by Mohsin Hamid
“So you’re a waiter now?”
“What? No, I just . . . I borrowed this.”
She smiles.
“I’m in business,” you explain.
“Sounds mysterious.”
“Sales, actually. I make a lot of money.”
“I’m happy to hear that.”
She glances around. The two of you are garnering considerable interest because such an enthusiastic meeting of a model and a waiter is unusual, and also because you are on the verge of dropping your tray. The pretty girl has no compunction about causing a scene, but she is aware of the gap in social status between you, and of the questions perhaps beginning to form in the minds of her colleagues and clients.
“Here,” she says, “put that down and follow me.”
She leads you to the main pavilion, past the nowabandoned runway, and out a backstage entrance, shaking her head at a security official who bars your way. She waves hello to a small knot of people from the fashion world, but otherwise the two of you are alone under the starless sky. A hot breeze, gently perfumed with diesel, tugs at your clothing. She lights a cigarette and looks you over.
“You’ve grown up,” she says.
“So have you.”
“Do you still watch movies?”
“Not that much. Sometimes.”
“I’m an addict. I go to sleep in front of the DVD player every night.”
“Every night?”
She raises an eyebrow and smiles inscrutably. “Not every night. Often. When I’m alone.”
“I live with my father. Well, he lives with me. But I have my own place now.”
“Are you married?”
“No. Are you?”
She laughs. “No. I’m not sure I’m the type men marry.”
“I’d marry you.”
“You’re adorable. Maybe I meant I’m not the type men should marry.”
“Why not?”
“I change.”
“Everybody changes.”
“When I change, I let myself change.”
“I know. You wanted to leave the neighborhood and now you’ve done it. You’re famous.”
“And you?”
“I want to be rich.”
She laughs again. “It’s that simple?”
“Yes.”
“Well, tell me when you are.”
“I will. But I don’t have your number anymore.”
She gives you her phone and you dial yourself, letting it ring twice and saving it under her name. The glow of her cigarette has reached the filter.
“I should get inside,” she says.
“I’ll call you.”
“I know. Take care of yourself.”
She kisses you afresh on the cheek, placing her hand at the small of your back. You feel the graze of her breasts against your chest, and then she is gone.
As the pretty girl rejoins her world, she finds her poise somewhat undermined by your encounter. You are like a living memory and she, who is implacably resistant to remembering, is unsettled by you. Your manner of speech, even though it has evolved in the decade since the two of you last spoke, still carries the cadences of how she once spoke, more than the cadences, the perspectives, the outlook of the neighborhood she once belonged to, a neighborhood she is glad to have fled and to which she does not want to return, even for a moment, even in passing. She tries to focus on her companion, the textile scion, but she is blurry at first, not entirely present, and this alarms her to the extent that she makes a conscious and ultimately successful effort to clear her mind.
You call her that night but she does not answer. You try again the following day with the same result. Later in the week you get hold of her, finally, yet she is distracted, busy getting ready for a shoot. Occasionally thereafter, when you manage to speak with her, you are able to have a brief conversation, but she is always occupied when you suggest meeting. You find this perplexing, and consider how best to proceed. You do not know much about women, but you know a fair bit about sales, and it is apparent to you that this is a case when you must let the customer seek you out, lest you devalue your product completely. So you wait. And she does call. Not often. Not even every month. But sometimes, and usually late in the evening, after she has watched a film, and her voice is languid with impending sleep, and perhaps with alcohol as well, and she speaks to you softly for a few wonderful minutes from the comfort of her bed. She does not invite you over, or propose an encounter elsewhere, but she keeps in touch with you and your life, and this, while at times quietly painful, gives you a measure of hope.
At work you join the scramble for your former colleague’s accounts. One prospect rejects your advances, but you have internalized the principle of perseverance and accordingly you revisit him the following season. The man in question runs a shop in a formerly desirable residential area near a much-revered tomb, now choked with traffic by day and scented with marijuana by night.
You arrive on your motorcycle with the strap of your satchel slung bandolier-style across your chest. Your target sits behind the cash register.
“I’m not interested,” he says.
“You were before.”
“What happened to the other one?”
“I replaced him.”
“I didn’t trust him.”
“You should be happy then.”
“I don’t trust you either.”
He shouts at his assistant, who has knocked over a stack of breakfast cereal boxes. You glance at the shelves. They are stocked with a mix of foreign and domestically produced goods, foodstuffs mainly, but also cleaning supplies, lightbulbs, cigarettes, and, unexpectedly, a pair of unboxed air conditioners.
You point to the last. “You sell those?”
“They’re used. There’s demand for them.”
You open your satchel and slowly tap half a dozen cans and bottles down on his counter. “Tuna.” Tap. “Soup.” Tap. “Olives.” Tap. “Soy sauce.” Tap. “Ketchup.” Tap tap tap. “Lychee juice.” Tap. “All imported.”
“I already have all this.”
“I know. That’s why I’m showing these to you. How much are you paying?”
He looks at you with disgust. “Tell me this. Why are you cheaper?”
“We’re a big outfit.”
He sneers. “You? I’m sure.”
“Our owner has contacts at customs. He gets stuff through without paying duty.”
“So does everybody else.”
“Why don’t you want a good deal?”
“Because I don’t like good deals I don’t understand.” “It’s not stolen.”
“I’m not buying it.”
“Really, it’s not stolen.”
“You think I’m deaf?” He spits on the floor at your feet. “Get out.”
“There’s no reason for . . .”
“Get out, dirty pimp motherfucker.”
You stare at him, taking in his potbelly, his flimsy little mouth, his weak, breakable wrists. But you are also aware he keeps his right hand low, under the counter, out of sight. And you sense shoppers taking notice, his assistant lingering at the entrance, passersby pausing outside. Mobs form quickly in these insecure times, and mobs can be merciless. You stand your ground for a moment. Then you garrote your anger, pack your samples, and leave without another word.
“I know all about your scam,” he yells out behind you.
You try not to dwell on this incident as you ride back home through the still, smoky dusk. Your costs are low because your master sources recently expired goods at scrap prices, erases the expiry date from the packaging, and reprints a later date instead. This is not as simple as it sounds, there being a number of tricks to removing ink unnoticeably and requiring great attention to detail in the printing process. Products do have built-in safety margins, and inventory turnover in the city is usually high, so for the most part there should be limited risk to consuming what you sell. You are simply increasing the efficiency of the market, ensuring goods that would oth
erwise be wasted find buyers at reduced price points. You have never heard of anyone dying as a result.
Your work is a far cry from your father’s simple trade, but despite your misgivings, you would not consider changing places with him, not at his prime, when he traveled to and from his employer’s premises in generally good spirits and good health, and certainly not now, when he is easily exhausted and can no longer stand in the kitchen for more than an hour at a stretch. He has secured a job with a couple returned from abroad who do not like having servants in the house. He wheezes his way over to them every second morning, as they are leaving for work, cooks and refrigerates their dinner for two nights, and takes a bus home by midday. In the afternoons and on alternate days he recovers from his exertions.
The pair of you have moved to slightly larger accommodations, and you have told your father he no longer needs to earn a wage. But he does not desire to be a burden, and in any case he feels employment is the natural state of a man. He would do more if he could, but he cannot.
Your father suffers from a broken heart, both literally and figuratively. He misses your mother intensely, yearning for her even more after her passing than ever during her life. Also his genes and the cholesterol-laden cuisine he has prepared and eaten in wealthy homes for decades have conspired to give him recurring bouts of angina. The damage to his muscle tissue is now irreversible, and although episodes of actual pain are brief, there is no escaping the pressure on his chest or his shortness of breath.
His faith is strong and idiosyncratic, manifesting itself in prayer, visits to shrines, religious music, and sacred verses written on paper and worn as amulets. All of these comfort him. He fears death, but not terribly so, and he awaits the opportunity to be reunited with his beloved much as certain young girls await, with a trepidation that does not quite exceed their longing, the loss of their virginity.
You find him lying on his cot, listening to a tinny yet soulful voice on a battery-powered radio because the electricity is gone and with it the power for your television. He is covered in a shawl, despite the heat, and he sweats lightly from his forehead. You bring him a cup of water and sit beside him, and he pats your hand, his callused palm leathery and almost soft. He whispers a benediction and breathes it into the air, spreading his hopes for you with a contraction of the lungs.
SIX
WORK FOR YOURSELF
Like all books, this self-help book is a cocreative project. When you watch a TV show or a movie, what you see looks like what it physically represents. A man looks like a man, a man with a large bicep looks like a man with a large bicep, and a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo “Mama” looks like a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo “Mama.”
But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It’s in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it’s approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm.
Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves. Therein, if you’ll excuse the admittedly biased tone, lies the richness of reading. And therein, as well, lies a pointer to richness elsewhere. Because if you truly want to become filthy rich in rising Asia, as we appear to have established that you do, then sooner or later you must work for yourself. The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they’re not particularly fattening. So don’t share yours, and munch on those of others whenever you can.
In your case you’ve set up a small business, a workhorse S in the thunderous economic herd of what bankers and policy makers call SMEs. You operate out of a two-room rented accommodation you once shared with your father. Two rooms struck you as a well-earned luxury when he was alive. Now, were it not for the needs of your firm, they would have struck you as wasteful, and disconcerting besides, for even though you are a man in his mid-thirties, you have only recently been introduced to the types of silences that exist in a home with one occupant, and emotionally you stagger about this new reality like a sailor returned to land after decades at sea.
It is shortly before dawn. You sit alone on the edge of a cot that used to sleep your parents, rubbing the dreams from your skull as you listen to an oversexed neighborhood rooster crowing in his rooftop cage. You breakfast at a kiosk festooned with the logos of a global soft-drink brand, sipping tea and dipping your fingers into a plate of chickpeas. You are known to many of the men around you, and they nod in greeting, but you are not beckoned into any of the conversations taking place. No matter. Your mind is on the day’s work ahead, and as you chew and swallow you barely notice the tethered goat at your feet, with its jaunty, peroxide-bleached forelock, or the battle-scarred, toe-long beetle winding its way to a promising cat carcass.
You have used the contacts with retailers you forged during your years as a non-expired-labeled expiredgoods salesman to enter the bottled-water trade. Your city’s neglected pipes are cracking, the contents of underground water mains and sewers mingling, with the result that taps in locales rich and poor alike disgorge liquids that, while for the most part clear and often odorless, reliably contain trace levels of feces and microorganisms capable of causing diarrhea, hepatitis, dysentery, and typhoid. Those less well-off among the citizenry harden their immune systems by drinking freely, sometimes suffering losses in the process, especially of their young and their frail. Those more well-off have switched to bottled water, which you and your two employees are eager to provide.
Your front room has been converted into a workshopcum-storage depot. There, in sequence, are a pipe bringing in tap water, a proscribed donkey pump to augment the sputtering pressure from outside, a blue storage tank the size of a baby hippopotamus, a metal faucet, a lidded cooking pot, a gas-cylinder-fired burner to boil the water, which you do for five minutes as a general rule, a funnel with a cotton sieve to remove visible impurities, a pile of used but well-preserved mineral-water bottles recovered from restaurants, and, finally, a pair of simple machines that affix tamper-resistant caps and transparent safety wrapping atop your fraudulent product.
You are leaning over your technician as he conducts an experiment.
“It stinks,” you say.
He shrugs. “It’s fuel.”
“It’ll make our water smell like a motorcycle’s wet fart.”
He lowers the flame. “Now?”
“Too much soot. Turn it off.”
You look at the portable petrol stove he has borrowed, dull brass and round as the base of an artillery shell. A shortage of natural gas has yet again brought your operation to a standstill. Petrol, had it worked, might have been an affordable stopgap. But it has not worked. So you try to think of other options as you play with the thread around your neck, fingering the key to your bedroom, where sit your client list and register, a modest pile of cash, and an unlicensed revolver with four chambered rounds.
Your technician scratches his armpit pensively. “Maybe we skip the boiling today,” he suggests.
“No. We don’t boil, we don’t sell.” You know quality matters, especially for fakes. Shops would stop buying if their customers began falling sick.
Your technician does not question your decision. He is a bicycle mechanic by background, untrained in the nuances of business, which is why he works for you, and also because, as the father of a trio of little girls and the youngest son of a freelance bricklayer who died of exposure sleeping rough at too advanced an age, he values a steady income.
Were, uncharacteristically, your technician to press you to reconsider, you would likely respond by falling silent, waiting for the pause to grow uncomfortable enough for him to glance in your direction. You would then meet his gaze, holding his eyes until he flicked them floorward and increased the curvature of his spine, gestures which, among teams
of humans as among packs of dogs, signify one mammal’s submissiveness to another. Mercifully, however, you probably would not sniff his anus or inspect his genitals.
Your runner arrives, announcing the good news that a nearby depot will be refilling gas cylinders for an hour later this afternoon, and also bringing with him the aroma of food, fried-bread lunch rolls sweating translucent their newspaper wrappings. The three of you eat together in fellowship, chatting among yourselves like siblings, which in a way you are, since these two are your clansmen, distant relatives bound by blood, and so yes, like siblings, except of course that when you tell these siblings to finish quickly, they must and do obey.
After the meal, you head to the depot to get in line. Your conveyance is a micro pickup truck older than you are, the side panels of its rear bed holed through in intricate, rusted filigree, but its noisy two-stroke engine rebuilt and reliable. You are at an intersection when your phone rings. Seeing who it is, you pull over, kill the motor, and answer.
“Are you free for dinner?” the pretty girl asks.
Her voice shifts your sense of place, rendering your immediate surroundings less substantial.
“Yes,” you say.
“You don’t need to know when?”
“Oh. When?”
“Tonight.”
You smile, hearing her smile. “Yes, I figured.”
“I’m in town. You can come to my hotel.”
That evening you get a haircut, opting for a buzz, which the barber claims is both the rage these days and guaranteed to flatter a man as fit as yourself. You purchase extravagantly priced tight jeans and a nylon jacket with the words “Man Meat” on the back from a boutique with impressive cars parked outside. At home you conclude the jeans are too short and you rush to swap them for a longer pair, but the assistant looks you over and, without pausing her online chat on the shop’s computer, refuses on the grounds that you have removed the tags.
You decide to wear them in any case, unfastening their top button, concealed beneath your belt, and pulling them lower on your hips. They squeeze up a small roll of your flesh, a mini-potbelly, and you wonder if it was a mistake to buy them. A fortnight’s wage outlay for two items of clothing does seem fiendishly unbalanced. But you are getting late, so now you must speed on to your rendezvous.