by Mohsin Hamid
You call your accountant into your room and shut the door. Outside, through a tawny pane, you see the top of an overloaded bus snarled in telephone wires. Shouting rises from the street below.
“How bad?” your accountant mumbles.
“Gone.”
“Completely?”
You manage to choke off a string of profanities. “I’ll
need to replace it. Will we be fine for salaries?” “We have enough cash.”
The right half of your accountant’s face is stiff from
stroke. He is not actually qualified as an accountant, but this does not matter to you. As is customary, you bribe the tax man, and your cooked books serve merely as a starting point for negotiations. What does matter to you is that he be adept with numbers, which he is, having spent decades as a clerk at one of the city’s more reputable accountancies.
Your accountant suspects he has not long to live. His visage has already become a mask, its partial rigidity reminding him of his father’s in the hours following his father’s death, the body bathed but not yet committed to the soil. He often imagines the feeling of tiny blood vessels bursting in his brain, a sensory effervescence, like the prickles of a foot gone to sleep. But he bears his fate for the most part with equanimity. His sons are employed. His daughter is married, to you, a fellow clansman with proper values and excellent prospects. He has therefore completed what a father must most importantly complete, and while the yearning for another chance at youth tempts us all, he is strong enough to hold fast to the truth that time works not that way.
Because you have a lot to do and further because you believe it sends a motivating signal, you depart late this evening. A crescent moon hangs low in the sky, and a pair of flying foxes passes overhead, their giant bat wings thudding through the air. You drive along your customary route, listening to music on the radio.
At an intersection a boyish motorcyclist with delicate, curly hair taps on your window. You lower it to find a pistol pointed at your cheek.
“Get out,” he says. You do. He leads you to the side of the road and tells you to lie facedown in the dirt. Traffic comes and goes, but no one stops or pays any attention. The smell of parched soil fills your nostrils. He places the muzzle against your neck, where your spine meets the base of your skull, and twists it from side to side, grinding. It presses painfully into skin and bone.
“You stupid mother’s cock,” he says, his voice highpitched, almost prepubescent. “You think you can buttfuck your betters?”
Your lips move but no sound emerges. You feel phlegm hit your scalp, neutral in temperature and thick like blood.
“This is a warning, sisterfucker. You only get one. Remember your place.”
He walks to his motorcycle and rides off. You do not stand until he is gone. You perceive a sharp discomfort in your upper vertebrae and notice that your car door has remained ajar, the engine idling this whole time. You pop open the glove compartment. Your revolver. Useless.
The ultimatum you have just received comes from a wealthy businessman, part of the city’s establishment, who among other things owns a rival bottledwater operation, and onto whose turf you have begun to expand. He is powerful and well connected. So you are frightened, but not only frightened, you are also angry, seethingly furious, both emotions combining to cause you to tremble as you drive, and to think, over and over, while fighting a rising sense of dread, I’ll show that fucker, I’ll show him.
How you will show him, though, remains unclear.
You pull up at your home, a newly constructed townhouse in an unfinished, mid-price development, one of a choice of four designs repeated in multiple blocks of twelve. The trees on your street are still saplings, knee high, bound to wooden stakes for support against the wind. When your wife lets you in, she looks at you with concern and asks what on earth happened. You say it is nothing, perhaps something you’ve eaten. Later that night she hears you vomit in the bathroom.
Having recently turned twenty, your wife is a little less than half your age. She believes she has married well, the difference in years notwithstanding, your gap being the same as that between her parents. She grew up in better circumstances than you did, but not in circumstances as comfortable as those she currently enjoys. This, she feels, was to be expected, for she has always been regarded a beauty, with pale skin and a wide, sensuous mouth, and in arranged marriages looks such as hers fairly command a price.
In exchange for her assent to the agreement brokered between your accountant and you, she attached two conditions, first that she be allowed to complete her university, a lengthy course in law, and second that she not be tasked with producing any children while studying. She attached these conditions partly because she wanted them fulfilled and partly to test her power. You acceded, and you are honoring them.
She imagined during the negotiations that she was also testing your desire. Of this, however, she is now less sure. For while sex was a daily, sometimes twice-daily, occurrence in the first weeks of your marriage, it quickly subsided to a rhythm of about once a fortnight. She ascribes this to your being a man in his forties, even if her experience of your initial frenzy does leave her in some doubt. Nonetheless, she continues to look up to you, and feels ready for you to spark in her the flames of romantic love, although she has begun to wonder when you will take the time do so.
The day you texted the pretty girl on her mobile to inform her of your impending wedding, the pretty girl was surprised, given how little you and she had come to speak in recent years, by the strength of her sadness. She had not consciously been aware of her expectation that you would always wait for her, and while her thoughts occasionally alighted upon memories of you, she had no specific plans for further encounters like the evening you shared in the hotel. So she was caught unsuspecting by her sorrow. Still, she texted you back to wish you happiness. And then, as usual, she did her best to master her feelings and buckle down to work.
A popular cooking show on TV has brought the pretty girl considerable success, which is all the more remarkable since she has never been much of a cook. But she packages a sassy, street-talking persona with a spicy nouveau-street cuisine, combining the dialects of her childhood with the skills of her assistant chefs to charming and profitable effect.
She lives alone in an elegant, minimalist bungalow, not far from the sea, reunited with a generous income after a dip in her fortunes. Her fears of a return to poverty have receded. She recognizes that her celebrity was erected on a foundation of appearance, and she is not blind to the reality that appearances shift. But she believes that there are ways to lift celebrity free of its foundations, indeed that beyond a certain point, celebrity, like a cloud, can become seemingly its own foundation, billowing, self-sufficient, resolutely aloft. Unburdened by the commitments of extended monogamy, she dedicates immense time to this goal, to perpetual publicity campaigns, to those who will sustain her future. To, in other words, her viewers.
Among these viewers is your wife, who finds the pretty girl endearing, like a cool aunt, and her recipes simple and tasty. So you often come home to discover the pretty girl talking to your wife in your living room, their eyes locked across the ether, and when you inevitably ask your wife in a brusque tone to change the channel, she does so with a smile, assuming it is because you, a typically macho man, are uninterested in the wonders of the culinary arts.
You make no mention of your gunpoint warning to your wife, but it leads you to request an audience with the local head of an armed faction to which you and other traders in your area pay protection money. You have not personally seen him before, but as a member of the same clan you expect him to agree to a meeting, and indeed he does not keep you waiting for long.
The encounter takes place in a house that is remarkable only for the two men with assault rifles who loiter outside. The faction head sits on a carpet under a slowmoving fan. He rises, shakes your hand with a mangled but healed appendage missing two of its fingers, and watches you appraisingl
y. Settling yourself beside him, you explain your predicament.
The faction head is inclined to help, first because you will pay, and second because you are kin, and third because he sees you as an underdog and he regards himself as a champion of underdogs, and fourth because the businessman who threatened you belongs to a sect the faction head believes deserving of extermination. But he tells you none of this immediately. Instead he informs you of his decision the next day, having in the meantime, since he is middle management, conferred with his superiors, and also having let you sweat.
You are given a guard for your personal security and an unelaborated verbal guarantee of further measures should the situation escalate. The guard arrives unannounced at your office, so quiet and calm as to be virtually opiated, but with sharp, unsmiling eyes. He is roughly your age though significantly heavier, packing a barrel stomach and four silver teeth. You cannot imagine him a father or a husband, so you do not ask him about his family, and he, for his part, makes no smalltalk either. He spends the nights at your home, but even with him outside, in your single and otherwise unoccupied servant quarter, it troubles you to have this man living near your wife.
Whenever he sits in your car, the guard cocks his automatic noisily between his legs, whether for effect or to improve his reaction time or simply out of habit, you are not entirely sure. You wonder if you have made a mistake by engaging him, as the expense is crippling and he makes you uncomfortable besides. But, as you see it, your only alternatives are to ignore the threat, which might be suicidal, or to back down and submit to your rival, which would be unfair and a blow to your pride. Once, as you intentionally drive by the businessman’s walled villa, an acre of prime property in an upscale district, you glimpse him through a closing gate powerwalking on his lawn. His gray tracksuit and blue hand weights are evocative of a certain type of filmic villain, and this sight steels you in your determination not meekly to surrender.
Your wife knows that something is bothering you, perceiving you to be distant and uncharacteristically irritable, and she recognizes it is not without significance, of course, that her husband has newly retained a guard. She desires to be a comfort, and when her attempts to engage you in conversation fail to elicit an explanation of what is the matter, she takes another tack, proposing that the two of you go out to see a movie, or dine at a restaurant, but you are adamant about spending evenings at home, for security reasons, although you do not tell her this last, not wanting to frighten her. The imported glossy magazines she reads offer advice on what to do in this situation, how to please your man when he seems unpleased, and so, greatly daring, as your anniversary approaches, she instructs her waxing lady to remove all of her pubic hair, a bracingly painful experience, purchases with the entirety of her month’s pocket money an expensive, lacy set of bra and panties, in violet, her favorite color, and waits for you on your bed, semi-undressed, in the glow of flickering candles. She is unaware that the electricity has gone out, and so is taken aback when you enter the room holding a portable, battery-powered tube light, and you, for your part, are embarrassed at having stumbled in on her unannounced, and so you avert your eyes, muttering an apology, and head straight for the bathroom. When you return she is covered to her chin with a sheet, her eyes big in the dimness, a sense of humiliation washing over her, and yet, when you lie down, she reaches deep within, and, summoning extreme reserves of willpower, places your hand upon her chest and her hand between your legs, and she feels her body swelling and hardening to you, but not yours to her, overcome as you are by exhaustion and stress, and so she turns around and clenches her face against sound and wetness and pretends to go to sleep.
For you the weeks pass in fraught tension, your gaze incessantly flicking around you as you drive, wondering whether you will be attacked, and wondering also what, if anything, your guard will be able to do to protect you. You tell yourself you will not give in to fear, but despite this you begin to cancel visits even to those corporate customers with which your firm has its most lucrative cooler-replenishment contracts. Your business suffers as a result, as your days take on a more and more rigid schedule of early to work, stuck in the office, and late to home.
This routine is initially broken not by an act of violence but by the death of your sister. The arrival of the monsoon has brought with it sudden floods, and while the houses of your ancestral village, through a blessing of topography, have mostly been spared, resultant pools of stagnant water have bred armies of disease-carrying mosquitoes. Your sister is killed by dengue, her high fever relenting, and briefly offering false hope, before internal bleeding starves her organs and causes them to fail.
You travel on a series of lurching buses with your brother and his sons, themselves now nearly men, not reaching your destination until the following evening because of rain-damaged roads and bridges. The funeral has been delayed to make possible your presence, and thus you are able to see your sister one final time, a woman old without having been so long on this world, her white hair sparse and front teeth missing, the flesh of her face sunken to her bones, as if deflated by the passing of her life.
Looking at your brother, you observe that he too has aged, though even as a young man he tended not to seem young, and you wonder how you must appear to your nephews. You offer your prayers at the flower-strewn mound of earth that caps your sister’s resting place, and you give the money you have brought to her husband and children. Death in the village, being common, is handled in a matter-of-fact manner, and after the first few days you witness no wailing, even if a tear is shed by your eldest niece when she bends to allow you to place a palm on her head as you depart.
You left your wife behind in the city, a decision experienced by her as hurtful, despite your claim that the journey would be too arduous because of the floods. She finds it shocking you did not want her present on such an important occasion, unknowing that your true motivation was your wish to conceal somewhat the shabbiness of your origins.
As you return, slowly, through innumerable blockages, dismounting to help heave vehicles free of treacherous mud, you are reminded again of the yawning gap that exists between countryside and city, of the intensity with which here eyes follow a goat, the sole survivor of its swept-off herd, while there existence continues largely unchanged.
Later that week the boyish gunman is once more given instructions to encounter you. He washes and dresses as usual, listening to movie songs on a promotional soda-can-shaped radio and shaving above his upper lip in the aspiration of one day provoking a mustache. His mother and sister bid him good-bye. He is low on funds and so he purchases only a small quantity of petrol for his motorcycle and a single loose cigarette. He chooses an intersection on your route with a giant billboard advertising antibacterial soap, and waits, smoking, a new habit good for making him forget that he is hungry. His phone beeps to inform him you are on your way.
The gunman’s mind lingers on a T-shirt he had been wanting, purple, with a psychedelic hawk, but it was gone when he passed by the store today, and the shopkeeper said it was sold. He wishes he had been able to buy it. He should have borrowed the money. There is a girl with dimples from his neighborhood he has not had the courage to speak to, and she never seems to notice him, but he is sure she would have in that T-shirt.
You too are thinking of a woman as you approach the intersection, recalling the imaginary games you once played with your sister. In front of you a truck is hauling a shipping container, and its brakes start to hiss as it decelerates. Amidst this noise you see the gunman striding towards you, and you turn to your guard, but he has already understood. Your guard shoots thrice through your windscreen. The gunman falls. You are ready to flee but your guard opens his door and steps out onto the street. One of the bullets has dislodged a curly-haired piece of cranium. It rests not far from where the gunman lies, struggling to breathe. Your guard fires several rounds into his face and chest and snaps a photo with his mobile phone. Reoccupying his seat, he tells you to drive, and when yo
u do not seem to understand, he repeats himself, and you quickly obey.
You stop on a deserted road and your guard uses the socket wrench from your tire-change kit to smash your damaged windscreen, cracking it like an eggshell. He pushes it free from inside the car, employing both feet, and carries it to a pile of rubbish. A humid breeze ruffles your collar as you continue home, and that night you lie with your revolver under your bed, unable to sleep. You wonder what will happen now, if you will suffer violent retribution, a prospect made much more concrete by your vivid recollections of the gunman’s slaying.
But you are subsequently informed by the faction head that the photo has been transmitted, along with a written communication, to the businessman, and a cessation of his threats against you has been agreed. You do not know whether entirely to believe this, whether some larger scheme is instead playing itself out, but your guard is taken away, and so you recommence after months to move about alone, hoping for the best, and also putting your affairs in order, in case you are mistaken.
Your business prospers, and soon the entire incident becomes, if not a distant memory, at least not a pressing concern. You work long hours, returning late to your wife, and focus on your immediate tasks. You think from time to time about the pretty girl, and she thinks about you, but she does not communicate, holding back whenever she feels the impulse to do so, not wanting to interfere in your happiness with your wife, and you do the same, and for the same reason. But even unconnected in this way, the pretty girl does interfere, for you are unable to open yourself to your wife fully, seeing reminders of the pretty girl in her, as though the pretty girl has become your archetypal woman, of which your wife can only be a copy, and hearing in your wife’s laughter and feeling between your wife’s legs echoes of the pretty girl, painful echoes that cause you to shut yourself off and keep away.
You try to compensate materially, buying your wife an expensive necklace, nothing when compared to those worn by heiresses and celebrities, of course, but still of a modest splendor neither she nor you has previously possessed, and this gift pleases her, but her hope that your gesture will be accompanied by the genuine tenderness she craves soon fades, and the necklace stays in its box, unworn, on all but the odd night or two a year.