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In this excerpt from his latest novel, written in the form of a self-help book, Mohsin Hamid provides an instructive course in the art of running a small, illicit business.
Like all books, this self-help book is a co-creative project. When you watch a TV show or a movie, what you see looks like what it physically represents... 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 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...
You have used the contacts with retailers you forged during your years as a non-expired-labeled expired-goods 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 workshop-cum- 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.
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.
…[Y]ou come to an important decision. You have amassed some savings, savings you intended to use to buy a resident's bond on your property, not outright title, of course, that being far too expensive, but rather the right to live rent-free in your rooms for a set number of years, after which your landlord must repay your principal. Such an arrangement is a great aspiration for those of modest means, offering as it does security akin to home ownership, temporarily, for the duration of the bond.
In the world of cooks and delivery boys and minor salesmen, the world to which you have belonged, a resident's bond is a rest stop on the incessant treadmill of life. Yet you are now a man who works for himself, an entrepreneur, and one smoky afternoon, as you pass along a road on the outskirts of town, a small plot for let catches your eye, the rump of what was once a larger farm, currently no more than a crumbling shed and a rusty but upon closer examination still functional tube well, and it occurs to you that with the money you have saved, you could instead relocate here and expand your bottled-water operation. Such a course would be risky, leaving you with no savings and no guarantee, should your business fail, of a roof over your head. But risk brings with it the potential for return, and, besides, you have begun to recognise your dream of a home of your own for what it is, an illusion, unless financed in full by cold, hard cash.
The night after you sign the lease, you lie by yourself on the cot that once slept your parents, waiting for exhaustion to push you beyond consciousness. Beside you is your unringing phone. You watch one after another of the ubiquitous, hyper-argumentative talk shows that fill your television, aware that in their fury they make politics a game, diverting public attention rather than focusing it. But that suits you perfectly. Diversion is, after all, what you seek.
Reproduced with permission from Penguin India
HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA
Author: Mohsin Hamid
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 240
Price: Rs 499
