by Mohsin Hamid
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.”
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.
FOUR
AVOID IDEA LISTS
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-personalhygiene-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-myson-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 which is, if called upon to be, utterly ferocious.
As you ride you see the pretty girl on a billboard. She is modeling jeans. She poses as one of three young people, two female and one male, the others leaning their backs against each other and presenting their sides to the viewer, and so giving the impression to you of being a couple, while the pretty girl walks alone, perhaps signifying that she is single. This giant image creates conflicting emotions in you. You are struck, as always, by her beauty, and you are glad to be able to see her. You have heard through neighborhood rumor that she has split from the man she ran away with, and this composition, which creates the sense that she is available, is pleasing to you. But you also feel a stab of loss. The mobile number you had for her was immediately disconnected upon her departure, and you have not spoken to her, or seen her in person, since.
The pretty girl has finally succeeded in securing a place of her own, a room in an apartment she shares with a singer and an actress, both women in circumstances not dissimilar to hers. The marketing manager has been left behind, and she is now in an on-and-off relationship with a photographer, a long-haired fellow with an expensive motorcycle, who is thought by some to be bisexual. The pretty girl makes a modest living off print and runway work, having yet to establish what is known in her business as a name. At this very instant, recently awoken, and after skipping her lunch, she stands up in her lounge and takes a drag on a menthol cigarette, gazing out her window at scattered clouds bloodied by dust.
Beneath those clouds you dismount. You have been summoned to your home by your father because your mother is unwell. Your sister is again pregnant, so she cannot be here, but your brother and his wife have come. The unsightly bulge at your mother’s throat upsets and shames her.
“If it weren’t for my tits,” she says, “everybody would think I’m a frog.”
Despite her condition, the forcefulness in her eyes is undiminished. Unfortunately, much time has been wasted. Her normally robust health predisposed your mother to ignoring her symptoms. A neighborhood peddler of powdered herbs then fed her his concoctions for months, to no positive effect. The so-called doctor thereafter retained began a course of treatment that was halted only when it was discovered by you, chancing one day to watch him actually administering it, to consist entirely of saline injections and analgesic pills.
Your father has supplicated the matriarch of the family that currently employs him, a formerly tight-fisted widow who after her husband’s passing has begun to engage in a measure of philanthropy, and she has agreed to intervene by arranging a trip to a private hospital.
The matriarch arrives outside your home in her car. She does not step out or open her door. She does not roll down her window. Your mother and sister-in-law are borne beside her on the rear seat, your father in front with the driver. You and your brother travel separately by bus, rejoining them in a hospital waiting room.
“Why are they here?” the old lady asks your father.
“These are my sons.”
This seems to have little impact.
Your father adds, “This one’s at university. He’ll understand what the doctor says.”
The old lady scrutinizes you, taking in your beard, your attire. She addresses your father again, “Only one of you will come inside.”
“Him,” your father says, indicating you.
The doctor is a plump, serious woman your mother’s age. Her diagnosis upon examination, confirmed by test results at your second visit a week later, is papillary thyroid cancer. She explains that it is eminently treatable if dealt with early and appropriately. In your mother’s case the opportunity to treat it early is long past, but surgical removal of the thyroid still carries hope.
“How much will this cost?” the matriarch asks.
“Including medicines, anesthesia, and recovery?”
“In a communal ward.”
The doctor specifies a figure greater than your father’s annual salary.
“And without the surgery?” the matriarch asks.
“She’ll die.”
The matriarch considers. You watch your mother. She stares fixedly ahead.
“Very well,” the matriarch says.
The doctor silences a ringing mobile in the pocket of her smock. “Then there’s ongoing treatment. Hormones, radiotherapy.”
“That will be her family’s responsibility. Is it likely the surgery alone will cure her?”
“It’s possible.”
“Good.”
“But this is an advanced case. We’d normally expect to administer radioiodine a few weeks later, then . . .”
“Please explain all that to her family.”
The doctor comes outside and does so. Your father looks at you repeatedly, and each time you nod. He is tearfully grateful to the matriarch for agreeing to pay for the surgery. He smiles and blinks and shifts his weight. He bows at the neck to her, again and again, a gesture like a nervous tic. You have not seen him in the presence of one of his employers since you were a child. To observe him like this disturbs you.
But you are struck most by your mother’s expression. She has until now utterly refused to believe that she will not soon return to health.
“It won’t be painful,” you whisper to her. “They’ll put you to sleep.”
“I’ve pushed four of you out between my legs,” she whispers back. “I can handle pain.”
You smile, but only briefly, because looking at her you realize she is certain for the first time that her ailment will kill her.
Relations between your father and you have been tense, disapproving as he does of your beard and the organization you have joined. But over the following days he comes to lean on you heavily. There is deference in the way he watches you listen to a nurse or speak to a pharmacist or fill out a hospital form. He has never been a talkative man, but when you were younger he could be expressive physically, and he reverts to that mode of communication. He puts his arm around you. He pats your back. He ruffles your hair.
These gestures feel good, even though it is strange that the man performing them has become shorter than you.
Your mother is taken home from her surgery alive. She is perplexed by her wounded status, like a soldier who has been shot but as yet sees no blood. The trauma her body sustained in the operating theater leaves her weak, and because the extraction of her thyroid and her lymph nodes involved the disassembly of considerable portions of her neck, she finds it difficult to speak. She is thus doubly disarmed, of her physical vitality and of her powerful tongue, and when not exhausted she is baffled, and at times angry.
Your family insists on maintaining that all will be well, with or without radiotherapy. You pretend to agree, but you also decide to approach your hostel leader for funds. He has just returned, his whereabouts while away a secret, and you find him in his room, reclining in torn socks upon his sweat-stained mattress.
“I need money,” you say.
“That’s a funny greeting, little brother.”
“I’m sorry. My mother’s sick.”
“How much do you need?”
You name the figure.
“I see.” He strokes his jaw slowly.
“I know it’s a lot . . .”
“It is a lot. But I think we can help you.”
“Thank you.”
“You should take her to one of our clinics.”
“Our clinics?”
“Yes.” He watches you. He has what should be a benevolent smile but his face remains impassive. You have seen him smile this way after breaking a man’s nose.
“She’s been treated at a private hospital. It’s very good.”
“Our clinics are very good. What’s her illness?”
“Cancer.”
“I’ll make a few calls. Find out where she should go. Tell them to expect you.”
You know better than to argue.
In the evenings you ride your bicycle to your home, staying with your parents until it is time for them to attempt to sleep. You do not wish to burden them with the costs of your meals, so you continue to board at the hostel, and besides, your membership of the organization is an occupation for which you are paid, if modestly, and on which your performance is assessed. Now in particular it is important that you be seen to be doing your job well. You attend meetings, read the organization’s literature, and keep your eyes and ears open, as you have been instructed to do. But your thoughts wing their way to your mother.