Mohsin Hamid - How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

You do not bother denying it. You have walked by her house many, many times. Every boy in your neighborhood knows where she lives. Though you have an hour left in your shift, you jump on your bicycle and pedal hard.

You climb the outside of her building carefully, moving from wall to windowsill to ledge, trying not to be seen. When you get to the top she does not speak, and you, out of habit from your many unspeaking encounters, remain silent as well. She undresses you and lays you flat on the roof, and then she undresses herself. You see her navel, her ribs, her breasts, her clavicles. You watch her expose her body, taking in the shock of her nudity. A thigh flexes as she kneels. A brush strokes your belly. She mounts you, and you lie still, your arms stiff at your sides. She rides you slowly. Above her you see the lights of circling aircraft, a pair of stars able to burn through the city’s pollution, lines of electrical wires dark against the glow of the night sky. She stares into your face and you look back until the pressure builds so strong that you have to look away. She pulls off before you ejaculate and finishes you with her hand.

After she has dressed, she says with a small smile, “I’m leaving.”

She disappears downstairs. You have not kissed her. You have not even spoken.

The next day she is gone. You know it well before you fail to cross her on your way to work, word spreading quickly in your neighborhood that she has surrendered her honor and run away with her deflowerer. You are distraught. You are the sort of man who discovers love through his penis. You think the first woman you make love to should also be the last. Fortunately for you, for your financial prospects, she thinks of her second man as the one between her first and her third.

There are times when the currents leading to wealth can manage to pull you along regardless of whether you kick and paddle in the opposite direction.

Over dinner one night your mother calls the pretty girl a slut. You are so angry that you leave the room without finishing your egg, not hearing that in your mother’s otherwise excoriating tone is a hint of wistfulness, and perhaps even of admiration.

SURELY IDEALS, TRANSCENDING AS THEY DO PUNY humans and repositing meaning in vast abstract concepts instead, are by their very nature anti-self? It follows therefore that any self-help book advocating allegiance to an ideal is likely to be a sham. Yes, such self-help books are numerous, and yes, it’s possible some of them do help a self, but more often than not, the self they help is their writer’s self, not yours. So you’d do well to stay away, particularly if getting filthy rich tops your list of priorities.

What’s true of self-help books is equally, and inevitably, true of people. Just as self-help books spouting idealism are best avoided, people so doing should be given wide berths too. These idealists tend to congregate around universities. There they find an amenable environment of young, impressionable, malcontented, and ambitious individuals, individuals who, were they legends of yore instead of still-pimply and poor-personal-hygiene-sporting men and women in contemporary Asia, would be dashing off to slay dragons and triumph over genies, individuals, in other words, who give corporeal form to the term sucker.

You have, as was perhaps to be expected, fallen in with university idealists yourself. You sit at this moment on a narrow, lumpy bed in a hostel entirely appropriated by members of your organization, like a city block by a gang. Your hostel leader packs as you speak. He is a big man, tall as well as broad, with luxurious facial hair gone prematurely gray and the flattened features of a boxer.

“Where?” he asks you.

“Behind the space sciences building.”

“How many of them?”

“Four. First years, I think.”

“And you’re sure it was hash?”

“I’m sure.”

“We’ll deal with it when I get back.”

Sweat drips from you both. The electricity is out, and deprived of a fan the normally stifling room bakes in the heat like a charcoal-fired clay oven. Mosquitoes are rampant, having entered through the unrepaired mesh that now only partially covers the windows. You slap one feasting on your forearm as the hostel leader puts a pistol in his duffel bag and zips it shut.

Your father was adamant that you complete secondary school, even though you struggled to wake in the mornings after nights spent delivering DVDs. He recognized that in the city manliness is caught up in education. Burly though he is, your father had spent a working lifetime in the service of employers who, were the world a festival of unarmed banditry, he would have beaten, bound, and relieved of their possessions in a few quick minutes. He understood that his employers benefited from two things he lacked, advanced schooling and rampant nepotism. Unable to give his children the latter, he did all he could to ensure that at least one of you acquired the former.

Yet university is no easy proposition for a young man from a background such as yours. Nepotism is not restricted to swaggering about in its crudest, give-my-son-what-he-wants form. It frequently assumes more cunning guises, attire, for example, or an accent. Despite your previous academic results, and your familiarity with a wide range of personal styles and affectations from film, there was no hiding from the fact that you were the son of a servant. No soiree invitations awaited you, no rides in shiny new cars. Not even a cigarette shared among a half-dozen old friends on the university steps, for none from your school gained entry here save you.

State-subsidized though it may be, your university is exquisitely attuned to money. A small payment and exam invigilators are willing to overlook neighborly cheating. More and someone else can be sat in your seat to write your paper. More still and no writing is needed, blank exam books becoming, miraculously, a first-class result.

So you have grown a beard and joined an organization. As you speed away from the meeting with your hostel leader, other students avoid your gaze. No curious glances greet the sight of you and your bicycle, unusual on a campus where almost everyone without personal motorized transport travels by bus. The heat of the city, and its sprawl, have conspired to throw pedal power into disfavor among university types. But you are accustomed to it from your former job, and you value the exercise.

Compared with most of your comrades, you are more serious about your studies. You are also more sturdy and less easily frightened, and therefore better than most in a scrap. Many of your organization’s leaders are in their late thirties, having ostensibly been students at the university for almost as long as you have been alive. In that respect, it is not your intention to follow in their footsteps. But you do relish the nervousness the sight of you now instills in wealthier pupils and corrupt administrators.

Your organization is, like all organizations, an economic enterprise. The product it sells is power. Some thirty thousand students attend your university. When combined with those at other institutions around the city, the street-filling capability of these young people becomes formidable, a show of force in the face of which unwanted laws, policies, and speech must tremble. Political parties seek to harness this with on-campus offshoots, of which yours is one.

In exchange for membership, you are given a monthly cash stipend, food and clothing, and a bed at the hostel. You are also given protection. Not only from other students, but from university officials, outsiders, and even the police. Pedaling down the streets of the city now, you know that you are not an isolated and impoverished individual, weak prey for the societally strong, punishable with a slap for being involved through no fault of your own in an accident between your bicycle and a car. No, you are part of something larger, something righteous. Something that is, if called upon to be, utterly ferocious.