‘How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia’

By Mohsin Hamid

Hamish Hamilton

228 pages

 

 

A few years ago, Rana Dasgupta wrote an eye-opening article in literary magazine Granta about India’s new rich, in which he explained that the country’s economic growth had been far too explosive for the small English-speaking upper class to monopolise its rewards.

The old cosmopolitan elite have done well enough, with their degrees from Berkeley and Cambridge, and their jobs in banking and management consulting: “But they are surrounded by very different people — private businessmen, entrepreneurs, estate agents, retailers and general wheeler-dealers — who are making far more money than they are, and wielding more political power. These people may come from smaller cities, they may be less worldly, and they may speak only poor English.

But they are skilled in the realm of opportunity and profit, and they are at home in the booming world of overlords, connections, bribes, political loopholes, sweeteners — and occasional violence — that sends their anglicised peers running for the nearest cappuccino.”

In Mohsin Hamid’s dazzling third novel, we follow the rise and fall of one of these wheeler-dealers, these new lords of opportunity and profit. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is set in Pakistan, not India, in a “megalopolis” that mostly resembles Hamid’s home town, Lahore (though neither the country nor the city is named — in fact there’s hardly a proper noun in sight).

This might come as a surprise to some; we hear a lot about the “new India”, while Pakistan — which has seen a comparable, if more limited, boom — is generally portrayed as the poor, backward neighbour, afflicted by Islamist terrorism, insurgency and floods. But this is a novel that aims to strip readers of their preconceptions.

Hamid shows us the same powerful forces are at work in a Pakistani megacity as in Bombay or Delhi or Bangkok. And while the new breed of entrepreneurs are often portrayed as unscrupulous or grotesque, like the murderous taxi tycoon in Aravind Adiga’s scabrous The White Tiger, Hamid asks us to consider that they might in fact be rational, honourable people responding as best they can to their environment — just like you or me.

Or, more specifically, like you, since the book is written in the second person, in the style of Jay McInerney’s 1984 Bright Lights, Big City or a role-playing story. At first sight, it poses as a self-help book. The chapter titles take the form of instructions to the reader: “Move to the city”, “Get an education”, “Work for yourself”, “Befriend a bureaucrat”, and so on. But after a couple of paragraphs of ironic motivational talk, each chapter moves into a narrative mode: “you” are a poor village boy, first seen “huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother’s cot one cold, dewy morning”.

At your mother’s insistence, your family moves from the village to the city to join your father, who works as a domestic chef: “As you and your parents dismount (from the bus), you embody one of the great changes of your time.”

Thereafter, you are seen going to school, while earning money for the family on the side as a pirate-DVD delivery boy; then working as a “non-expired-labelled expired goods salesman” (knocking off out-of-date cans of tuna with new labels).

Step by step, you find your true calling, in the fake bottled-water trade. You start off with a back-room operation: a donkey pump, a water tank, a gas-burner, a filter and a pile of old mineral water bottles. But soon you hit the big time, and before long you have your own semi-legit factory out in the ballooning industrial suburbs.

Hamid’s debut, Moth Smoke’, was formally conventional, though its subject matter caused a stir — imagine a McInerney party novel, set in Lahore, with bootleg whisky, cheap heroin and nuclear neighbours. But these days he seems to specialise in ambitious, highly compressed novellas, which address the reader in an unusual and slightly tricksy fashion.

He’s best known in this country for The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a 9/11 novel about a Pakistani financial worker falling out of love with America. Like Camus’s ‘The Fall’, it was written in the form of a monologue, from one man in a cafe to another.

How to Get Filthy Rich also pulls a few fairly complex moves. Initially, it seems to be a satire powered by a cool, rational fury about the conditions of life in Pakistan — from the landlords whose gaze the villagers are not permitted to meet, to the place-holders and rent-seekers who run schools and politics alike, to the undrinkable water: “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 fluids that, while for the most part clear and odourless, reliably contain trace levels of faeces and microorganisms capable of causing diarrhoea, hepatitis, dysentery and typhoid.”

At another level, the book is a love story disguised as a satire. “You” fall in love, with a woman known as “the pretty girl”, who comes from the same city slum, and works her way up into modelling and acting. The lovers are driven apart by circumstance, but re-enter each other’s lives at significant moments. Finally, in its later stages, How to Get Filthy Rich becomes a meditation on mortality in the form of a love story.

Furthermore, it becomes clear as the book proceeds that each chapter corresponds to a significant span of “your” life, and is set in the historical present. If, like me, you don’t know Pakistan, then this only gradually becomes clear, when the technology stays the same though decades pass in the lives of the characters; and when the few news incidents alluded to, such as the 2008 truck-bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad, don’t seem to fit into any comprehensible time scheme.

In short, there’s a hell of a lot going on in the 200 or so widely spaced pages of How to Get Filthy Rich. Some readers might find that the novel trips up from time to time on its own conceits; but it is an addictive, muscular piece of storytelling, and the few moments of clumsiness and archness that Hamid’s formal experiments produce are a price well worth paying. — Guardian News & Media

 

 

 

 

 

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