Later that week you have the good fortune of again catching a group of students furtively smoking hash in a shed behind the space sciences building. You inform your leader, who tells you to accompany him to the scene. As you walk he looks around pleasantly at the plum-headed green parrots chattering in the treetops. You suspect he is carrying his gun.
He greets the smokers. There are five of them and two of you, but they appear very frightened.
“This is not good, my brothers,” your leader says.
“What, sir?” one of them asks. He is a lanky fellow with sideburns and a soul patch, his T-shirt suggesting an affinity for heavy metal.
Your leader cuffs him across the face and continues without raising his voice, “These drugs are forbidden. They will make you weak. You’re intelligent boys. You should know that.”
All five nod vigorously.
Your leader spreads his arms. “This won’t happen again?”
He is assured that it will not.
The following day your leader gives you the details of a clinic. It is just outside the city, or at least outside what is currently thought of as the city, even though roadside urbanization links its location to the metropolis like the arm of an octopus. You and your mother journey there by bus. The clinic is a low building, almost equal in footprint but not in height to the place of worship that sits beside it. Its clientele is poor, and it utterly lacks the computers and air-conditioning, or for that matter the clean walls and floors, of the private hospital.
The doctor you are taken to see examines your mother quickly, looks at her test results, and shakes his head. “We can’t help her,” he says to you.
“You don’t treat cancer?”
“Sometimes. Surgically. But we don’t administer hormones or radiotherapy.”
“What should we do?”
“You should pray. It’s out of your hands. The thyroid has been removed. She might be fine.”
Your mother is quiet throughout, as she tends to be in her interactions with medical professionals. They are unusual in their capacity to cause this behavior in her. Their power to kill in the future by uttering mysterious words today robs her of her confidence and she, a customarily confident woman, resents this. She longs to resist them but has no idea how to do so.
For a time, your mother’s condition seems neither particularly good nor bad. The wound of the surgery heals, darkening and puckering under its protective dressing of gauze. She endures headaches stoically, refusing for the most part to admit to them but unable entirely to mask in her eyes signs of the discomfort they cause. She also has muscular twitches, little spasms thrusting beneath her shawl like fish feeding below the surface of a pond. You recognize these from your online investigations at the university computer center as being symptoms of her thyroid hormone deficiency.
Eventually your father beseeches his employer for further assistance. But the matriarch explains to him that life is one long series of illnesses, that she has intervened to save his wife, successfully and at great expense, but cannot be asked to keep intervening, again and again, for where would it stop, she is not made of money, and in the end, as she knows only too well herself, certain things are up to fate, and we can struggle, but fate is fate, so it would be best for him and his family to do what they can, since it is after all their responsibility, and to accept that she has already helped them more than anyone could reasonably have expected that she would.
In the coming months your mother’s suffering is extreme, her cancer having metastasized to her bones and lungs. This is accompanied by a transformation in her appearance and personality. She is gripped by fear, surprised both by her unyielding attachment to life and by the failure of her imagination to conceive of a proud ending to it. Her death, in the absence of modern palliative care, is preceded by agony, only partially mitigated in her final fortnight by street heroin procured by your brother and administered by your father through slender, long-filtered women’s cigarettes, from which your mother, wheezing, attempts to inhale in tiny gasps.
Your sister arrives from the village to comfort her. Neither woman has previously thought of your sister as your mother’s favorite, that honor being yours, but it is to your sister that your mother turns most naturally at this time, perhaps because she is her eldest, or because they are both women, or because your sister is the only one of her children to herself be a mother, and in your sister your mother perceives echoes of her own mother, whom she last saw the same age your sister is now, when your mother was a little girl. In the moment she ceases to live, your sister is holding your mother’s hands, your mother like an infant struggling to take its first breath as it transitions from aquatic life to terrestrial, but in reverse, with her lungs filling with water, and the breath never coming.
As you and the men of your family carry her whiteshrouded body on your shoulders to the open, dusty pit of her grave, you are struck by how light she is. The speed of her progression from solid heartiness to ephemeral fragility has been so strange as to be almost fantastic. Rose petals are thrown, incense lit, entreaties to the divine offered, and then those of you still living return to your lives.
At the university, members of your organization urge you not to mourn too much or for more than the prescribed period. They say that to do otherwise is to reject what fate has decreed. Instead they tell you to focus your energies on the tasks you are assigned, to recognize your comrades as your true family, and to act through the organization to fulfill your destiny as your mother has fulfilled hers. But these suggestions strike you as scripted and uncompelling, and moreover in your current introspective and melancholy state your appetite for the food, clothing, and belonging that the organization offers, and for the protection that it claims to offer, is significantly diminished.
Your leader begins to watch you, then tells those he trusts most among your comrades to watch you as well. He is troubled by your apathy and listlessness, by the note of cynicism you inject into conversations and meetings. You are careful never knowingly to provoke him, but he is aware of the negative influence you have begun to assert when you think him out of earshot. It does not take him long to gather evidence sufficient to issue you with a stern and possibly, given his volatility, painful reprimand, but when he dispatches his deputy to bring you to him, you are nowhere to be found.
Your father has taken your mother’s passing hard, but has refused to accompany your sister back to the village or to stay for a time with your brother. He instead continues with his job, traveling to the matriarch’s residence in the mornings and returning home at night. It is not your intention, when you move in with him, to stay permanently, yet as the days go by you show no interest in resuming your studies, and after a while you begin to hunt for a job.
One afternoon, as you ride your bicycle in pursuit of employment, you glimpse what you think is a familiar face in a small battered car stopped at a red light. You look closely and are certain that yes, it is the pretty girl. She rides in the driver’s seat, alone, her face covered with thick makeup from a shoot. You smile and wave, but she does not see you, or if she does, then she does not recognize you, and when the light changes she careens off on her way.
It is perhaps not that night, but certainly that week, that you sit yourself down at a neighborhood roadside stall and ask a wrinkled old man with hennaed hair and a cutthroat razor finally to give you a shave.
FIVE
LEARN FROM A MASTER
To be effective, a self-help book requires two things. First, the help it suggests should be helpful. Obviously. And second, without which the first is impossible, the self it’s trying to help should have some idea of what help is needed. For our collaboration to work, in other words, you must know yourself well enough to understand what you want and where you want to go. Self-help books are two-way streets, after all. Relationships. So be honest here, and ask yourself the following question. Is getting filthy rich still your goal above all goals, your be-all and end-all, the mist-shrouded higha
ltitude spawning pond to your inner salmon?
In your case, fortunately, it seems to be. Because you have spent the last few years taking the essential next step, learning from a master. Many skills, as every successful entrepreneur knows, cannot be taught in school. They require doing. Sometimes a lifetime of doing. And where moneymaking is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shitjust-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-mytoilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out.
The master at whose feet you metaphorically squat is a middle-aged man with the long fingers of an artist and the white-tufted ear hair of a primate resistant to lethal tympanic parasites. He is quick to smile and slow to laugh, and although the skin has begun to sag on his wiry forearms, his sinews remain supple. He owns several secondhand cars, none of them large enough to attract attention, and is habitually to be seen alone in a backseat, immersed in a newspaper, while a driver and sharp-eyed guard ride in front. He cannot himself drive, having come late and suddenly into his prosperity, but he has other offsetting and more lucrative talents, not least his superb numeracy and his keen sensibility for font.
He sits now in a small, windowless room in his factory, an art deco bungalow that has been converted surreptitiously into a manufacturing facility, its boundary wall raised for seclusion in precisely the same manner as those of neighboring private residences. Despite his success, or rather, you have concluded, underpinning it, he oversees the counting of his money himself.
You stand in line, waiting your turn, your pockets bulging with cash and chits of paper bearing mnemonic aids scrawled so illegibly as to be virtually encrypted. When his accountant gestures with his head for you to proceed, you hand over your take and orally present your breakdown, both of which are checked against past figures and inventory records.
“Sales are up,” you conclude. “Like everybody’s,” the accountant says deprecatingly.
“Mine more than most.”
Your master mentions one of your customers. “Last month you said he didn’t see a market for tuna.”
You nod. “That’s what he said.”
“What changed?”
“I gave him a few free cans.”
“We don’t give anything for free.”
“I paid for them. Personally.”
“I see. And?”
“He sold them. Fast. Now he’s a believer.”
The accountant enters some numbers into his laptop. Your master scrutinizes the result. He grunts and the accountant returns to you a small portion of the bills you brought in. This is your compensation, determined by adding together a notional fixed salary, a percentage commission, and a variable kicker based on how well your master feels business is doing and you are doing within it. You try to gauge the amount by the thickness of the wad and the colors of its constituent notes as you shove it into your pocket. You will count it later.
You are about to leave when your master tells you to ride with him, an unusual and worrisome request. You follow him to his car, where he takes out his phone and dials as he instructs his driver to drive. His guard watches you closely in the rearview mirror.
Your master conducts his telephonic conversation in a rural dialect that he does not realize you, whom he presumes to be a city fellow, understand fluently. Even if your master knew this, however, it would not concern him. He employs the dialect not for privacy but because it puts at ease the supplier he has on the line. Your master has spent time in many of the small towns in the region that forms the economic hinterland to your metropolis, and his chameleon-like ability to match his speech to his surroundings has often worked to his advantage. He would likely be proud of it, if he were the sort of man who was proud of such things. But he is too practical for that.
You sit in silence as your master discusses at length stock movements and delivery dates. The car approaches the outskirts of the city, passing the disinterred earth and linear mounds of vast middle-class housing developments. Rows of electricity poles rise in various stages of completion, some bare, some bridged by taut cables, occasionally one from which wires dangle to the ground. When your master hangs up he asks what you think of a colleague.
“I think he’s good,” you say.
“The best?”
“One of.”
“Was he stealing from me?”
Everyone steals, at least a little. But you say, “He’s not crazy.”
“Where was he today?”
“I didn’t see him.”
He snorts. “You won’t be seeing him.”
The flatness of your master’s tone feels like the side of a blade.
You keep your voice steady. “Yes, sir.”
“You understand me?”
“Yes.”
The car stops and your master indicates that you are to get out. You do so and halt. You imagine the guard staring at your back. You make no sudden movements, keep your hands in plain view. Only when the car drives off do you turn around, standing at the side of the road and waiting in the heat for a passing bus.
On your return journey you find yourself squeezed against a window by the bulk of an overweight and therefore clearly prosperous vegetable farmer whose clan has recently made the first of a lucrative series of sales of their communal land to a refrigerator assembly plant looking to expand its warehousing space. He wears a gold-plated watch and a thick gold ring set with three uncut rubies the brown-black color of coagulated blood. He does not yet own a car. But that will of course change.
Your city is enormous, home to more people than half the countries in the world, to whom every few weeks is added a population equivalent to that of a small, sandybeached, tropical island republic, a population that arrives, however, not by outrigger canoe or lateen-sailed dhow but by foot and bicycle and scooter and bus. A limited-access ring road is under construction around the place, forming a belt past which its urban belly is already beginning to bulge, and from which ramps soar and arc off in every direction. Your bus barrels along in the shadow of these monuments, dusty new arteries feeding this city, which despite its immensity is only one among many such organs quivering in the torso of rising Asia.
It is evening by the time you reach home. You wash your body with soap, using a plastic bucket to gather water from an almost impossibly unforthcoming tap, and then dress in the black trousers, white shirt, and black clip-on bow tie arranged for you, along with a plastic security pass, by a former schoolmate who works as a waiter for a catering company. You are excited and nervous, but pleased by your appearance when you glimpse yourself in the mirror of your motorcycle, thinking your garb connotes wealth and class.
Your schoolmate meets you as planned outside the service entrance of a private club that is tonight hosting a fashion show in a pair of pavilions on its expansive lawn. You are both screened for weapons by a uniformed gatekeeper brandishing a hoop-ended metal detector, then perfunctorily motioned through. The shirt you are wearing is a half size too tight at the throat and has begun to chafe when you swallow, but you ignore this discomfort. Your thoughts are on the pretty girl.
You are unable to gain access to the runway pavilion, so you wait at the after-party, or after-reception, rather, the actual after-party, of which you are entirely unaware, being scheduled for much later tonight at the home of the designer whose work is on display. There in the second pavilion, with its temporary bars and tables and plush, semi-recessed lounges, you pace about, hoping she will appear, a tray of drinks balanced on your left hand, precariously, it must be noted, for you have never done this before.
The pretty girl is by now a person of some substance in her industry, even if the term is admittedly an odd one in a profession characterized by its less-is-more physical bias. She is not quite a model of the first rank, but she is well known to photographers and designers and other models, and to readers of picture-laden weekend supplements of local newspapers, a group that because of your abiding desire to
see her not infrequently includes you. She earns enough to afford an apartment of her own, a modest but reliable car, and a live-in maid who can cook, which is to say she earns as much as a retail banker her age, and perhaps twice as much as you do, even before the gifts she receives from her multiple, high-churn-rate admirers are taken into account.
She enters now at the side of one of these gentlemen, the handsome although late-blooming and aggressively insecure son of a textile magnate, managing as she walks both to slink and to carry her head with her jaw aligned precisely parallel to the floor, creating thereby an effect of imperious carnality that this year is widely sought after.
You do not know how to attract her attention, and for a moment you are gripped by despair, this venture seeming foolish and doomed to failure. But she is as alert as ever, her laconic expression notwithstanding, and she notices the stare of an out-of-place man in his late twenties with something familiar about him. She returns your gaze at once. Detaching herself from her companion, she approaches.
“Is that you?” she asks.
You nod and find yourself swept up in an embrace. The length of her body presses against yours, embarrassing you, this being a public place, but thrilling you as well. Her touch recalls a moonlit rooftop. When she kisses you on the cheek in plain view of all of these hundreds of people, you wonder if she might still be yours.
“I can’t believe it,” she says.
“It’s incredible.”