How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (8 page)

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 you 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 upon. 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.

Increasingly, your wife comes to find herself unsettled by the attention she receives from many young men at her university, and by her own desire sometimes to respond, always quickly repressed since she has been raised to believe in the inviolability of marriage, and so she starts to dress more modestly, and even to cover her hair when she leaves the house, establishing thereby a barrier between her and the covetousness around her, and a degree of inner calm.

Lying beside her in your bed, untouching, a newly installed little generator rumbling downstairs as it shields you both from electrical outages, and your head on a towel because age and postural problems have combined to give you a recurring stiffness of the neck, it does not occur to you that your wife's love might be slipping from your grasp, or that, once it is gone, you will miss it.

EIGHT

BEFRIEND A BUREAUCRAT

NO SELF-HELP BOOK CAN BE COMPLETE WITHOUT
taking into account our relationship with the state. For if there were a cosmic list of things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up and into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.

You might therefore assume that the most reliable path to becoming filthy rich is to activate your faster-than-light marketing drive and leap into business nebulas as remote as possible from the state's imperial economic grip. But you would be wrong. Entrepreneurship in the barbaric wastes furthest from state power is a fraught endeavor, a constant battle, a case of kill or be killed, with little guarantee of success.

No, harnessing the state's might for personal gain is a much more sensible approach. Two related categories of actor have long understood this. Bureaucrats, who wear state uniforms while secretly backing their private interests. And bankers, who wear private uniforms while secretly being backed by the state. You will need the help of both. But in rising Asia, where bureaucrats lead, bankers tend to follow, and so it is on befriending the right bureaucrat that your continued success critically depends.

You sit before him now, in his government office, spacious yet dowdy, as such offices often are, with dusty windows, framed portraits of a pair of national leaders, one dead and one alive, and chunky wooden seating in need of reupholstery, which, if reconfigured, could easily accommodate twice as many visitors, and communicates through its weightily inefficient refusal to do so a loud and clear signal of intent. Many bribes were paid to enable this meeting, most importantly to the bureaucrat's personal secretary, without whose assent slots in his calendar seem never to open up, and so here you are, with the head honcho himself, finally able to make your pitch.

The bureaucrat, in violation of nonsmoking regulations, lights an exquisitely expensive gifted cigar from his well-appointed humidor without offering you anything but a cup of tea. He knows your type, self-made, on the rise, and because of his education, family background, and temperament he regards you with disdain, but also with satisfaction, for there is usually more money to be had from supplicants who seek to challenge the status quo than from those who seek merely to maintain it.

You were delivered to him by a sticky web of red tape. Permits denied, inspections failed, meters improperly read, audits initiated, all these scams and hassles you have over the years surmounted by greasing junior and mid-level palms. But you have reached an impasse. Your firm has become fairly aboveboard, at least as far as product is concerned, sterilizing mostly to the accepted standard and bottling under your own name. Yet your expansion into the big leagues, into the mass market of the piped municipal water game, has been stymied. Only state-licensed providers can bid for municipal contracts, and your application for such a license has been turned down. So you have pursued the rejection to its source, this man seated in front of you.

He puffs away, the fingertips of his free hand resting on a file containing your recently dismissed proposal. You drone on about the technical soundness of your candidacy, your capital and expertise, your many satisfied customers. The bureaucrat lets you expend your energy, punch yourself out, presentationally, and when you inevitably fall silent he writes two words on a sheet of paper in the indigo ink of his gold-nibbed fountain pen and pushes them towards you. They are, “How much?”

You are relieved. A hurdle has been crossed and the negotiation can now begin. But you pretend otherwise.

“Sir,” you say, “we meet the conditions . . .”

“Have you previously been a municipal vendor?”

“We've been in the water business almost twenty years.”

“Have you previously been a municipal vendor?”

“No.”

“Are you authorized to be a municipal vendor?”

“Not yet.”

“No.” He propels a perfect smoke ring with an unhurried flick of his jaw.

“All your requirements have been satisfied.”

“All our quantifiable requirements. It is my duty to ensure our unquantifiable requirements are also met. Reputational requirements, for example.”

“Our reputation is that we're friendly.”

“Good.”

You observe him. He is nearer sixty than fifty, and so less than a decade your senior, but with the velvet-cushion newborn grip of a man who has eschewed not merely manual labor and racket sports but even carrying his own briefcase.

He directs, with a tap of his finger, your attention to the piece of paper between you. These days, regrettably, it is difficult to know when a conversation is being recorded. He prefers to keep impropriety inaudible. You make a show of pausing in consideration before inscribing a sum you feign is impressive. The bureaucrat rejects it with a curt shake of his head, scribbling a vastly greater, but reduced, figure. You feel a glow of satisfaction. In not dismissing you out of hand he has slid off his viceroy's throne and into a salesman's stall. You are his buyer, and though you must not squeeze, you have him by his enormous, greedy, and extremely useful balls. You haggle, but magnanimously.

The bureaucrat cannot, however, act without the approval of his political masters, and therefore, the following week, after another meeting with you to fill in the specifics of your arrangement, he dispatches you to the home of a politician familiar to you from TV and newspapers. You are driven by your driver in your hulking and only slightly secondhand luxury SUV. Positioned beside him is a uniformed guard normally employed by you to open and shut the gate of your house. You sit in the back, ostensibly browsing e-mails on your computer, hoping to make a substantial impression.

Fears of terrorism have led the politician to take measures to secure his residence, strong-arming his neighbors into selling him their properties, erecting a razor-wire-topped boundary wall far in excess of permissible heights, and placing illegal barricades at either end of the street. Police officers mill about on foot, and a heavily armed rapid-response unit idles in a pickup truck, ready to accompany him on the move. You are allowed to proceed, but without your vehicle and retainers, much to your disappointment, and you are frisked twice on your way in.

The politician's working environment is structured in the manner of the courts of princes of old, namely with one set of waiting rooms for commoners, another for those of rank, and an inner sanctum occupied by him and a contingent of his advisers. Your transaction is conducted simultaneously with multiple unrelated strands of endeavor, some public, some personal, and some apparently without purpose, or rather with no purpose other than amusement. An extended lunch is under way, and so everything happens to the sounds of chewing and with repeated gestures that look like multi-fingered snaps but are in reality attempts to dislodge grease, rice, and bits of edible residue without the use of water or tissues. None of this surprises you or throws you off, the bureaucrat having prepared you well, and in any case your dominant feeling is one of achievement at being with people of such importance.

Your deal is concluded in an uncomplicated, if seemingly whimsical, fashion, the politician asking one of his henchmen for an opinion with a laugh and raised eyebrow, much as he might ask him to assess the desirability of a mid-priced prostitute. A number is thrown out. This is accepted by you with obsequious murmurs and bows of the head, precisely as you have been instructed to do by the bureaucrat. And that is that.

As you drive off, under a beautiful, orange, polluted sky, riding high in your SUV above lesser hatchbacks and motorcycles, you start to hum, only the presence of your employees preventing you from bursting into full-blown song. What a long way you have come. Your offices loom ahead, the entire second floor of a centrally located emporium, atop a bustling array of shops. Security men and parking attendants salute you, elevator doors spring apart for your arrival, and your nods to a select few of your managers, as you stride by their desks, spark a buzz of chatter. Yes, your meeting was a success.

Your son is delivering an address on the lawn when you get home. It is twilight, a moment adored by mosquitoes, and he wears shorts and a T-shirt, the sight of his bare brown flesh worrying you until he runs over and into your arms, granting you the pleasure of lifting his solid little form, his vertebrae clicking softly as gravity tugs them apart, and sniffing on his skin the synthetic lemon-lime aroma of insect repellent. Your son is a big-cheeked, bowl-haircut-sporting, navel-high orator, and this evening he has assembled about him not just his nanny but the cook and bearer as well, all of whom become markedly more formal in your presence. The boy is subjecting them to a political speech modeled after one he must have seen on TV.

“When I am your leader . . .”

You watch and listen, wishing as always that you had more time with him, that you could take him with you to work or, even better, stay here with him and his toys, and also thinking of your parents, realizing that they must have experienced, half a century ago, the same emotions you feel now, except in their case with more trepidation, for while disease or violence could of course strike down your son, the probability of his early death has, through your attainments, been reduced dramatically.

Interrupting his performance, you charge at him with a roar. He flees into the house, squealing, and you yell that you will eat him up, but you quieten as you pass inside, parked cars on your street having alerted you to an ongoing meeting. Your wife sits with a dozen other women, their heads covered and in several cases their faces too, engaged in heated debate. Your greeting elicits a verbal response from her, but her eyes rest upon your son, and it is he alone she favors with a smile as the two of you proceed upstairs, followed, scooter in hand, by his nanny. The conversation around your wife subsides at this sudden claim on her attention, but resumes with equal vigor when she tilts her head and gestures to her collaborators with upraised palms, as though marshalling some unseen but weighty force, or communicating a deep and shared sense of exasperation, or otherwise supporting a pair of invisible breasts.

It has been five years, the age of your son, since you last entered your wife's body. Intercourse between you had already been infrequent, and only a lucky roll of the biological dice explains why she conceived so quickly after completing her studies and removing her contraceptive coil. Childbirth, however, was less easy. A severe third-degree perineal tear damaged your wife's anal sphincter. With reconstructive surgery and endless hours of physiotherapy, she defeated the resulting incontinence, and she is now free of the diapers she was forced to wear, galling for a woman so young. But you were almost entirely absent from this process, clumsily semi-aware, at best, of the details of her condition. Consumed by your work, made hesitant by your upbringing and gender, and in any case pining for that other woman beyond your reach, you readily paid for whatever needed paying for, but did no more.

Yet you have changed with the growth of your son. Medicalized, bloody, and enacted to the sound of screaming and the smell of disinfectant, his birth was like a death. It shook you. And, slowly, it unlocked forgotten capacities for feeling. Fatherhood has taught you the lesson that, even in middle age, love is practicable. It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past. And so, armed with this wisdom, you are attempting to woo your wife, to build a family on the strength of the bond that is your son, to win her joy and smiles and caresses, to entice her back to your side from her separate bed lying parallel to yours.

But when you began to turn to her again, to try to see her, as if for the first time, as an adult and a mother and indeed something wondrous, a warrior, striking in her maturing beauty and her indefatigable determination, and you sought to make conversation with her and to stroke her arm and her cheek and her thigh, you discovered your wife uninterested. She has never shouted at you in anger. In fact, she continues to exhibit a well-brought-up sympathy for your age, which, with your litany of minor ailments, ranging from your spine to your teeth to your knees, has started to seem further and further removed from her own. But she avoids discussions with you that are not practical in nature, finding troubling your attempts to engage in this manner, as though violative of the terms of your truce. The focus of her attention is elsewhere, on her son, and on her group of religiously-minded activists.

In their company, she conducts herself with a gravity that exceeds her years, enjoying an influential position despite the fact that many of them are her seniors. Her legal training and relative prosperity give her pertinent advantages, of course, but mostly it is her bearing, her self-sufficient fire and evident fearlessness, that others rally to, coupled with her disarming warmth, much sought-after and awarded only to a fortunate few.

You are aware, when she comes tonight, draped in her shawl, to read your son his bedtime story and put him to sleep, that you cling to him not just because of your feelings for the boy, which are powerful and true, but also because in this moment, with your arms around your child, you have something she wants, a precious sensation, and one you simultaneously desire to prolong while feeling sad, even ashamed, of engendering solely in this way.

Hoping it might positively impact your relations with your wife, some months ago you hired one of her brothers into your firm. He joined an already sizable band of kinfolk and clanspeople owing their paychecks to you, many without contributing notably to your enterprise. But from the outset his cleverness and education distinguished him from the others, so much so that you are considering grooming him as a potential deputy.