she says, though, is.

“Come over.”

“Where?”

“Meet me on my roof.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“Where is it?”

“You know where it is.”