How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid Page B

for long enough.”
    You take a drink. “Did you stay in touch with anyone?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œNot even your parents?”
    â€œNo. They died.”
    â€œI know. Mine too. I meant before that.”
    â€œSome messages. From them, and later, when I started coming on TV, from relatives. Mostly abuse. Or asking for money.”
    â€œSo it’s just been me.”
    â€œJust you.” She rests her long fingers on the back of your hand.
    You have sampled alcohol only twice before, and never to the point of being drunk, so this sensation of flushed, relaxed glibness is new to you. The two of you eat and chat, occasionally guffawing at volumes disturbing to your fellow diners. Warmth and a craving, a consciousness of your proximity, build within you. But your meal is over too soon, as is the wine, and you are steeling yourself for the evening to end when she says, “I have another bottle in my room. Do you want to come up?”
    â€œYes.”
    She tells you the number and asks you to wait a few minutes before joining her. You are confused how to get there exactly, and reluctant to attract the attention of security by asking for directions, but you reason that you must take the elevator, and from there you are able to follow signs in the halls. She opens her door when you knock, brings you inside, and kisses you hard on the mouth.
    â€œI don’t have another bottle,” she says.
    â€œThat’s all right.”
    You hold her, encompassing this familiar, unfamiliar woman, feeling her breathe, tasting the place her words are born. You caress her as you strip her naked. You smooth the curve of her hip, of her jaw. You cradle her pelvis with your palm. No, you are not strangers. You are where you should be, finally, and so you linger.
    Sex with you seems transgressive, which heightens her desire, although she is too preoccupied fully to enjoy the act. There is a whiff of home about you, emotionally, but also physically, in for example your lack of deodorant, and for her home carries with it connotations of sorrow and brutality, connotations that elicit signals from her to you to be punishing, but these you misinterpret, and so they remain unacted upon.
    She is passing through a fragile period. Gravity has begun to tug at the arc of her career, and for the first time she earned a fraction last year of what she did the previous. She is aware that her future is shaky, that she could well end up impoverished, aged, and solitary, an elderly lady in a single room, buying rice and flour in bulk once a season, or, no less frightening, the wife of some cocaine-snorting man-child too chronically insecure to appear in his father’s head office much earlier than eleven or to stay much later than three, prone to picking up teenage girls at parties in his muscular European limousine and to sobbing unpredictably when drunk.
    Lying nude beside you, a used condom on the carpet and a lit cigarette in her hand, she strokes your hair tenderly as you doze. She does not let you spend the night, however. You ask when you will see her next and she is not dishonest, saying she does not know, but to your voiced hope that it be soon, she makes no reply. Afterwards she reclines alone in bed, recalling the comforting sensation of your figures pressed together. She imagines what a relationship with you might be like, whether you could possibly mix with her colleagues and acquaintances in the great city by the sea. She wonders also, as she inhales with shut eyes, the burrowing-termite crackle of paper and tobacco audible, if there will ever arrive a day she is not repelled by the notion of binding herself permanently to a man.
    You drive off in a state of agitation, both happy and afraid. But it is the fear that has grown dominant by that weekend, when you take your nephews to the zoo. They long for their monthly outing with their prosperous uncle, for their ride in your truck and the sweets you give them, and on