How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid Read Free Book Online

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.
    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.
    â€œIf 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