How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid

over and, without pausing her online chat on the shop’s computer, refuses on the grounds that you have removed the tags.
    You decide to wear them in any case, unfastening their top button, concealed beneath your belt, and pulling them lower on your hips. They squeeze up a small roll of your flesh, a mini-potbelly, and you wonder if it was a mistake to buy them. A fortnight’s wage outlay for two items of clothing does seem fiendishly unbalanced. But you are getting late, so now you must speed on to your rendezvous.
    The hotel is the city’s most exclusive, its old wing temporarily closed and scaffolded since a massive truck bomb shattered windows and ignited fires inside, but its new wing, sitting farther from the street, already repainted and open for business.
    After the attack, given the importance of the hotel as a meeting place for politicians and diplomats and businesspeople, and also because of its significance as the outpost of a leading international chain, a bridge with lofty, illuminated blue signage to the outside world, it was decided to push the city away, to make the hotel more of an island, insofar as that is possible in a densely packed metropolis such as this. Two lanes formerly intended for traffic have accordingly been appropriated on all sides. The outer of these is fenced with concrete bollards and filled with waist-high anti-vehicular steel barriers, like sharp-edged jacks from the toy room of some giant’s child, forming thereby a cross between a dry castle moat and a fortified beach meant to resist armored invasion. The inner lane, meanwhile, features gates, speed bumps, ground-mounted upward-looking CCTV cameras, and sandbag-reinforced wooden pillboxes the color of petunias.
    Around this citadel, constricted and slow, traffic seethes. Bicyclists, motorcyclists, and drivers of vehicles with three wheels and four maneuver forward, sometimes bumping, sometimes honking, sometimes rolling down windows and cursing. Every so often their slow crawl gives way to a complete standstill as space is cleared for a bigwig to pass, and then looks of resignation, frustration, and not infrequently anger can be seen. It is from this snarled horde that, nearing the first checkpoint, you seek to detach yourself and enter.
    The guard glances at your ride and asks what you want.
    â€œI want to go inside,” you say.
    â€œYou? Why?”
    â€œI’m meeting someone for dinner.”
    â€œReally.”
    He calls over his supervisor. The taillights of a sleek, gleaming chariot, bearing perhaps a senator or tribune or centurion, flash red as it navigates through the search stations ahead. The supervisor tells you to reverse. He is younger than you, shorter than you, and flimsier than you. But you bite down on your pride, flanked as you are by submachine guns, and plead with him. After a phone call to the pretty girl and a painstaking examination of your diminutive workhorse you are grudgingly permitted to proceed, but only to the secondary parking lot in the rear, from where you must walk.
    It is said that in this hotel foreign women swim publicly in states of near nakedness and chic bars serve imported alcohol. You see no sign of such things, maybe because you halt in the lobby, or maybe because in your excitement you are focused on locating the pretty girl. She walks towards you now, high on her wedges, smiling coolly, her hair almost as close-cropped as yours.
    She is a visitor to your city, having moved several years ago to an even larger megalopolis on the coast. Her modeling career has plateaued, or perhaps peaked is a better word, since even though the rates she commands remain good, her assignments are declining rapidly in frequency. She is trying therefore to transition to television, and has become a minor actress, minor for the reason that her acting is poor, with credits consisting mainly of bit parts in dramas and comedies. She could not normally stay at this hotel on a personal trip,